The Spaceman of Alcatraz (1968)

D. Franc Violon
B&W


This is the inevitable consequence of so many producers slapping the words 'of Alcatraz' onto their films in the 1960s – movies which have absolutely nothing to do with the island and are seemingly just there to make a quick buck. This French film is a case in point, in that beyond some stock footage (which is clearly shot on grainer and older film than the movie itself) and a couple of mentions in the dialogue, it has precisely zilch, nada, nothing to do with Alcatraz. Indeed it imagines the inside of Alcatraz as being beautiful white and germless corridors, where scientists wander through speaking French. The concrete brutality of the original is nowhere, in fact I’m not entirely sure the film realises Alcatraz was a prison.

(Curiously the fact that everybody in the film is French but they’re all apparently in America is never addressed. It's set a little in the future and so maybe the French were hoping to get their empire back and then some. Or maybe having seen films where lots of Hollywood actors pretended to be French whilst speaking English, the makers just decided to return the favour. That second theory doesn’t really explain why the lead scientist is called ‘Pierre Rouge’ though.)

In the walls of Alcatraz is kept one prisoner, the only survivor of a spaceship which crashed to Earth. The survivor is humanoid but hairless, and he speaks terrible premonitions of what will happen on Earth shortly if the governments don't change their ways. Nobody knows if these premonitions are accurate and so nobody acts. The prisoner talks and broods and smiles a very knowing smile from time to time, and the scientists start to realise that because the same exclusive group are left to examine the prisoner in perpetuity on Alcatraz, they’re as much prisoners as he is. The question then becomes: who’s experimenting on whom?

Although the fact our alien is being played by an alternatively kindly and glowering Donald Pleasance, does give away that his intentions might not be totally benign.

The version I saw was subtitled which meant Pleasance’s dialogue is dubbed into French. Once you’ve seen this great English actor seemingly speak all his lines in lilting, slightly high from helium French voice, at the end of each sentence letting out a little gasp of air like a balloon deflating, it’s hard to view him in the same way again. Certainly all those Halloween sequels he did would have benefited from such inspired craziness.

Really, it’s hard to criticise 'The Spaceman of Alcatraz', even though it's grabbed its title dishonestly, as this is the most compulsive 'of Alcatraz' film we've seen so far. A slow burner certainly, but one which is looking at Stockholm syndrome, the nature of man and the future of the planet - all whilst being trapped in one building. It has no answers of course, but it has a great aesthetic and French scientists speaking on camera just sound far smarter than their English speaking counterparts.

Jungle Jim (1984)

D. Hackworth Hopes
Colour

Ah, Johnny Weissmuller, Olympic swimmer turned Tarzan, who once the most famous period of his career was over, picked up a jungle suit and a paunch and became Jungle Jim on both film and TV. “Who’s Jungle Jim?” I hear you cry. Well, Jungle Jim was another character created by the same guy who dreamt up Flash Gordon and was kind of a fully dressed western version of Tarzan, but one who operated in Asia rather than Africa. So he’s a sanitised take on the great white hunter, suitable for kids of all ages – even if Weissmuller looked a bit too portly and the jungle couldn’t be any more fake if Johnny was just stood in front of a plain background with the words ‘Trees Go Here’ scrawled on it.

The same year that director Hugh Hudson gave us a truly self-serious version of Tarzan in ‘Greystoke’, we had the other side of the coin with a remake of ‘Jungle Jim’. Here was Flash Gordon himself, Sam Jones, tackling another of Alex Raymond’s creations and proving once again that he was born at completely the wrong time. If ever there was a one dimensional actor who was good at striking heroic poses in the face of all kinds of monster nonsense, it was Sam Jones. But he needed to either exist in the time of B movie madness or the kind of schlock the Sci-fi channel turns out week after week now. The 1980s were really no good for him.

Having been knocked out and dumped in the jungle, Jim awakes in the mythical country of Muthapetox wearing an outfit that makes him look like Indiana Jones just after he’s been to the dry cleaners. Ever the adventurer, it isn’t long before he’s earned the wrath of white jungle priestess, Barbara Carrera (another performer who screams the 1980s and another performer who wasn’t given proper chance to put her bad acting skills to good use), and then rescued damsel in distress, Emma Samms, and her incredible shrinking skirt. Samms and Jones bicker and fight and flirt and fall in love as they trek their way out of the jungle and towards ‘civilisation’. But Jim realises that the legendary lost city of Nig-taca is not far away and determines to visit it.

So we’re in the land of made up places with obviously made up names, but unlike the same year’s Tarzan movie, that means it doesn’t take itself at all seriously. Interestingly the film ends with an alien spaceship rising out of the lost city where it’s been buried for thousands of years. That’s of course the same ending as ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ and yet in this far more preposterous film such an occurrence doesn’t seem to so utterly preposterous. The Indiana Jones film spent its length stretching our credibility (fridges that survive nukes; Shia Le Bouef channelling Tarzan, the entire Shia Le Boeuf performance in fact) until it reached the point of tearing that credibility completely asunder. ‘Jungle Jim’ though doesn’t require any credibility, in fact it demands you leave your credibility at the door at the start, and it’s all the better for it.

We Cease to Grow! (1972)

D. Damien Nostro
B&W

Much like the Doctor Who serial ‘The Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ and the forthcoming ‘Kingsman: Secret Service’, this obscure grainy 1970s film features a mad environmentalist who decides that the best way to solve the population problem is to wipe out most of mankind. Obviously Paul R. Ehrlich’s ‘The Population Bomb’ has, and continues to have, some effect – although possibly not the one the good doctor was expecting. Let’s look at this closely, what kind of absolute nutter thinks that the best way to save the human population is to wipe out 99.9% of it? Okay, let’s say that there are people like that out there, misanthrope extremis, how would they persuade anyone else to go along with their scheme? Surely anyone propositioned to help implement this plan of mass slaughter, would back slowly away with a distinctly scared and freaked out look in their eyes. In both ‘The Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ and ‘Kingsman: Secret Service’ it’s the elite who are saved (although in the 1970s that meant intellectuals; in 2014 it apparently means celebrities), while in ‘We Cease to Grow!’ it’s less clear – but even then, surely members of any elite know people who aren’t in the elite? Surely they’re not so blasé in their lifestyle they’re happy to watch everyone else die just so they can hang out and procreate with people like themselves. Perhaps I’m being horribly naive, but I’d like to think that when some billionaire megalomaniac does come along and suggests this scheme, that most people (although certainly not all, I admit that) will say that they don’t want to be a party to the genocide of most of humanity, thank you very much.


Orson Welles plays the lead role – although even then he probably knocked out his part in about four days – as a wheelchair bound mad genius who has unleashed a terrible chemical bug into the world. Now locked down in his bunker, and resembling a bigger and scarier Raymond Burr, he ruminates on his reasons and rationale whilst chaos takes hold outside. Welles’s voice as he intones is like the rumble of the apocalypse, so it’s appropriate he’s there literally narrating the end of the world. Statistics purr out of this wounded lion, as he tells of how much food the world has left, the spread of diseases and the rise of the oceans. Outside we see the chaos starting, rioting on the streets; as well as more individual vignettes, where sad and desperate people come to the end of their sad and desperate lives. It’s not a film to make you feel good about yourself; in fact it’s difficult to work out what kind of mood the film makers want you to leave the cinema in, because as far as I can see Welles is supposed to be right here. Yes he has carried out this drastic act, but he is a sage, a seer, he is salvation. So who knows what the audience was supposed to do with it? Maybe the film makers just wanted enough people to see it so that if some megalomaniac did suggest killing most of humanity, somebody would actually say yes.

