Review of The Traveler (2010) by Robert B — 05 Aug 2014

The Traveler (Michael Oblowitz, 2010).

Not long ago (as I write this, anyway), I did a capsule review of a Glenn Ciano movie called Inkubus, with Robert Englund as the titular creature, who walks into a police station and confesses to a litany of crimes, then basically dares the cops to arrest him. Sound familiar? It probably should if you've seen The Traveler, released the year before, with Val Kilmer in the Robert Englund role. Nothing Satanic about this one, though (spoiler alert! well, kinda, if you didn't pick up on the title), but otherwise there are enough similarities between the two that more than once while I was watching this, which I saw a couple of months after Inkubus, I wondered if Ciano was familiar with Oblowitz' film; I wouldn't go so far as to call Inkubus a Traveler mockbuster, but the line's pretty thin there. The Traveler gets a slightly higher rating because Joseph Muscat, turning in his first feature screenplay, put a bit more thought into the characters; they're Chinet(TM) instead of cardboard, but still. **.