The Flipside of Dominick Hide
The Flipside of Dominick Hide
| 09 December 1980 (USA)
The Flipside of Dominick Hide Trailers

Dominick Hide, a time traveller from the year 2130, is studying the London transport system of 1980. Time travellers are supposed to be observers, and are strictly forbidden to land their flying saucers. One time traveller who broke this rule accidentally killed a dog, changing history and causing many future people to disappear. Inspired by his Great Aunt Mavis, Dominick decides to find his great great grandfather. He begins to land in 1980, where his strange clothes and speech make him seem an eccentric oddball. His quest brings him into contact with beautiful boutique owner Jane, and they fall in love. As Dominick's visits become more frequent and more prolonged, he increasingly risks his indiscretion being discovered by his boss, Caleb Line, and every moment he spends in the past increases the danger that he will catastrophically change the future

Reviews
Dynamixor

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

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Curapedi

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

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Hayden Kane

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

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Marva

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

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Simon Anthony

I helped make the first of these two splendid TV programs. I was a video tape operator/engineer on the pub / party scenes in part one. I had the chance to read the script before the recording. It read well and they acted it wonderfully. I am delighted that these programs survived the pillage of the VT library that killed so many other programs, but this one would still stand out as superlative even if all the rest made it to the 21st century.I watched it just now on an 'old' digital PVR and online (for part 2). The machine I recorded it on from the studio at the BBC shares none of that technology. We have come further in these 30 years in many technical and social areas than is shown in the future view of 2130 that we see in these flips and yet this double past somehow still feels alive and vibrant. If we can see and hear the past, it's still there. I would never have 'clean wiped' that tape.

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ColinBaker

This was a delightful time travel play from 1980, beautifully played by the main actors, and including clever references, and even a sly note about attitudes to homosexuality.One person mentioned about making this a film with Jim Carrey. I think that would be a dreadful mistake. For one thing, Peter Firth's Dominick is a bit odd in 1980, rather than the madcap zany character in many of Carrey's roles. Secondly, the whole production is understated, the only music being Beatles music played by a futuristic hologrammatic trio, and an undistinguished theme song.Appropriately, this, together with its less successful follow up, Another Flip for Dominick, is definitely "of its time", and should be left alone, but the BBC should repeat both, and on a mainstream channel rather than BBC4, on which they were recently shown.

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MrSqwubbsy

"Are there somewhere places...?" If you could get past the appalling (and relentlessly repeated) signature song by the deservedly obscure Meal Ticket, you'd be entering a place that truly had travelled in time. This timeslip drama unaccountably has 1980 stamped on the base. You remember 1980? Yep, it was nothing like the society depicted here, of vaguely-political, pint-glugging, chirpy Notting-Hillers. Ferchrissakes, setting it in Portobello says it all.The place was a living museum to the early '70s back then and has only recently dragged itself into the,ooh, early '90s. Dominic Hide's's naif rapidly loses his charm and his stoner persona combined with the look, attitudes and stylings of the supporting cast had me in mind of the early '70s, certainly not the hard-nosed era of Thatcher and 3 million unemployed! Truly just how irksome is Firth and how inexplicable that even 200 years hence such a hippy-dippy twerp could be charged with such an important task as travelling back in time (and potentially upsetting history). Once there he predictably starts messing around and his canoodling with Langrishe whilst happily spliced in his own time (without seemingly much in the way of moral dilemmas) might ring true when seen through the prism of those long-gone late '60s/early '70s mores (free-love, "if it feels good do it" etc) but it should have struck a dull note to a reasonably progressive 1980s audience and by 2007 seems utterly anachronistic. And this feller's from the 22nd century,remember! I'll let you into a secret here - I saw this on telly on its first repeat in the early 1980s and loved it. I was an incurable romantic back then and I guess that on rewatching it today,I was hoping to be swept back to happier times. But I found I just could not buy its sloppy idealism. To compound matters I began watching the 1982 sequel but at the point where the (male) babysitter entered the story, looking like the bloke from The Joy of Sex and with all the patchouli-scented charm of Sher's History Man, nausea overcame me and then when an even sillier time-traveller (Pyrus Bonnington) began flirting with the Spanish au-pair, Alice was duly summoned with the sick-bag. Just how has this tripe acquired the status of a classic?? Or am I simply an old curmudgeon?

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podin

Just waiting for a release on DVD! Maybe with the sequel?! Let all Sci-Fi fans out there get the possibility to watch this good movie and us who seen it, the possibility to place it on a pedestal or in the bookshelf!

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