The Chrysalids (1971)

D. Michael Anders
Colour

‘The Chrysalids’ is a fantastic novel which I’ve travelled too far in life without reading and, now I have, I whole-heartily recommend it. As such I really wanted to enjoy this obscure and barely released film adaptation. John Wyndham’s ‘The Day of the Triffids’ and ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’ are much more wired into the psyche of the British public, I think, because of the film versions (the latter, of course, as ‘The Village of the Damned’). I wanted this film then to right a wrong, so that even if it wasn’t as well known it may one day get a cinema re-release, or a big DVD push, and the reputation of both it and the book would rise. Unfortunately, even though it doesn’t shy away from ambition, there are performances here so ropey they could be used in rigging, dialogue so mouldy it’s like it’s been delivered from a petri dish, the kind of continuity errors that would get most film-editors beaten, whipped and then sacked, and a plot which even a casual observer would stare at and wonder where all those bloody great holes came from.

Set in a harsh puritan society of a post-apocalyptic world, we follow decidedly mature teens Ian Ogilvie and Jane Seymour, who like nuclear Romeo and Juliet fall in love despite the enmity of their families. When the pair’s passion is discovered, the arguments which ensure result in the two of them revealing hitherto hidden telekinetic powers that mark them both out as devil’s spawn in their world. Their only chance for survival is to flee into the badlands outside the civilised world, but such is the fear they’ve provoked, they are pursued relentlessly by the mad preacher who runs the town.

I can handle Seymour and Ogilvie not really looking like teenagers at all. I can handle that the moment they escape, they ditch their buttoned up puritan garbs for some battered and revealing swimwear, as clearly they’re now rebelling. I can handle that the telepathy in the book has become the far more visually pleasing telekinesis in the film. I can ever handle that both Seymour and Ogilvie’s performances are bland, particularly when compared with the ridiculously and enthusiastically evil turn Roy Dotrice gives as the town preacher – and Seymour’s dad.

But what I really can’t get a grip on is the way telekinesis is only used when the plot needs it. At points the film just forgets that its lead characters can move things with their mind – which we can all agree, would be a useful ability to have in a scrape – and just finds some other way to get them out of trouble. Similarly the unexploded nuclear bomb they find at the end feels like deus ex grande machina. The book’s different ending also has a similar charge against it, but here we have two people, hundreds of years after a nuclear war that’s ill-defined in their history, instantly clocking what this weapon is and figuring out how to use it to their advantage. It’s like watching a caveman have a flash of inspiration on how to programme a digital watch.

There are some scary moments en route, particularly for Seymour who is very much screaming peril monkey of the movie, but this is a film which rides its way through the pretty English countryside with only a faint grasp on its own plot, and so never captures Wyndham and fails even on its own terms.

Dropper Harris and the Menace from Beyond (1939)

D. Ted Green
B&W


The third Dropper Harris film clearly realises it’s the last in the series. That’s not to say it’s lazy, everybody involved is clearly giving a hundred percent even when they know the material they’ve been given is utterly ludicrous. Cary Grant in particular looks like he’s relishing the absolutely ridiculous dialogue and lunatic scenario, knowing that this isn’t something he’d find himself doing for Howard Hawks or George Cukor. This has the feel of everybody letting their hair down, of an entire production team chilling out and just throwing stuff to the wall to see what would stick. Cary Grant later wrote (and indeed directed a film) about his experiments with LSD, and this feels like he’s slipped some to the crew to give the whole production that blissed out, psychedelic, “logic is there to be broken, man” type of atmosphere. As here we have a plot involving Dropper Harris, London citizen and number one agent for the British secret service, taking a trip into space. Yes, this is Dropper Harris goes to the moon.


If you were expecting some common-sense plot to explain this development, then I’m sorry you’re out of luck. There are reasons given for why all this happens, explanations offered for all that takes place, but they don’t stand up to even the briefest scrutiny. Indeed this is the second version of this paragraph I’ve written, in the first I tried to explain the plot, but after much head scratching and confusion I just gave up. Again the makers aren’t being slap-dash, this is a film that knows its money shot is Dropper Harris (Cary Grant) and Binky (Tommy Harrison) bouncing around in Flash Gordon outfits on the moon with big silly grins on their faces. That’s what’s on the poster, that’s what the public wanted to see and – goddamnit! – that’s what we got.


Yes, there’s some nonsense about the Russians having opened a moon-base and sending rays back to Earth, but it’s purely window dressing. This is about Dropper, Binky and new team member/love interest Catarina (Dorothy Lamour) going to the moon. That’s where the fun lies and everybody is set to have the time of their lives. Grant in particular has a big, very un-Cary Grant-like goofy grin, as he prances around in Buster Crabbe’s cast-offs spouting alternatively meaningless mumbo-jumbo or over the top atrocious dialogue. He’s still brilliant in this film. Indeed the genius of Cary Grant’s acting is that even when he knows what he’s doing is totally ridiculous, even when part of him is obviously making fun of each scene even as he acts in it, he still takes the audience with him. He never capsizes the film, never ruins it by playing it like panto – somehow he manages to be both serious and in on the joke at the same time, and the result is some of the most joyful silliness you will ever see.


There was nowhere else for Dropper Harris to go after this (except, perhaps, Mars), but we should be thankful these movies exist. A gleeful series of mad, lunatic 1930s adventure films, which always felt out of this world even before they actually went there.

The Dalek War (1970)

D. Philip Strafer
Colour

This is what Terry Nation was striving for. From the first murmurings of dalekmania, his piggy eyes rang with pound signs and he was desperate to take his creations out into the world by themselves. Sod ‘Doctor Who’! He didn’t have the rights to ‘Doctor Who’ and so didn’t care about it. Indeed, arguably, the daleks were much bigger than the programme which beget them. They were the ones who made it the much watch show. What’s more, there had been five films at this point with the word ‘Dalek’ in the title and all of them had made money. There was clearly a market there for exterminators extreme and this movie was going to capitalise on it.


So whereas on TV The Doctor temporarily bid adieu to the daleks, in film the daleks waved a full goodbye to The Doctor. (That’s not as bizarre an image as it sounds: if a dalek holds its sucker at the right angle and weaves a little, it can do a pretty good wave.) So here we have a film which isn’t about The Doctor meeting and defeating the daleks, it’s about the daleks being the daleks and the audience revelling in their awesome metal coolness. This is the daleks being the best creatures in existence, shiny pepper-pots who will eventually control the universe.


Of course you couldn’t just have a film about daleks (even for Terry Nation a searing drama with a dalek only cast would have been a push) so there has to be some human characters as well. This comes in the form of a bunch of space soldiers – led by a young Gareth Hunt, with a shifty second in command played by Hywel Bennett – who crash land on Skaro, the daleks’s home planet. From being a hard-arsed incursion force, they suddenly find themselves having to survive long enough for the rescue ship to reach them. ‘The Dalek War’ is aiming to be a taut and claustrophobic movie, with lots of shiny corridors made dark by failing lights and humans being picked off one by one by the impressively relentless daleks.


