A 1938 screwball time-travel comedy set in the far future year of 2018.

Any flick that starts off with Neil deGrasse Tyson munching on popcorn in a movie theater has got my undivided attention from the get-go.  The well-known astrophysicist explains to us that Future ’38 is a movie long-thought lost and relegated to the dustbin of history–however, it’s been newly rediscovered and is ready to be watched exactly as it was originally presented back in 1938.

Roll film.

Essex (Nick Westrate) is a government employee tasked with hopping in a time machine, traveling into the future about 80 years, and retrieving an extremely powerful Formica (!) bomb component that was locked in a safe back in 1938. Bringing this piece back will help defeat Hitler and end World War II.

You heard me.

After laying down on some industrial fans (seriously, that’s the time machine for the ultra-low-budget spoof-a-rama), he is popped into existence in 2018–that is to say, it’s the fake 1938 filmmaker’s idea of what 2018 would look like, and it’s a technicolor marvel, kind of like Dick Tracy crossed with Just Imagine. Like the name-dropped Wizard of Oz, this movie starts in black and white, then switches to bright living color when it jumps to 2018. It’s a fun little detail that helps sell the gimmick.

Essex pops up in the hotel run by Banky (Betty Gilpin), a wisecracking, gum-snapping blonde bombshell who is hesitant to believe the wild story Essex relates, but is obviously attracted to the mook.  Gilpin could easily have stepped out of the silver screen of the 1930s, and she nails the mannerisms, speaking cadence, and overall look of those starlets.  It’s a great characterization.

Part of the fun of the movie is to see what the “1938 director” predicted for the future: iPhones with handheld receivers attached so people can use them to talk, a big screen TV with an always-ready operator (Mabel, played perfectly by Sean Young [herself!] in a brief cameo) to help you dial a number, weird eyeglasses that go all the way up the forehead, or a spoon-fork combo utensil called (naturally) a foon.

Everybody in the cast does a good job, and is obviously having a fun time with the 30s-style dialogue and the clever one-liners that both honor and ridicule classic sci-fi thrillers.  There are Jewish gangsters, brogue-ish Irish police officers, dimwitted thugs, and lots and lots of passers-by taking pictures.

Director Jamie Greenberg keeps the momentum going for a brisk 75 minutes, barely pausing to let his characters toss off a witty bon mot before they rush out to fuzzily green screen a fake driving trip around the city.  To top it all off, he even filmed in 1.33 aspect ratio, making it look even more like the films he’s making fun of.

Sure, some of the jokes fall flat, tripping over themselves in their rush to parody, and some of the character bits need that “sad trombone” sound effect as they walk out of frame to put an accurate and apt button on the scene’s joke. This was obviously an ultra-low-budget (the sets are…uh…”fragile-looking” let’s just say) but if you can get beyond that, I think you’ll enjoy this retro-futuristic science fiction fractured flicker. Both Uncle Mike and Neil deGrasse Tyson approve.