(Nah, I don't know either why they thought this title was a good idea)
Dr. Who (Peter Cushing, whose character is actually named Doctor Who in the Amicus pictures) strands his TARDIS on Earth of the year 2150. He and his companions (based - as is Cushing's Doctor - on some of the companions of the contemporaneous Hartnell version of the character; therefore, none of them interesting enough to go into details here) could probably have found a better time and place, for our oh so fantastic little planet has been invaded by the Daleks, mostly to provide the attack salt shakers with the possibility for a very special mining operation in Bedfordshire.
There is resistance among the human survivors, though, and after some reasonably exciting adventures, the doctor is doing his usual genocidal business on his old enemies.
The two Amicus produced film versions of Doctor Who with Peter Cushing aren't too well-loved among Who fans, with Cushing's doctor never counted as canonical at all (even if the scripts of the films were based on some of the TV serials), and it's not too difficult to understand why. The Amicus films are very much in the business of streamlining the Doctor away from anything actually mysterious or mystifying (even compared to Hartnell, whose Who phase - as far as I'm familiar with it - doesn't strike me as all that strange or mysterious to begin with), making the Doctor a not atypical for pulpy SF old scientist guy with a time machine.
If you can ignore that, and have a certain affinity for mid-60s SF, you can have quite a bit of fun with the film. Cushing doesn't have all that much to do, but he's of course as reliable a presence as ever, while the young ones in the cast do their spots of running around and getting captured decent enough.
While it's fun in a pulpy way, I found that the film has its most interesting moments when it is playing with the UK's post-World War II / post Blitz anxieties, a subtext that is in fact strengthened through the fact that the year 2150 of the film does look rather a lot like 1944 (purposefully more so than it does like 1966, if you ask me). There's no deep exploration of this subtext - there's always too much running and shooting to do - yet it is present enough to lend the proceedings a bit more reality-based gravitas than your typical Rupert T. Davies script of today dares to have.
Posts
4 comments:
I lived in England as a kid and was lucky enough to see this on the big screen. Our local theater played first-fun movies, but also played older films, too. Got to see such diverse fare as Mary Poppins and 2001: A Space Odyssey, not to mention "new" movies like Creepshow and (cough*) Annie.
And holy hell ... Doctor Who and Peter Cushing? I was in geek heaven.
- Simon
That sounds like a very fun time.
Of course, the film can't live up to the idea of Cushing playing the Doctor, but how could it?
Being at best a casual fan of Doctor Who, I find this one a real hoot. Not so much the first Cushing Doctor Who film, though.
I agree, the first one's a lot less entertaining.
I don't really understand why the Who core fandom seems to hate this one so much.
Post a Comment