To modern eyes the film it most resembles is ‘Aliens’, both are about military operations against an unremitting foe who can’t be beaten. Except in many ways it’s not at all like ‘Aliens’, as instead of being scary it finds new ways to be ridiculously cheesy at every turn. Imagine there were whole scenes in ‘Aliens’ given over to various xenomorphs chatting to each other about what strategy they were going to take. Imagine that the xenomorphs spoke in shrill, grating voices and actually had passionate arguments about what to do next. James Cameron’s vision suddenly becomes a lot less menacing, doesn’t it? But that is actually what we have here, sequences where daleks have ridiculous dalek conversations that just make them look far more comical than scary. But then part of the problem is that we’re clearly supposed to see the daleks as scary monsters, but also really like them as well. For all we’re supposed to care about the humans’ plight, there is part of the film that just desperately wants the daleks to win. And that gives it a real problem in tone, as with the charisma free Gareth Hunt, snivelling Hywel Bennett and nothing but anonymous meat bags surrounding them, it just feels like we shouldn’t want these idiots to escape even when two of them manage it. Instead we’re supposed to root for the daleks: to be scared of these pepper-pots, as well as finding them immensely cool, even when the film goes way out of its way to make them utterly bloody stupid.
It’s a confused movie which raises lots of conflicted emotions. It’s also the first dalek film not to make money, a crucial element would be back next time though.

Scotland The Feared (2009)

D. Neil Marshall
Colour


It’s a tad surprising that Neil Marshall’s satire/horror/dystopian science fiction/gaudy spectacular of a film isn’t better known, I’d have put good money on it being referenced (by both sides) in the run up to the Scottish devolution vote. I’d have thought that with the future 'Dr Who' careers of two of its stars, Whovians like myself would be all over it. But no, it seems that after ‘Dog Soldiers’ and ‘The Descent’, Marshall’s films have struggled to get recognition. And that’s a shame as for all its flaws (and they are myriad), this is a film crammed full of ideas.


In the future, the Prime Minister of the independent Scotland (Peter Capaldi – not doing full Malcolm Tucker, but still in scary if not sweary mode) is agitated about Scotland’s influence on the world stage. Oil is running out and Scotland is facing becoming a poor country, “the bastard cousin” of a still dominant England. These strifes have already reached home, with gangs of disaffected youths – known as Haggises – roaming the land. However with the discovery of a nuclear weapon left over from Colonial times (as they’re referred in the film), Capaldi decides to start a war. It’s up to plucky young reporter James MacAvoy (bland) and his intern, Karen Gillan (inexperienced as an actress, but fetchingly lovely) to stop him.


The newly minted Twelfth Doctor and Amy Pond together on celluloid, you’d have thought the Science Fiction magazines would be panting over DVDs of this. Particularly, as I’ve already noted, the vote this year is going to make it truly topical. However the reason they won’t, is that having splattered all these elements together, ‘Scotland the Feared’ struggles to make any of them work.
‘The Mouse that Roared’ satire of the premise – where Scotland attacks England’s great ally, Portugal (it’s true that the one country in Europe England/Britain has never been to war with is Portugal) goes from ludicrously satirical idea to be taken intensely seriously by all the characters very quickly. But then maybe the idea of firing a nuclear warhead at millions of innocent Portuguese can’t be played for comedy for too long.


As for the horror, the Haggises are scarily tattooed and scarily Glaswegian, but are used far too frequently. By the end it seems like any scene which has become inert can easily be resolved by having a bunch of violent skinheads crash into the room. And there are only so many times watching a drooling skinhead wield a broken bottle of McEwans is actually entertaining.


And the dystopian future stuff? Well, that’s a mix of smog coloured sky, bright neons and impressive shadows. It isn’t as original as it could be, but you can see Marshall and his cinematographer straining against the budget to create something that is undeniable futuristic and Scottish.


Which is what I like about this film, how goddamn Scottish it is. For the most part this looks like a film made for an exclusively Scottish audience. To understand all the references it helps if you have good working knowledge of Scottish indie music, the suburbs of Edinburgh and The Jacobite Rebellion. There are characters who speak like particularly indecipherable extras from Rab C. Nesbit, with not a subtitle in sight. Okay, for a more general audience there are jokes about the first presidents of Scotland being Alec Salmond, Sean Connery and Alex Ferguson – but you won’t necessarily feel a welcome in the hills if you’re a Sassenach.


So why isn’t this a rallying film for the independence campaign? Undoubtedly because the ending makes it clear that the film doesn’t know where it lies. (Spoiler alert) ‘Scotland the Feared’ does honestly end with England sending it troops to quell the Scots and make everything safe again. After all the stuff about being proud Scots and how the country can stand up for itself, it is forcibly taken back into English hands before it can cause any more damage. It’s a genuinely odd conclusion that makes you wonder who this film is aimed at. Surely anyone who believes in the Union doesn’t want to sit through 90 minutes of strident neon flag waving for independence; while anyone who believes in devolution doesn’t want to watch a film where England bails them out.


It’s all very odd, and just proves once again that you can’t have your Dundee Cake and eat it.

The Invisible Man (1955)

D. Ralph Smart
B&W


There’s a reason why the Claude Rains/James Whale version is the best known of 'The Invisible Man' movies. There’s the spooky tavern, the screaming maid,. Raines’s magnificently sinister voice, a scarf dancing around by itself. It just feels so much like what Wells’s versions of The Invisible Man should be. In the eighty years since it was made (Eighty?! My doesn’t time fly!) Kevin Bacon, Chevy Chase and David MaCallum have had a stab at it but with less visible success (pun intended). Perhaps the most out there and uncanonical of these versions though is when Kenneth Moore donned the white bandages. It’s called ‘The Invisible Man’ and says it’s based on the novel by H.G. Wells, but if you’d resurrected Wells in 1955 and bought him popcorn at a showing, he’d have stared at the screen racking his brains as to whether he ever dreamed of such a thing. As this Invisible Man is invisible, but going places Wells never imagined. But even though the film is now pretty much forgotten you can surely see roots from this to 'Doctor Who', 'The Avengers', Alan Moore and the more outré parts of the James Bond films.


Ladies and Gentleman, I give you Michael Griffin, invisible man and roguish British secret agent.


Yes, those of you who’ve read the book or seen Claude Rains, may be surprised that someone so clearly insane could pass the rigorous examinations set by MI6. Surely he would have failed on personality type in eight or nine different ways. Also, wouldn’t a man so clearly self-absorbed not care too much about the nation state in the battle against the Russians? It’s true that his behaviour is a bit extreme at times, and there are moments when his colleagues and controllers look at him (or look at the space around where they imagine he might be) aghast. But then I guess actually having an invisible man on your side makes the difficulties of employing an invisible man worthwhile.


(Part of the problem with making ‘The Invisible Man’ is attracting a top name actor to it, after all why would your self-righteous A-lister want to do a role where he is never actually seen? This version gets around this though by giving Moore a perfectly fitting mask of his own face.  Bacon and McCallum (and Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible) also use such masks. But the question has to be asked, where would one get such an item? Masks are there to hide behind, so what company sees the market in making a mask that looks exactly like the person who is wearing it? Is there really much business in that type of thing? Even more than the idea of invisible men, this seems weird to me.)


