Time Travel Is Dangerous

Best friends Ruth and Megan discover a time machine in the trash, and use it to loot the past of items that they can then sell in their vintage shop, but their actions begin to have serious reprecussions on the timeline.

As I have mentioned here a time or two before, in late October of 2024, I traveled across the world to Trieste, Italy.

A port city in the far northeastern corner of Italy, Trieste is a mix of Italian, Austro-Hungarian, and Slovenian influences set hard up against the head of the Gulf of Trieste in the Adriatic Sea. Known as the “City of Coffee,” it was considered to be the end-point of the maritime leg of the famous trade route known as the Silk Road, and was an important deep-water port owned by the House of Habsburg, an aristocratic family that was as powerful as it was inbred. These days, Trieste is just a nice little seaside city, recently featured in the film Heads of State, and every October, it has a film festival called the Trieste Science Fiction Festival. It’s really nice. If you have the means, I highly recommend going.

I went because, with the threat of white Christian America imposing their white supremacist values on this nation, after the overwhelming majority of them, across all demographics, enthusiastically voted for a decaying old criminal pedophile and serial rapist, was about to become a reality, I figured, if I was going to take a trip overseas, it needed to be before white America’s Brownshirts and Good Germans started eyeballin’ brown people’s passports at the border.

Also because I'd heard good things about the Trieste Film Festival.

So I went, and I saw several films while there, but this one, Time Travel Is Dangerous, a faux documentary of the Found Footage genre, with Stephen Fry as the very dry and very British narrator, was not one of them. It was one that I had on my list, but I missed it, like many others. Luckily, most of those films are now streaming, and lately I've been trying to catch up.

So...

BFFs Megan and Ruth own a vintage shop in Muswell Hill, a northern London suburb, called The ChaChaCha Vintage Emporium. Unfortunately, it's gotten a lot harder to come across quality merchandise these days, so business isn't good. Also, their landlord is openly celebrating this fact, as he can't wait to kick them out and turn their shop into luxury flats.

Luckily, they happened to find a discarded time machine (built out of an old bumper car) while dumpster diving for potential sale items in a back alley near their shop. Now able to slide along wormholes to the past, they immediately begin to use the machine to raid history for a ton of "surprisingly well-preserved" pieces of retro fashion, valuable collectibles, and pricey antiques to fill their failing shop.

And just like that, business was booming again.

When they found the Time Machine, it also had a bunch of old VHS tapes in it. They were copies of a public access Mr. Wizard's type tv show, and it turns out, the shows' two hosts were also the Time Machine's inventors. Megan and Ruth quickly became huge fans of the show, and often watch it between restock supply runs.

Are there a few problems?

Sure. There's the small ethical issue of the fact that they’ve stolen so many things. Although, to be fair, this hasn't seemed to have any ill effect on history. But here in the present, they’re beginning to run out of room. They’ve noticed they’re getting a little bit sick recently too, headaches, a few nosebleeds, some weird-colored poops. Also, at one point, a "time fissure" in the middle of the shop turned Ruth into a rather snotty little teenage version of herself... briefly.

But the main problem is, Ruth and Megan are way too open about this.

The pair's absolute inability to be discrete eventually attracts the attention of a local secret society of scientists, The Technology Engineering Scientific Thought and Innovation Society. TESTIS, for short, I assume because people think they're nuts. The society has many rules, the most important of which is secrecy. In fact, the group's motto is inserere hic sententiam, which they often tell people means Inventing in Secret (It actually means: Insert motto here).

Instantly suspicious of their surprisly good condition stock, despite its age, not to mention its rarity and inherent value, the group–which just so happens to include the Time Machine's inventors–confront the pair. The scientists warn Ruth and Megan about the dangers of time travel and urge them to stop using the machine, which they do... for a time. But it's just too hard to run a vintage shop without a time machine, so they start up again.

This leads to Time itself starting to break down...

Directed by Chris Reading, and written by Reading with Anna-Elizabeth Shakespeare and Hillary Shakespeare, who are also producers on the film, Time Travel is Dangerous is based on real-life Cha Cha Cha Vintage Emporium owners Ruth Syratt and Megan Stevenson, who Reading first met, while I assume he was vintage shopping in Muswell Hill, in 2015. Somehow from there, the trio ended up making a short film called The Unreason, that was based around the idea of two friends with a vintage shop stealing things from the past in order to sell them in the future.

That's a fantastic film origin story.

The idea that a project like this could have possibly grown out of a single off-handed joke while chatting with a new aquaintance? "Where do we find our stuff? Oh, we got a time machine, we just go and steal stuff from the past whenever we need a restock." I love that.

The feature length version is a very charming and very British little comedy, reminiscent of similar-feeling stories like the Hitchhiker’s Guide, Shaun of the Dead, Red Dwarf, Spaced, and a whole bunch of Doctor Who, of course. Like I sad... it's very British. It's madcap. It's zany. It's droll. It's got some good sci-fi. If you liked any of that stuff I listed, then you really should enjoy this.

Also, I was impressed with the kitschy ways this film ”low budget” gets around Ruth and Megan having to visit historical locations, or slide through wormholes between reality, or when they end up in extra-dimensional spaces. They obviously just visit a Renn Faire at one point. It's all cheap and silly and obvious, but it works really well, and honestly... it fits the film’s whole tone. Plus, I loved the extremely accurate portrayal of what it’s like to be the new person at someone’s game night, walking into a room where a bunch of dedicated game board people are all very seriously playing a very complex game.

Time Travel is Dangerous has an impressive cast of recognizable names and faces, including Stephen Fry, Brian Blessed, Brian Bovell, Tony Way, Tom Lenk, amongst others, and maybe most surprising, amateur actors and real life vintage shop owners, Ruth and Megan are great too.

The film might run a little long, sure, but all in all, I really enjoyed it. Cute, funny, imaginiative, it’s definitely worth checking out. Maybe more a matinee choice than an evening flick choice, but still... lots of fun. Definitely worth it.