Dr Who And The Daleks (1965) and Daleks Invasion Earth 2150AD (1966) Blu-ray reviews

• 27th May 2013

I love Doctor Who; especially the old ones. It’s probably the nerdiest thing I am into. Therefore, I jumped at the opportunity to review these two films. I remember going to see these big screen adaptations at the ABC Cinema in York as a boy bringing the Daleks to life in spectacular fashion. The new re-releases have now been restored and released on DVD and on Blu-ray for the first time. The colour on both films is brought out in all their pre-psychedelic hues, especially in the first film. Dr Who and the Daleks was released when Doctor Who as a popular TV show was just two years old in 1965 (the first episode was delayed by a week following the assassination of President Kennedy) and had been transmitted of course in black and white. So to see them in colour would have been a big thing for fans at the time. The films were made by Amicus Productions, better known for their portmanteau horror films often starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing but in this film curiously they went under the production company name of Aaru; never the less they were produced by the American ex-pat Amicus producers Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky. Cushing was offered the part of the time travelling Time Lord in both films but he played the role completely differently to TV’s first Doctor Who. On BBC TV the Doctor was played by William Hartnell (this was before the Doctor went through different ‘incarnations’) who played the part as a cantankerous old eccentric scientist who travelled with his niece and other young companions. Both Subotsky and Rosenberg wanted to make films of a fantasy nature and take out much of the blood out horror films so synonymous with Hammer films. For example the titles of the Amicus films were often more gratuitous than the films themselves (Dr Terror’s House of Horrors and Torture Garden etc.). They did the same with Doctor Who. In many ways Doctor Who was more terrifying in the early days than it later became and this was watered down for the big screen releases deliberately by the films producers. Indeed it is unfortunate that Cushing plays Doctor Who as a sweet old man of the Clive Dunn variety rather than the fussy cranky old man familiar with fans at the time with William Hartnell. The film is deliberately targeted at a family audience including Roberta Tovey as the Doctor’s young niece, Susan.

Dr Who and the Daleks starts in the home of the Doctor and his niece when two of Susan’s teachers (played by Jennie Linden and Roy Castle) turn up because of the precocious girl. Before long Ian (Castle) leans on a lever inside TARDIS, the Doctor’s time machine and the pair end up on a post-nuclear planet called Skaro. Before long they stumble upon a seemingly deserted city and a group of peaceful blonde haired people called Thals. They tell the travelers of a nuclear war between the Thals and the Daleks the latter winding up as malevolent mutants living in metal casing in the city. In a bid to win the Thals their freedom they all find the Daleks are war raging loons. Needless to say that good prevails in the end.

In the second film, Daleks Invasion Earth 2150AD the studio gave a larger budget to work with (and Cushing said he would return if he could co-star with Tovey again). This time Tovey and Cushing are joined by Jill Curzon as the assistant and Bernard Cribbins as a policeman who mistakenly finds himself joining the crew and ending up almost 200 years in the future with Daleks having now enslaved the human race into living zombies and destroyed the planet in the meantime. The Doctor and his companions help a handful of resistance fighters in attempting to stop the Daleks.

Both films have a mixture of the charm of low budget British science fiction films as well as some poor spfx but there is something innately charming about the pair. But in places the film does suffer from poor writing and poorer effects. I do think both films would have fared better if there was more of a frisson of fear and Cushing played his part differently. (Don’t get me wrong Cushing is an actor I love but here I think he could have used a little more imagination with the character.) Both films stuck to Terry Nation’s original TV characters and the original source stories and it is a shame that no further feature length Doctor Who films which stick to the original ideas were released; a Cyberman one would have been good. Of course there is a kitsch quality to both these films and there was also a great deal of marketing with shops selling toy Daleks with the release of both these films. To demonstrate this further, the most notable extra on one of the discs is the ‘Dalekmania’ documentary which had originally been released on the 2006 Optimum release of the pair of films. It is a humorous and enjoyable hour long documentary that is sadly bereft (I’m sure due to copyright reasons) of clips or even much mention of the even more popular TV incarnations of the stories but includes many interviews with Doctor Who nerds and their memorabilia. There are also restoration documentaries and interviews with among others Bernard Cribbins as well as other personnel. The colours come out really well in the first film and pains were made to present the films in the original Techniscope format but overall both films can be a little grainy; yet it’s like getting in your very own TARDIS to see the films as they were originally intended.

Chris Hick