After an opening mission which goes wrong (Griffin impetuously steals the wrong briefcase), his controller Leo G. Carroll (rehearsing for both ‘North by Northwest’ and ‘The Man from Uncle’) sends this invisible man on a mission to tail glamorous Russian spy, Jane Russell. The divine Ms Russell is clearly slumming it in British movies, but using it as an opportunity to cultivate an absurd East German accent which just gets magnificently broader and broader as the film goes on. Initially he is clandestine in the way only an invisible man can be, but before long he is putting on his human mask and wining and dining this ultra-glamorous Russian agent until she comes across to the British and right side. It’s then that she reveals her big secret, that the Russians have placed three giant robots in London which they are going to use to destabilise the capital. The stage is set for the incredibly giddy sight of the invisible man taking on huge metal men in London town.


Okay, the effects really do start to fall apart when the large men in robot suits go on the rampage. And more than once the strings are visible when the invisible man starts moving stuff around. But, in the ideas of it, in the concept, in the science fiction of stuff happening in grimy London we have both ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘The Avengers’. In the glamorous female prey and derring-do of the spy who breaks the rules, we have James Bond. And in the invisible man doing things H.G. Wells never imagined we have ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ (as well as Ralph Smart’s own equally forgotten 1950s TV show ‘The Invisible Man’ which this was a springboard for). It’s far from perfect, but this is a movie we should hail!

Argonauts of the Air (1937)

D. Jimmy Cowdell
B&W


It’s H.G. Wells week this week on The Alternative History of Cinema. There’s no specific reason for this, on this blog I just pick things on a whim and whimsy and go from there. And since in recent weeks, two H.G. Wells adaptations have occurred to me, I thought I’d create thematic unity by running them together. Yes, I really should have done it in September for his birthday or something like that, but sod it! All year around is a good time for Bromley’s finest literary son. First up we have a stilted, cut glass tale of British derring-do in outer space. Set in the wonderful year of 2014, but clearly much more the 1930s. The future, much like the present, is British and nothing is going to stop that. Get your Union Jack marked spaceships at the ready, put your stiff upper lip in place, and off we go.


Based on the very short Wells story of the same name, this is the almost Monty Python set-up of spaceflight from the suburbs. Just outside the two up, two down of the new suburban developments, there are rockets lined up ready to fly to the furthest reaches of space. There dashing young men queue up to be spacemen and take the glory of Britain to the further possible horizon, while dowdier men in pinstripe suits and bowler hats man Mission Control – just like Mr Benn’s most out of this world adventure. We hear tales of a moon-base, a Martian colony (where in a throwaway line it seems we are teaching the Martians about civilised government), of how the Saturn fleet is now mighty. But a threat is coming from closer to home that could seriously harm this brilliant endeavour.


For the most part this is derring-do of a Bulldog Drummond style. Lewis Coleman is Captain Jack Cook, a legendary figure in the space corps – the kind of man with a pencil thin moustache, slicked back hair, a rakish grin and a glint in the eye bright enough to weaken the knee of any poor susceptible member of the female species. He’s the type of Englishman who is every woman’s dream (although that dream probably involves pounding her lover’s buttocks once a week with a cane to really get him off. Yes, he’s that type of Englishman!) Clearly the film makers have seen Flash Gordon as there are the plastic rocket ships, onesie space uniforms, strange new planets. But at the forefront, hands on hips, staring handsomely into the distance, looking both heroic and rather repressed, is our very English hero.


But there’s a problem, the large staff back at space-fleet command has been infiltrated. It hasn’t been infiltrated by a Martian, or a Venusian or a moon person – no the big threat comes from closer to home, it comes from the anarchists. Arthur Simkins, as rat-faced an actor as ever lived, is Karl Mannix, an anarchist who is determined to destroy the space-fleet. He doesn’t dream of a glorious space Empire, he dreams of bringing England to its knees. After a few acts of sabotage a general meeting is called and after a bumpy opening, Captain Jack carries the day and gets the workforce on its side. It’s then that Mannix, and his sinister foreign cohorts, decide to step the plan up and kill Captain Jack, slaughter the glorious symbol of the British Space Empire itself. But the will of the people is stronger. Joined together – every member of the space corps, from Captain Jack Cook down to a lowly cleaner named Marjorie (who stares at Captain Jack with a mix of motherly pride and lustful wantonness) is able to root out and get rid of the these subversive infiltrators. Space flight is for all and the all join together to make sure that the malcontent few do not destroy the great dream of mankind.


It’s a beautiful image, one that precedes ‘Star Trek’ by thirty years, and chimes well with Wells’ own political views. But it also makes for an oddly confusing movie. The anarchists are clearly portrayed as left wing themselves. There they are with their pamphlets, their copies of Marx, their exaggerated (as it turns out) claims about poor working conditions. And so they don’t seem to be that different from the grouping which eventually crushes them. Yes, socialism without Marx is an ideal Wells is on record as desiring, and this is a film where the Marx is forcibly removed from socialism. Yet there is little on the screen to truly explain what that means and we’re left with a story where some left wing patriots get rid of some really left wing malcontents so that the bowler hatted fellows of Wimbledon, Surbiton and Worcester Park can continue their work in Britain’s glorious imperial space-race.

The Horsemen of Now (1974)

D. John Crosby
Colour


Here’s a deeply weird British film which cries out for a big budget Hollywood remake. Surely this is just sitting there waiting for, say, Tom Cruise as the good guy and maybe Christophe Waltz as the bad. If you throw in modern computer generated effects, a big budget and stunts that are clearly more than just toy trucks, then you probably have the makings of a fantastic franchise. As the film we have at the moment, the budget is nowhere near capable of taking on the frankly huge and bonkers ideas, and something epic needs surely to be done with it. However, having said all that, one of the things I really like about this film is the very British smallness of it. The fact that the entire world is clearly represented by a few streets in West London. The recognisability of the cast, being the usual British mix of jobbing stage actors and Carry On veterans. And most particularly the fact the good guy’s headquarters Is a greasy spoon café. This is a film of a dysfunctional future and I love that this particular dystopia has the whiff of greasy bacon sarnies.


Actually sod it. The yanks can stay away from this, I’m happy with the deeply weird and very British ‘The Horsemen of Now’ being exactly the way it is.


Richard Burton, looking weary and sounding gruff and seeming every inch the son of a coalminer from Pontrhydyfen, is Sammy – one of the leaders of this new world and a truck driver. Yes, you’ve read that right. In the future, after whatever happens takes place the truck drivers are the Kings. (Whatever this dreadful event actually is remains incredibly vague. Obviously it is cataclysmic, with the sky forever tinged pink and dust visible in the air, and trucks racing unimpinged by speed limits around Shepherd’s Bush.) These truckers get into the cabs, unwrap their Yorkies (probably, nothing is said to the contrary) and patrol the streets like the knights of olde. But they have an enemy. Travelling in their own London taxis, piloted by an army of undead cab drivers, we have The Sorcerers. That’s right, Sorcerers. In the future there is magic, it has been rediscovered and harnessed by these sorcerers, who intend to turn themselves into gods and enslave everybody left. It’s the power of the Earth against the mechanical brilliance of man in this skewed version of alchemy. At the head of the sorcerers is Patrick McGoohan, and the entire film is a wait for him and Burton to face off in what will clearly be an epic confrontation.


It’s an interesting dynamic, Burton’s hair is bleached a terrible honey blonde which makes him look like a particularly seedy member of the SS, while McGoohan is raggedly handsome and shot in heroic poses throughout. What’s more, traditionally in films, those harnessing the elemental powers of the Earth would be seen as the good guys, with the bad being those in control of the big, dusty, metal machines. And yet here it is the other way around. Brilliantly it is toil and sweat and being skilled with your hands that is seen as the good and useful thing, while magic is something airy and fairy and likely to be taught at Oxbridge. Yes, it’s the rise of the salt of the Earth, taking up their articulated vehicles and getting ready to punch the soft-hand layabouts in the face.


