Filmed concurrently with The Amazing Transparent Man, Beyond the Time Barrier is a decent little time travel film that has largely been forgotten since its release in 1960. Director Edgar G. Ulmer was able to shoot most of the low-budget film in the Texas Centennial Exhibition Fair Park buildings and a nearby military airfield, wrapping up the entire shoot in a mere 10 days.

Robert Clarke produced as well as starred in the movie as an Air Force test pilot who accidentally journeys 64 years into the future to find a largely desolate world where the remnants of mankind have divided into two enemy factions, with the more advanced, underground city-dwellers on perpetual guard against the dangerous mutants who still live topside. Yes, the plot does sound a little bit like a well-known H.G. Wells story, and that's precisely why this film, shot in late 1959, was not released until July 1960, mere weeks before the much-anticipated The Time Machine hit theaters (there's nothing like borrowing the publicity that someone else is already paying for).

Like many science fiction films of the 1950s, Beyond the Time Barrier does have a bit of an anti-nuke agenda, but I must say it presents this message in a slightly different and rather effective manner.

The film opens with Major William Allison (Clarke) taking the super-nifty new X-80 aircraft on what is essentially a sub-orbital spin, unleashing the full power of the specially designed rocket engine at the unprecedented height of 500,000 feet. During the test, he loses contact with mission control and gets hit with a cheesy special effect, but he still manages to return to base successfully.

Upon arrival, though, he is beyond perplexed to find what should be a bustling Air Force base totally abandoned and in an advanced state of decay. He is eventually captured and taken to a mysterious underground citadel housing a society that has never heard of the U.S. Air Force. That is because the year is 2024, and a terrible epidemic caused by cosmic rays almost wiped out civilization beginning in 1971. All but a handful of the residents are deaf and mute, which doesn't help Allison's search for answers as to how he got there.

The obvious question is, of course, whether or not Allison can find a way to return to his own time -- or if he will even want to, since the easier choice is to just stay there with the future's hottest babe and do his best to keep the largely sterile population from dying out. The cast list is sort of interesting. Vladimir Sokoloff plays the Supreme Leader of the Citadel, while the lovely Darlene Tompkins continually steals the show as his mind-reading deaf-mute granddaughter. The Captain is played (badly) by former Washington Redskin and stunt man Boyd Morgan, and the director's very own daughter Arianne Ulmer (credited as Arianne Arden) plays a scientist.

My favorite part of the film is the scientific mumbo-jumbo that is used to help explain how Allison somehow broke through the time barrier flying at only a fraction of the speed of light, with the proposed method of his returning to his own time coming in at a close second. How can you not love the low-budget science fiction flicks of the late 1950s? The film's saving grace, though, is the ending. The science of it may not make a lot of sense, but it's not the same old boring ending you'll find in other movies of this type. The film really needed that good ending because the majority of the script is pretty weak.

I've heard that there were a lot of script-related issues at play here, some of which weren't resolved by the time filming began. I must say I find that quite easy to believe. Still, though, Beyond the Time Barrier seems to carry an air of sincerity throughout, and that helps make up for some of its plot-related problems.