Desert inside hourglass
 

I'm looking for a movie or an episode of some series, or it may even have been a short film. I only have a blurry image from one scene: Some people walking in a desert seeing nothing but sand around them. Then it cuts to a man sitting with an hourglass stearing inside it, and he says something like "I think there are bugs inside here, I can see something moving in the sand". So the people are inside the glass. Anybody remember something like this? Probably from the 90s.

Stian.

Strange image. I don't think I can help except to say that the imagery reminds me of the inhospitable landscape of Ceti Alpha V in Star Trek II, and the Ceti eels in their glass box.

There is a sandy, radiation-blasted landscape in the Doctor Who episode The Leisure Hive, which features a time-controlling device shaped like an hourglass.

Re: Desert inside hourglass
 

It sounds familiar to me for some reason, but I can't help with the name.

It's a real bitch when that happens:).

i agree,i came in to see if someone had replied something that would trigger my memory

Re: Desert inside hourglass
 

Wasn't there a seen in Krull (1983) that was something along those lines.

I believe so. I haven't seen the movie in a very long time though, so I don't know how accurate the quote Presthus remembers is.

Here's a low quality image of the enchanted hourglass from Krull:

Well remembered. There were no creatures in it though, nor with the hourglass in Flash Gordon.

Re: Desert inside hourglass
 

That sounds like an episode of The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone....a more recent take on it would be the locker scene in Men In Black

The only other thing I can think of is the Doctor Who story Carnival of Monsters. The main characters find themselves in a series of interconnected locations and discover that they've landed in a Miniscope (akin to an old fashioned peep show) where the various creatures and landscapes exist in a miniaturized state for entertainment. The owner of the device at one point mentions that there's something in the workings that shouldn't be.