For some tastes this no doubt will be a bit talky. The budget isn’t high, so there’s a lot of Burton sat around a transport caff (chatting with, amongst others, fellow trucker Kenneth Conner, and proprietor Joan Sims) about what the hell those damned sorcerers are up to now. We do get a few scenes where black cabs pull up and their passengers do terrible things to a lone trucker, but clearly – from what Burton says – they are just the tip of a very strange and peculiar iceberg. Similarly McGoohan hangs out with his cohorts, in what looks to be some wood panelled magic seat of learning, and tells them what he’s going to do to Burton and then to the world when the day comes. (McGoohan was of course first choice for James Bond and turned it down, but here he is showing that his real skill would have been as the campest, most over the top Bond villain of all time!) It may seem a long wait but it ensures that tension is high at the end, when a convoy of trucks goes into battle against a fleet of black-cabs piloted by zombies and carrying a group of sinister magicians. As the vehicles roar, the manhole covers actually lift and the pavements are alternatively smashed up and bent by the warring parties, any wait seems fantastically worthwhile as it’s astounding how bonkersly brilliant it all is.


Actually I’ve changed my mind again. You can do this is you like, Tom. The original won’t disappear and I’d like to see the whole thing done on a proper big budget. Just please, Tom, try and keep as much of the brilliant weirdness as the studio will let you.

Shadows of the Aliens (1984)

D. Phillippe Noir
Colour


It’s sad that this French science fiction film didn’t garner a bigger audience, as it’s a visually innovative, sharply political, gripping thriller. Whether one would describe it as enjoyable is a question we’ll throw into the air with little heed to its safety, as there are car crashes which are less bleak. But how often do you get to pick up a croissant and a glass of red wine and sit down to a science fiction movie which has something to say and is saying it in a French accent?


Our setting, as the opening caption tells us is the future, although very little is done to indicate the future. The cars, the buildings, the haircuts all scream the 1980s, so that is where we are. (Clearly Goddard’s ‘Alphaville’ is an influence.) Our setting then is the present, but not quite the present. Jean Poiret, pulling on his policeman’s overcoat, is a government sanctioned hunter. He stalks the streets of Paris hunting down aliens, who are then rounded up and taken to who knows where. Of course this being science fiction, these aliens are humanoids from outer space (recognised by their two sets of eyelids and no toes) rather than immigrants. But for the social message of the film, these are one and the same. The aliens are not wanted by France, they have never been invited in and now they have to leave.


The first half of the film then is chasing these aliens (they are never given a name) around Paris, trying to catch them but sometimes being forced to terminate them with maximum force. In the first half hour alone we have a creature thrown off a tall building into the path of a juggernaut; and one dropped into a vat of handily placed acid (of the kind which only ever exist in the movies). Poiret seems to be the type of investigator Napoleon would like, as whenever an act of violence needs to be committed, a luckily placed fire-axe or lift-shaft is nearby.


Some movies would have been content with this cat and mouse, this human and humanoid alien, some movies would have left their ambition there. But ‘Shadows of the Aliens’ decides to push things much further.


Halfway through a giant spaceship arrives on Earth, or more precisely in Paris. (The film is French, therefore Paris is the centre of the world and quite probably the universe). These are the Vervoids, a powerful alien race which hates the original aliens as much as the French do. Initially we only see the Vervoid leader, a giant and sweaty ball of rippling flesh, unable to express the simplest emotion without its entire body rippling. Realised with the aid of a puppet, this is an alien leader who is striking and menacing and bears an unmistakable resemblance to the older Orson Welles. The Vervoids are hailed as saviours. (The fact that these first aliens are never named may cause problems in this review, but not in the film. We simply have The Humans, The Vervoids and – lastly – the aliens). With the French government’s approval – in the form of uber-efficient administrator, Gerard Depardieu – they take over Paris and work together to rid these aliens on a more industrial scale. Suddenly we have gone from problems of immigration to the Vichy government and everything has turned terrifying and strange.


There is no US/British allied force to the rescue this time (this isn’t ‘Adrienne and the Astronaut’ though, such creatures as Americans do still exist). We’re told that worried phone calls have been made by the President and Prime Minister, although the tone of Depardieu’s voice makes it seem like they’re easy to ignore. Instead the Vervoids and the humans are allowed in win. Indeed at the conclusion, with most of the original aliens dead, it’s clear how much the Vervoids and humans now look like each other. They are one and the same.


Post Star Wars there were a lot of science fiction films which didn’t really want to say anything, they just wanted to entertain with their brilliant light shows. This one though is desperate to say things, it wants to shout them from the rooftops, and is happy to bring in juggernauts, acid vats and rubbery Orson Welles just to get some attention. Maybe the end result is too dark to grab a huge audience, but this is undeniably a tense and thought provoking film.


And, really, where else are you going to see a giant rippling Orson Welles dominate Gerard Depardieu?

Adrienne and the Astronaut (1967)

D. Jean-Pierre Matisse
Colour


It’s odd that the French film ‘Le Cosmonaute Rend Visite à Adrienne’ was given the English title ‘Adele and the Astronaut’, as the future we are shown seems to be one where the Americans are completely wiped out. An astronaut is obviously a term for an American voyager to space, and yet the spaceman we meet is Terence Stamp and very British. (Very cockney in fact, so cockney that one briefly wonders whether the future will be a nightmare vision of jellied eels and rolling out the barrel). He isn’t remotely American. Indeed Americans aren’t mentioned at any point in the film and so the impression we get is that there are no Americans in the future. So this film, made at the height of the space race, two years before the moon landings, seems to go out of its way to suggest that in outer space there will be no room for the Yanks.


How are we to read this? To theorise that years from now all Americans will have been wiped out is probably a step too far. This is a film which posits a totally idyllic future in store for us, one where all citizens are happy, where their minds are totally open to new experiences, where love and contentment are universal rights. As such it would be odd if such a future was built on the total genocide of the whole American nation. It would be more than a tad icky to think of a future so beautiful built on such brutality to Uncle Sam. But the French film makers do seem to be saying – at the height of Vietnam, with riots right across The States – that true brotherly love can only take place without the Americans there. So if that’s the case, what happened to them?  If we discount genocide, then what else is there? Maybe they flew in away in their spaceships and have headed to Mars, where they now have all the wars their blood thirsty souls could possibly desire. Or perhaps they have transcended to whatever giant shakes, chilli cheese dogs, large fries on the side place in the sky Americans call nirvana.


Whatever. The French are making this film and they have decided NO Americans. And that it makes it interesting. After having seen and read so much American science fiction, it is intriguing, as well as somewhat jarring, to see a version of the future from which Americans have been totally excluded.


Catherine Deneuve is a futurist living in swinging London. By any measure she has made quite a good life from this nebulous profession of predicting the future, kitting herself out with a good pad and the fanciest designer clothes. But there’s one thing missing from her life and that’s a lover. That all changes one sunny morning however, when a man arrives from the heavens (actually there’s a blinding light in her bathroom and he steps out of that. So rather than the heavens it’s a toilet, but the principle is the same). He is spaceman, Terrence Stamp. A  creature from the future, part of the British stellar expedition force (which isn’t as mad as it sounds, the British were trying to make strides towards space in the late sixties), who has volunteered to be part of the new time travel programme. The technology is still in early days though and so Terrence has found himself transported back to the 1960s and Catherine. The reason for this is that she’s apparently is his true love - even though she was born a couple of hundred years before him, which suggests Cupid has one weird sense of humour.


