DIRECTED BY: Brandon M. Bridges

FEATURING: Brandon M. Bridges

PLOT: A series of time paradoxes reunite a Starfleet captain with a friend he’d long thought dead.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: While a handful of scenes approach delightfully high levels of weirdness, the trilogy as a whole is too monotonous and just plain boring to be worthwhile.

COMMENTS: For the lover of outsider cinema, fan films are a tricky lot to evaluate. On one level, fan films make up one of the most plentiful sources of DIY filmmaking. Persons whose movie production experience ranges from amateur to none gather together out of nothing but a shared enthusiasm for their subject to make films. They write their own scripts, sew their own costumes, scout out whatever locations their friends and family have access to, and rent or buy their own equipment, all with zero expectation of commercial recompense due to copyright law. The best of fan films are filmmaking for filmmaking’s sake, regardless of budget, experience or competence, and that’s fertile ground for weird cinema.

There’s something at the root of the fan film, however, that often prevents it from being a truly weird product. By its very nature, the fan film is intrinsically tied to the aesthetics and ideologies of the commercial film industry, because it’s the output of that very industry that fan filmmakers are trying to imitate. Fan films might be described as an audiovisual form of cosplay. Be it “Star Wars,” “Star Trek,” or “The Lord of the Rings,” most fan films aim to replicate their source material as closely as a limited budget and volunteer crew and cast allows. While there’s still plenty of room for creative expression within these confines, just as there is in fan art and fanfiction, the firm ties to pre-established canons and aesthetics severely hamper the fan film’s potential for weirdness.

I don’t know if I’ve seen a fan film that typifies this dichotomy between slavish devotion to source material and bizarre outsider weirdness as much as Brandon Bridges’ Star Trek: Time Warp trilogy. Its visual fidelity to the “Star Trek” universe comes down to minute details of each ship and uniform, and it’s made all the more impressive by the fact that it was all done by one man. At the same time, the constant insertion of what are clearly the director’s personal interests throws all that fidelity into disarray. Archived video of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” plays a vital role in the protagonist’s attempts to determine the identify of a time-traveling warlord. Bridges also has a relationship with “The Price Is Right” that’s akin to Ed Wood’s relationship with angora wool. Serious plot developments occur in holodeck recreations of the Bob Barker era set, and the game show’s full theme plays in each of the three films.

Maybe the strangest thing about the Time Warp trilogy isn’t its length, or its obsession with mid-70s daytime television, but rather how un-“Star Trek” the narrative feels. On a surface level, the story has many of the staples of “Trek,” particularly the original series and “Next Generation” films of the 80s and 90s. There are temporal anomalies, starship battles, and political conspiracies to disrupt peace in the universe. But most of the run time isn’t spent on any of these things; instead, it’s devoted to long, verbose conversations between the characters about their personal and emotional lives.

This isn’t to say emotional storytelling hasn’t been a focus of certain incarnations of “Star Trek,” but at their creative peak the franchise wove such storytelling into its narrative, revealing characters’ interior lives through their reactions to the events surrounding them. In Time Warp, sci-fi touchstones like time travel and alien invasions come off as little more than nuisances rudely interrupting the crew’s navel-gazing. While the concept of a mid-century melodrama occasionally interrupted by Romulans is appealing, the execution here is unfortunately just boring.

Each film in the Time Warp trilogy is available to view for free on Youtube.