I am a sucker for a time travel movie, how about you? It’s a fantasy that everyone can relate to. Of particular interest to me are the ones with no budget, where the time traveler just shows up in a flash of light or a ring of fire and goes, “Hai guyz, just got in from 2525.” I’ll admit I sometimes get a bit bored with the part where no one believes the time traveler, but that is usually overcome by the script eventually.

Here in Timestalkers, William Devane, an old friend of mine since Honky Tonk Freeway, stars as a history professor whose wife and kid are killed in a freak accident at the beginning of the movie. A year later, Devane’s character is sad but dignified, hanging out with his buddy Cliff Claven and resisting Cliff’s matchmaking efforts. The friends hit an auction of old West stuff where they find an anachronism: a photo from the 1880s showing Klaus Motherfucking Kinski holding a gun that was made in 1980. So Devane has the normal reaction of writing a book about time travel theories based on the photo. Then Lauren Hutton shows up from the future in a Union army uniform to chase Kinski, and things get TV movie complicated.

Will the beautiful time traveler and the nerdy prof catch the crazy guy before he changes history? Do they fall in love? If history is changed, will Devane’s wife and son magically reappear? What would the characters in this movie think if they knew how crap their high-tech computers were?

Timestalkers is a hybrid of a western and a sci-fi. Yep, it falls under that rare and desirable subgenre of Weird West. It’s cheesy by necessity because it’s a TV movie, but it’s so much fun. If you have Netflix instant, and you like TV sci fi, travel back to 1987 and catch up with it.