Terrence takes Catherine to visit his time, so she can compare it to her visions. What we’re given is a very sixties version of the future, where the phones are still the clunky same (and people actually still use phone-boxes for calls, and not just urination), the skirts are much shorter and mop-top bands are very much in fashion. The Beatles though are passé, which must have looked an odd conclusion to reach in 1967. There are also zeppelins, and that’s actually one of the things Catherine predicted correctly. (Seriously, what is it with futurologists and zeppelins? Why do they believe that the future will be filled with them? It’s seventy years now since the zeppelin was last a serious mode of transport, face it: zeppelins aren’t making a comeback). This future is a very 1960s ideal of brotherly love and peace, and it’s all so wonderful and everybody is so happy, and it’s truly and remarkably dull. The future is bright and its lovely, but nothing actually bloody happens. Eventually to add a bit of drama, it’s realised that the gorgeous young lovers can’t sustain their relationship over the timelines and must separate. It’s sad as Terrence Stamp and Catherine Deneuve may be the best looking couple in cinema history, and through their peaceful and non-threatening and non-adventurous adventures, we’ve grown to kind of like them. For those who are still awake, it’s a little bit sad when they part. But at least when Catherine returns to her timeline, she knows that the future is safe and beautiful. And who knows? When she gets married and has kids and grandchildren and so on, maybe Terrence will turn out to be a descendent of hers. (Come on, I was bored. The film wasn’t offering me any spice, so I had to create my own).


It’s a pleasant film, an optimistic film, but it is the kind of film to make your eyelids beg for mercy. Say what you will about the yanks, at least they know to add a bit of action to these things.

The Final Man on the Run (1959)

D. Frank Howard
B&W


I truly love creaky old British Science Fiction. It’s not just that being a ‘Doctor Who’ fan means that dodgy monsters in grainy black and white comes somewhat with the territory, it’s that alien invasion always feels a lot more poky and provincial in England. In America there are wide open spaces, the world that is being invaded seems so wonderful and worth taking. It’s not like that in Britain. Maybe if – like ‘The Children of The Damned’ – these aliens are choosing to invade the Home Counties you can perhaps see where they’re coming from, but grim and grimy London? Seriously, alien invaders, what’s wrong with your planet that you’d want to come somewhere that still uses powdered egg?


The oddly titled ‘The Final Man on the Run’ is cheap and British and essentially a rip off of ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ – only with the twist that instead of a quiet and prosperous America town being stolen, it is the seedy environs and backstreets of Soho. This makes it a very interesting set-up, as the aliens are replacing people who are already scary anyway. These aren’t schoolteachers and policemen who are being replicated, but spivs, small time crooks and all round scum. The only one who realises what’s happening is a down on his luck boxer, with a dodgy record himself, but no one will listen to him as nobody really cares for these people anyway – and so the contagion spreads.


This film, despite its cheapness and the rip off of the premise, should be better remembered – not least as one of the early starring roles for Sean Connery.  (There’s also a pre Doctor Who William Hartnell as a tobacconist who is one of the first to be taken. It’s a great moment when Connery peers into his face and sees not a single ounce of emotion). And Connery does well as the boxer in totally over his head. There’s a path to his performance, a joy in seeing the character question more and more before frustration truly overwhelms him. Although unlike Kevin McCarthy in the American version, Connery can never make himself look totally helpless. Even in the bleak conclusion, one gets the impression that this Glaswegian Terry Malloy, will still find a way to save the world.


It’s a tense ride which understands just how scary shadows are, although it feels too rushed at 72 minutes. Much like ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, which can be interpreted as either anti-communist or anti-witch-hunts, I suppose there are two possible readings here also. Either the film is saying that the salt of the Earth (no matter how coarse a grain) are the most crucial people of all and once we lose them we lose everything; or else this is a bunch of middle class film makers sneering from their pipes and slippers and thinking that the working classes are so common and brutish they are all pretty much aliens anyway, aren’t they?


So perhaps pour yourself a sherry and let the alien takeover begin!

The Evil of the Daleks (1969)

D. Gordon Flemyn
Colour


This is the point where ‘Doctor Who’, the TV Programme and the adventures of the cinema character, Doctor Who, who does nothing but battle daleks on the big screen, really do diverge. What was a symbiotic relationship breaks apart and isn’t put back together until late in the next decade. Let’s be fair the signs have been there for some time. On television, The Doctor is now a scruffy man with a Beatle haircut who has the knack for pretending he’s incompetent even before Peter Falk started squinting his way through ‘Columbo’. While on the big screen, Doctor Who (his actual name, making him son of Mr and Mrs Who and the brother no doubt to twin siblings, Elvis Who and Priscilla Who) is still a slightly stand-offish Victorian fogey. One is Patrick Troughton, the other is William Hartnell-eque. Neither of them, to be fair, is the original Doctor.


Of all the Dalek films, this might actually be my favourite – it’s Sherlock Holmes, it’s Hammer Horror, it’s steampunk before steampunk and it’s just so damn weird. We open with Doctor Who arriving in Victorian England with a deerstalker on his head and his granddaughter’s former boyfriend in tow. This is a break with tradition as granddaughter number one, Susan, and  A.N.Other granddaughter were hitherto always present for these trips. Instead now it’s Roy Castle, back again from the first film. Where he’s shown up from is never really explained, he’s just there – tagging along with Doctor Who on his trips through space and time. And in a way that might be a problem for the film, we can accept the character has the unlikely surname Who and travels in hither and thither throughout the universe and all of history – but really, he’d go back and pick up the wet lettuce Roy Castle again? Pleeaaasseee. The two of them are investigating how come 1960s style gadgets are showing up in Victorian London. Look, there’s a record player, there’s a tin opener, there’s a Vespa, there’s a Beatles doll and – more alarmingly – isn’t that man threatening them holding a machine gun? Clearly something is amiss. The two of them track these objects down to Professor Waterford, who has built his own time machine – although one far inferior to Doctor Who’s Tardis. It seems that he is some kind of time meddler, but swiftly his true purpose becomes apparent – he is merely a cog in a plan designed to lure Doctor Who into investigating. And behind that plan is, of course, the daleks.


From that point things just get far madder. There are for some gobbledegook reason, daleks with the ‘human factor’ who Doctor Who, although initially wary, ends up befriending and finally playing with: leading to a montage of shots of Doctor Who dancing an old fashioned jig with some rhythmic pepperpots and Roy Castle playing snakes and ladders against another (although how a dalek rolls the dice or moves the counter is anyone’s guess). Then there’s a trip to the dalek home planet Skaro – for the first time since the original film, and the place has had one full on multi-coloured redesign. It’s 1969 and daleks are clearly as in awe of the psychadelic as everyone else. There the human factor daleks take on pure daleks in one of the most exciting and visually striking battles these films have ever seen. Never elsewhere was Gordon Flemyn as good a director, it’s a gripping lightshow and explosion spectacular. (Truly, science fiction was not this exciting again until George Lucas woke up one morning and said “Hey! I know, a samurai western in space!”) And at the end of it – SPOILER ALERT – Doctor Who’s plans are defeated, he’s stranded without his Tardis (even worse, he’s stranded without his Tardis but with Roy Castle) in one of the most pessimistic endings ever whacked onto a children’s film. The bad guys win, the heroes lose and now the whole universe seems imperilled.


