Steady!

I'm not absolutely barking mad for Tom Baker, but 'Revenge Of The Cybermen' has a lot going for it in Dr. Who terms.

It features an established enemy (the titular man machines), the threat of nuclear destruction, location filming at the aforementioned (i.e. yesterday) Wookey Hole in Somerset and it has a Carey Blyton score for saxophone and radiophonics...but it doesn't have Jon Pertwee in it so I'm afraid it just doesn't quite do it for me.

What does, however, is the bit when a Vogon nearly falls off the little train. It may be childish, and it's not even particularly funny, but there's something so essentially human and British and Dr. Who-ish about it that it it makes me smile every time...

The Freakmaker

Released in 1974, ‘The Mutations’ turned out to be the last film that Jack Cardiff directed, and the last film that Basil Kirchin scored, so you might well expect it to be a career ending disaster, a monumental flop that derailed the hitherto promising careers of two excellent people. In actual fact, it isn’t bad at all: just a little cheap and tacky. But it’s fun, which goes a long way, and the music is great.

Donald Pleasance plays Professor Nolter, a brilliant biologist and geneticist who is working on creating animal / plant hybrids so that mankind can live by photosynthesis and the world hunger issue can be eradicated, which is fair enough. But why do the annoying (and really old) students in his seminar group keep disappearing, and what exactly is going on at the local Freakshow? That’s right, the local Freakshow. It’s that sort of film.

The Freakshow is the centre of the mystery, and is populated by a cast of real sideshow performers with a variety of deformities (including a man who can pop his eyeballs out of his sockets) and it is their presence that raises issues of exploitation and sensationalism. The majority of their screen time is documentary type footage of their tent show where they introduce themselves and their ‘talents’ in time honoured carnival style, but they also have some dramatic scenes that are deliberately staged to recall Tod Browning’s ‘Freaks’, including appropriating some of the dialogue. These scenes have a real pathos that is not in the script, but written by their haunted faces, awkward movements, and the obvious sadness of their limited lives. In classic horror style they become killers at the end, of course, and give a fairly impressive demonstration of deadly knife throwing.

Pleasance is very understated and utterly convinces as a dedicated, if somewhat sardonic man of science. You could almost believe he might even be the hero of this story until you see him tenderly stroke a large rabbit before shoving it into the open trap of a massive carnivorous plant. No matter how many times I see this, it always makes me laugh.

Scott Anthony is the male lead (well, he shares the honour with screen vacuum Brad Harris) and is perfect casting as a know-it-all student with a shit quip for every occasion. Equally insufferable as sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brezska in Ken Russell’s shrill and embarrassing ‘Savage Messiah’, Anthony’s career ended here, too – I can’t say I’m sorry as he is one of the least likeable male actors I have ever seen, and I’ve watched films with all of the Baldwin brothers (Memo to the Baldwin Brothers: you have made life unnecessarily complicated by all becoming ‘the fat one’.)

The most striking element of the enterprise is Basil Kirchin’s amazing music, including extracts from his first ‘Worlds within Worlds’ LP and additional material written with John Nathan. Surprisingly experimental for a mainstream (horror or otherwise) film, it utilises trumpet, animal roars, hums, clicks, pops, scratchy strings and the sounds of autistic children to provide an avant garde accompaniment to the story, lending a gravitas to the action even when it gets really silly. The combination of music and image probably work best in the opening sequence: the stop-motion footage of flowers and toadstools growing is beautiful on its own terms, but Basil’s music and sound makes it transcendent.

The Mutations

US Title.

Dr. Who: In The Matrix

From 'The Deadly Assassin'. The Matrix may not look all that terrifying now, but when you're eight it has a much bigger impact...

Dr. Who: The Deadly Assassin

‘The Deadly Assassin’ takes us to the Doctor’s home planet of Gallifrey for an extended stay and, to be honest, we get a fair idea of why he left: it’s really boring, like a sort of intergalactic Brussels filled with pompous bureaucrats and over-zealous security guards. No wonder he nicked that type 40 Tardis and went off in search of adventure.

The Doctor has been drawn there to act as a patsy for the planned assassination of the President of the Time Lords, a plot that has the horrible, gnarled fingerprints of a very emaciated Master all over it (the Master is literally falling apart, having reached the end of his last regeneration). The overarching story is rather dull, basically ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ with crappy lasers and even more internecine politics, but it is redeemed by, for me, the most memorable twenty minutes of TV broadcast anywhere in 1976.

In order to prove his innocence, the Doctor must enter The Matrix – a virtual world of the mind where anything can happen (as long as it’s not too expensive looking) and this provides a number of really cool scenes as the Doctor fights for his life against crocodiles, Samurai, WW1 snipers and bi-planes in a bizarre dream like environment of jungle, quarry and swamp.

I found it absolutely thrilling as a kid and, although it shows its limitations now, I still think it’s a brilliant sequence – one bound to fire the imagination of any reasonably bloodthirsty and thrill hungry child.

The Doctor survives, of course, the moribund Master gets away and the boring civil servants of Gallifrey rewrite history so that none of it ever happened. Like many trips home, it’s proved to be a tiring and soul sapping experience, leaving you with a desperate urge to go somewhere exciting and meet an aggressive woman in an animal skin bikini.

Dr. Who: The Hand Of Fear

‘Hand Of Fear’ is probably most notable for marking the (first) departure of Sarah Jane Smith after two Doctors and an awful lot of screaming, although it’s also a pretty peppy story which traverses 150 million years and two galaxies.

The TARDIS materialises in a quarry on Earth (one of the few times in the series a quarry on Earth is just that) just in time for Sarah Jane to be buried in an explosion. When they dig her out, she is clutching a fossilised hand. The hand belongs to Eldrad, an alien super villain from the distant past. Apparently dead, the hand exerts a malign influence over Miss Smith, later using a massive dose of nuclear power to reconstitute itself into a rather foxy silicon based life form, a curvy, haughty charcoal briquette.

Forcing the Doctor to take her back to her own planet, Eldrad is killed by a trap set for her by the long dead people of her now empty world of origin. Undaunted, she reconstitutes herself into a much bumpier, even more bonkers male who, realising there is nothing left for him on his own planet, decides to return to Earth and conquer us instead, the cheeky bastard. The Doctor’s not having this, of course, so he trips him up with his scarf and sends him plummeting into a bottomless pit. End of.

I Know What I Like

The enigmatic Moore, pictured with his 'Portrait Of A Doomed Man', only a few days before the artist's mysterious death by spontaneous internal combustion.

Dr. Who: Pyramids of Mars

When it comes to 'Dr. Who', I'm a Pertwee man, I always have been. But that doesn't mean I can't appreciate how good Tom Baker was in the role, or the different direction the show went in under producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes. The enterprising duo steered the series into gothic horror, shortening the story runs to a brisk four episodes and pitting the still new Doctor against all manner of dark new foes - prompting record numbers of viewer complaints about how grown up and violent the show had become.

'Pyramids Of Mars' is a classic, one that I can remember watching avidly back in 1975. The menacing Mummies turned out to be robots controlled from another dimension by an exiled alien despot called Sutekh The Destroyer rather than dessicated corpses, but that only made them scarier. There's something chilling about mindless, lumbering creatures, isn't there? That's why I hate going to Asda.

Dedicated to the late Elisabeth Sladen, who eased a painful transition from Doctor to Doctor for this particular six year old. RIP, SJS.

The Awful Power Of An Ancient God

The way trailers used to be: no symphony orchestras, no fast editing, no running, no explosions. Basic details, time and date, job done.