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THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT
Rating: 
USA. 1984.
Director – Stewart Raffill, Screenplay – William Gray & Michael Janover, Story – Dan Jakoby & Wallace Barrett, Based on the Book The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility by Charles Berlitz & William L. Moore, Producers – Douglas Curtis & Joel B. Michaels, Photography – Dick Bush, Music – Kenneth Wannberg, Visual Effects – Max W. Anderson, Special Effects – Larry Cavanaugh, Production Design – Chris Campbell. Production Company – New World Pictures/New Pictures Group Ltd.
Cast:
Michael Paré (David Herdeg), Nancy Allen (Allison Hayes), Bobby Di Cicco (Jim Parker), Eric Christmas (Dr Longstreet), Kene Holliday (Major Clark), Louise Latham (Older Pamela), Joe Dorsey (Sherrif)
Plot: In 1943 the US Navy attempts an experiment to make a whole ship – the USS Eldridge – invisible. But the experiment goes out of control and the ship is contaminated with a massive dose of radiation. Two sailors, David Herdeg and Jim Parker, jump overboard as the crew start being affected and fall through a warp in space to emerge in what they find to be a bewildering 1984. On the run from the authorities, they find the experiment has also opened a hole in time that is dragging everything into it and causing vast climatic disarray.
This is an interesting B-film. It loosely takes itself from The Philadelphia Experiment (1979), a ‘non-fiction’ book co-written by Charles Berlitz. (Charles Berlitz has also produced a number of works on various fringe science subjects such as The Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis and Roswell). The book purported to uncover files from an incident in 1943 where the US Navy attempted an experiment using Einstein’s (to this day still uncompleted) Unified Field Theory to make the USS Eldridge invisible. This somehow went wrong, transporting the Eldridge from Philadelphia to a harbour in Norfolk, Virginia, two days sail away, and back again, something that also caused crewmen to burst into flames, become invisible and to rematerialize inside bulkheads. Stories of the incident first appeared in the 1950s with a Naval officer named Carlos Miguel Allende who wrote a series of letters to UFO researcher Morris K. Jessup who first published details of the experiment in his book The Case for UFOs (1955). The authenticity of the incident is rather dubious. Allende however later changed details of his story and many facts that he claimed about himself were revealed to be false. Moreover the crew of the USS Eldridge deny that anything out of the ordinary ever happened and indeed ship’s logs show that Eldridge never ever docked in Philadelphia.
The Navy, somewhat embarrassed by the publicity surrounding the incident, attempted to demonstrate to the public that what had happened was no more than the routine degaussing of the ship, which involves surrounding it with electrical cables that negate its magnetic field and would make it invisible to radar (but not the human eye), and that this had somehow been misinterpreted. The fringe science cultists put this down to coverup and it has not stopped an amazing body of lunatic mythology emerging surrounding the incident, including claims that UFOs, aliens and the Men in Black were also involved, that the crew traveled through time and to Mars, and with people on the lecture circuit claiming to be witnesses and physicists who were involved with the experiment, even one brave soul who claims to be the reincarnated soul of a dead crewman.
In 1980-81, not long after the book’s publication, the film was taken on as a project by various people. John Carpenter, then riding high on the success of his horror film Halloween (1978), was brought on board by a producer who was hoping to get him to direct, but only ended up accepting an executive producer credit on the finished film. Carpenter could never work out the script to his satisfaction. The script circled around under various guises for several years with people never finding an adequate means of telling it is as a story. I was contacted recently by Michael Janover who set the record straight about the evolution of the script. Various scripts were written, most of these circling around the experiment and the coverup. It was Janover who came up with the idea of adding the time travel element – this was something that made the film no longer about the coverup of an incident 40 years earlier, but actively introduced the hero in the present. (To Janover’s amusement, the time travel idea that he came up with has now become part of the pseudo-science mythology surrounding The Philadelphia Experiment). The original version of the film had been planned as an A-budget effects vehicle but budget cuts had curtailed scale of some of the original vision in the script.
The film doesn’t really concern itself that much with the book’s experiment in invisibility or the purported teleportation. The experiment is only really a springboard for a more traditional time-travel story. This falls into fairly familiar patterns. But The Philadelphia Experiment is not an uninteresting film, with good usage being made of the cultural shock value – like moments where Michael Paré is shocked by a screening of Humanoids from the Deep (1980) on tv and bursts out in laugher at finding that Ronald Reagan is now President, or his bewilderment at encountering a transvestite hooker.
Unfortunately Michael Paré and Nancy Allen are too bland to give the story much emotional resonance – the happy ending is a particularly contrived irritation. But director Stewart Raffill, after inflicting The Ice Pirates (1984) on audiences four months earlier the same year, does a surprisingly good job. The sense of visual alienation created among miles of empty white sand, bifurcated by a highway stretching to the horizon, or the journey through the flaming conflagration of the project landscape and the everpresent hole in the sky adds an atmosphere to the film that at times verges upon the surreal landscapes of sf writer J.G. Ballard.
There was a sequel Philadelphia Experiment II (1993), which interestingly turned the story into a battle to stop a Nazi-ruled alternate timeline from coming into being.
Stewart Raffill’s other genre films are:– The Ice Pirates (1984), the awful cute alien film Mac and Me (1988), Mannequin on the Move (1991) and Tammy and the T-Rex (1994). The Philadelphia Experiment remains his best work.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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