And this is the real break from the TV show. In the television version of this story it’s The Doctor and Jamie who win and the daleks who are defeated. These arch villains of 1960’s British Science Fiction were saying goodbye to the programme that spawned them. Their creator, Terry Nation, was taking his ball away and making sure that the daleks only appeared in films (and hopefully their own TV show, but that never really came off). As such the daleks left the TV version of ‘Doctor Who’, albeit – as things turned out – only for the time being. However in films it’s Doctor Who himself who is leaving and he is left stranded and lost at the end. I like Peter Cushing as an actor, although don’t think that his work in these films is his best. However that expression of sadness and disappointment on his face as he realises how utterly defeated he has been (realises he has been left alone with Roy Castle and his snakes and ladders board – and maybe, and this is a dreadful thought, his fucking trumpet too!) is worth the price of seeing all five films. But even that is blown away and topped by the final shot: a camera moving slowly and menacingly ever closer and closer to the eye-stalk of the Dalek Supreme, as it tells us that the mighty daleks are coming for all of us. Rarely has a piece of talking metal ever been made to look so chilling.


‘The Evil of the Daleks’ looks great, if there’s one thing Elstree could do (as proven by Hammer and here by Amicus) it was Victoriana gothic, the inclusion of modern technology (even of a 1960s kind) in a Victorian setting is surely what steampunk is about, and in the human factor daleks we have another pushing at the envelope of what daleks can do – but one that leads to some spectacular dalek on dalek violence.


It will be a long time before those exterminating pepperpots are anywhere near this good on the big screen again.

The Stainless Steel Rat (1970)

D. Gerry Anderson
Colour


In many ways it should have been the perfect coming together. The first ‘Stainless Steel Rat’ book is great fiction for kids, it moves along at a fine clip, doesn’t aim for too much depth and isn’t concerned about painting the planets it visits in anything other than the broadest strokes. World building and complex plots are not what ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ is about, what it’s about is colourful adventure. Therefore Gerry Anderson must have seemed the ideal choice to film the adaptation. He had after all spent most of the 1960s making uncomplex and undemanding adventure series. If anything he created more depth for the worlds he encountered and so should have been great at filling in the blanks. His metier – as it was seen at this point by the general public and the industry itself – was puppets. And if anything was created to be filmed in Supermarionation, it was ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’.


This feature length pilot for a proposed series should have been a success then. Unfortunately, by 1970, it was becoming increasingly obvious that Gerry Anderson really fucking hated puppets.


It’s odd that the man most associated with Supermarionation, who coined the word even, was the man who became the biggest critic of it. Anderson wanted to work with real actors, he wanted to make films (he was involved in the development of ‘Moonraker’) and felt that puppets were a cul de sac. Unfortunately, as his later ‘UFO’, ‘The Protectors’, ‘Space 1999’ career proved, he wasn’t good at working with live actors. Indeed he had an odd habit of making actual actors give performances reminiscent of puppets. That was all in the future though, at this time he was still the man with the puppets, but the fact he was so desperate not to be the man with the puppets explains why ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ fails so badly.


‘Slippery’ Jim Bolivar diGriz is a rogue, a crook in a world where crime has largely been abolished. He is a high-tech, futuristic gentleman thief, like a Raffles with a ray-gun. We open as he successfully carries out a heist, before moving confidently onto his next crime. Unfortunately the next crime brings him into contact with Inskipp, a thief even more legendary than himself, but one who is now working as an investigator for the state. (Inskipp is a glorious puppet by the way, so squat and rotund and sweaty. It looks as if he’s been left in front of the radiator for a couple of days). He recruits Slippery Jim, much against his will, but soon our stainless steel rat gets the righteous scent of the hunt in his nostrils. He finds himself in pursuit of Angelina, the great femme fatale of the galaxy.


Firstly, the things this adaptation does right. The puppets are excellent, a far improvement on what Anderson had been working with at the start of the decade. One wouldn’t go as far as to say lifelike, as they’re still puppets after all, but these puppets are clearly at the more expressive end of puppet performers. The story is well paced, with the script placing exciting set-piece after exciting set-piece. And it corrects the biggest problem of the book, which is that the relationship between Jim and Angelina is so ill defined. Here Anderson aims for chemistry between his puppets, giving them witty dialogue that makes them sizzle like Bogart and Bacall with strings. Indeed it appears at points as if Anderson doesn’t want to restrain himself to just kisses. No doubt when he watched the sex scene in ‘Team America: World Police’ he saw realised a load of images which had flooded through his mind when making this film.


But where it doesn’t work is that Anderson is clearly straining with all his might against the form he did so much to develop. He clearly fucking hates puppets, and that has bad consequences for this film. Even when it’s puppets in brave new worlds, he still directs it in the most pedestrian way, with none of the verve of his earlier work. As such the exciting set pieces following exciting set pieces are not really that exciting at all.


What’s more, no matter how expressive the puppet, they’re clearly not enough for him anymore. When it comes to one of his characters giving a real serious emotion, then the vague features of a real person are superimposed onto their faces (superimposition on top of supermarionation). No doubt it was supposed to add depth, but it comes across looking weird, spooky even. Here we have a man who is working with puppets and wants to work with actors and so decides to do both, but doing so adds zero of the qualities you generally get from live actors and just ends up making his puppets look even more fake and stranger than before.


Such is his contempt for the materials he’s working with, that the viewer begins to imagine that he might truly shatter the illusion by running onto screen before the final shot and snipping all the strings while cackling manically into the camera. No doubt he was delighted that this wasn’t picked up as series. Even though ‘Slippery’ Jim Bolivar diGriz was a more nuanced and interesting character than Anderson had had before (maybe even the most nuanced and interesting character Anderson ever had) he was still – in this form – a fucking puppet. Underwhelming live action would follow for Anderson now, as for diGriz his wait for a proper film goes on – but I can’t help thinking that his puppet self is staking somewhere out right now.

The Power of the Daleks (1968)

D. Gordon Flemyn
Colour

When we arrange to meet up with a Dalek, what exactly are we getting? Is it an armoured case specifically designed to shelter the mutated remains of a race from the planet Skaro, or is it a killer robot which can be presumably programmed to do other things but kill? And whichever one it is, are we supposed to be scared of them, or are we supposed to find them quite funny too? Although not framed that way by plot or dialogue, ‘The Power of the Daleks’ is a film which struggles to answer both of those questions. It’s a film which has a back and fore with itself, at points thinking that Daleks are truly scary, at others smiling with indulgence at the exploits of these colourful pepper pot scamps. It’s a movie where a family being brutally cut down can sit side by side with Michael Bentine messing about with some test-tubes and nonsense words. It’s a Doctor Who adventure which really should be family entertainment, but would also quite like you to see its dark side – like a drunk elderly uncle at a Christmas party, threatening to show the six year olds his war wounds.

On TV, in the continuing adventures of the alien known as The Doctor, this was the first story of the Patrick Troughton era. A chance to show that even though the leading man had changed, his most hated enemies were still there and that they recognised him. Of course the films are the adventures of Doctor Who, son of Mr and Mrs Who, and grandfather to Susan Who and various other girls with the unlikely surname, Who. He hasn’t altered his face, he hasn’t altered his demeanour, he’s exactly the man he was and given they spent most of the last film hunting him down, it isn’t such a big deal here when the Daleks do recognise him. Except it takes them a little time for them to acknowledge who he is, or indeed who they are.

Here’s the plot. Doctor Who and his two granddaughters Susan (played by the maturing Roberta Tovey and Felicity (played by the impossibly cute Felicity Kendell) arrive on Earth Colony 7. (The planet had no more original name than that). There, to their horror, they find the Daleks. But these Daleks aren’t like the ones we’ve previously seen, no, they’re working as servants and regarded by the humans who greet them as subservient and friendly robots who exist to bring drinks and snacks. All is bliss on Earth Colony 7 and Doctor Who is looked at as mad for claiming that these robots are emotionless killers or “fiends in shiny metallic cloaking” as he at one point memorably calls them. (If I was trying to scare people, and I have done that in my time, I’m not sure that that’s the choice of words I’d go for). Meanwhile the Dalek leader (he’s bigger and shiner than the others) sees Doctor Who’s presence and accelerates their underlying plan.

What follows is one of the most schizophrenic films you’re ever likely to witness. On one hand we have various Daleks sliding out of darkness to kill guards and other people who get in their way. These scenes are shot with full shadowy terror (Flemyng excels himself), an almost black and white creepiness which really emphasises these Daleks as metallic seraphs of death. But elsewhere there’s Michael Bentine as Professor Yakabult, who demonstrates experiments with the aid of his assistant, Doris the Dalek. These scenes are inserted into the film as broadcasts on Earth Colony 7’s TV station, illustrating just how friendly these Daleks are. Bentine and the other characters in the film never interact, instead he goggles at the Dalek with wide eyes, he dances a waltz with it, the two of them sing “Earthling’s Eyes are Gleaming” in horrible tunelessness. It’s clearly designed for the kids, it’s clearly designed as light entertainment. The idea from a plot point of view is to show how inured everybody on Earth Colony 7 has become to the Daleks, how unthreatening they are, but my word it’s excruciating. One can only breathe a sigh of relief when the plot catches up with the horrible twosome and Doris exterminates him.

The plot gets faster and faster and more exciting and exciting, and this is actually – once it settles down and answers its own question – one of the best, scariest and most adrenalin filled entries in the series. The base under siege set-up (even though it’s under siege from the inside) and the running down corridors does make it resemble The Doctor’s exploits on TV, and yet there’s something about this which is its own film. Yes, there are Daleks and they are the true money spinners, but at the centre is the human man and the film is determined in its point that – without any alien help whatsoever – man will always win out against the monsters, no matter how ridiculous they first appear.

Daleks - The Chase through Time (1967)

D. Gordon Flemyng
Colour (of the bright and shiny 60s variety)

Thanks to complex rights issues, apart from the first two of Peter Cushing’s Doctor Who vs Daleks films (big favourites on Sunday afternoon with both BBC2 and Channel 4), the rest are lost in a complex legal process whose paperwork would probably fill up the Tardis. At the moment, Jerry Lewis's 'The Day the Clown Cried' appears more likely to be spat out screaming into the world. That’s a shame as these films form a nice counterpoint to the series, initially following the same lines before heading off in wild and weird directions.

 

‘Daleks – The Chase through Time’ is, like the first two films, based on episodes of the TV show. Indeed Terry Nation seems to have written these episodes with the express intention of turning them into a Peter Cushing film. There’s The Empire State Building! There’s The Marie Celeste! There’s Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster! And making their film debut, there’s Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich! Everything is bigger and far more fantastic than the BBC could realistically conjure up, sadly though Amicus Pictures isn’t up to the spectacle either.

 

Even in glorious Technicolor, Doctor Who (never forget that that is, in these films, his actual title and surname – he is the well studied son of parents with the unlikely name of Mr and Mrs Who) and his companions are clearly not at The Empire State Building. The studio can use as many stock shots of NYC as they like, but they can’t disguise a mock up. Similarly that Marie Celeste they land on is not in the middle of the ocean. In fact the background couldn’t be any more obviously cardboard unless Kenneth Connor fell through it.

 

As for the Universal/Hammer monsters (part of a horror theme park our heroes visit), didn’t Amicus Pictures develop a good reputation for horror? Shouldn’t they know how to do this stuff? So why is Graham Stark’s Dracula so camp and pouty? (Was Liberace really the inspiration?) And why is David Prowse’s Frankenstein’s Monster so powder puff? Why is the Monster pictured at one point having a break, sitting down in a comfy chair and drinking a couple of tea? It’s all very strange; an attempt at comedy which didn’t work on TV and is played much, much, much broader on film – but doesn’t work there either.

 

The highlight of this potpourri of destinations is undoubtedly is Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tith. Doctor Who and his companions find themselves in the band’s house and chill out listening to the futuristically titled ‘Zabadak’ – a song which manages to sound both adventurous and strangely banal. Here the comedy works in a rather sweet fashion, with a lone Dalek scout pushed around and mocked by the band as they play. I’m always impressed that the Dalek, with its pepperpot shape, manages to slalom and bounce around the dance floor in time to the beat. Underneath that metal shell he has a nice sense of rhythm.

 

What’s truly interesting about that sequence, however, is that the producers allegedly bent over backwards in an attempt to get The Beatles to be the musical cameo. A photo does exist online of John Lennon larking around with a dalek, so clearly it must have seemed a possibility. One can only imagine though what magic the Fab Four and the Scary Scaro-ians would have produced if they’d reached their third big screen outing together. The mind boggles at the psychedelic, transcendent explosion of far-out spectacle which would have been unfolded if these uber-colourful Daleks had met The Beatles in their resplendent Sgt Pepper garb.

 

Okay, the plot: having thwarted two of their plans, the Daleks decide to remove Doctor Who with the use of their own time machine. Realising the danger he’s in, Doctor Who runs through time in an attempt to escape them – along with his grand-daughters, Susan and Louise (Roberta Torvey and Jill Curzon, returning from the last film) and stowaway teacher, Graham (Kenneth Connor, moon faced and lovely through most of the running time, but too comic relief to be a love interest to the noticeably younger Curzon).

 

There are a couple of flaws here. Firstly, why don’t the Daleks just arrive at the location five minutes before Doctor Who and eliminate him that way? (But then that flaw in logic is a problem in the TV show as well). Secondly, Doctor Who on screen isn’t the mythical creation The Doctor is on television; in fact he’s just a man. As such the film gives the impression that this advanced race of super aliens has harnessed all their energy, intelligence and will-power to eliminate one bloke. An incredibly bright bloke, yes, but still one bloke. It seems a truly lop-sided battle, not made less so when Doctor Who actually wins. Perhaps, given this film’s success in America, one is tempted to imagine that Hanna-Barbara used it as the inspiration for ‘Stop the Pigeon’.

 

What’s episodic on TV remains episodic on the cinema screen. When plotting cinema domination, Nation clearly thought more in terms of spectacle than plot. But what’s truly interesting is that on the television The Doctor is now Patrick Troughton, but on film it’s still Peter Cushing. And rather than being part of some alien race who can change their faces, it’s made clear more than once that Cushing is human. Even when using the same stories, the lines of deviation between TV and film are hardening.

 

Still the Daleks are bright and shiny, as is The Tardis. Peter Cushing remains a great presence to hang a film around and is really creating his own version of the character. There are some scary and gooey scenes which predate some gooier scenes and scarier films in the offing; but equally in the sequence of the mutant Dalek who is less bright than the rest, we have a little sign of other things to come...