malmborgimplano-92-599820 I haven't seen any DW episodes from the pre-Tom Baker era so I can't compare this film to its contemporary TV episodes, but I've seen a lot of SF films from this era and this is pretty standard product. I notice that it was made by the same team of Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg that made the Amicus horror anthologies in the 1970s, which I love, and compared to even those low-budget films this is super low budget and unsophisticated, but it does have the same earmarks of comparative good taste, especially in visual presentation (the use of Technicolor is outstanding) and casting. Jennie Linden and Roberta Tovey are both high-ranking companions.Peter Cushing's Doctor (who's given a somewhat different backstory than the Doctor in the TV series--he's apparently human, and the creator of the Tardis) is kind of underwritten and he plays him in the manner of one of Boris Karloff's kindly old mad doctors. With his white brushed-back mane of hair, velveteen jacket and checked trousers there's a visual similarity between him and Peter Capaldi's Twelfth Doctor. A baton has clearly been passed.

fedor8 A colourful piece of 60s sci-fi nonsense for the kiddies. For 60s kiddies, mind you. I'm not quite sure how the 21st-century kiddies would react to this. Unless they're younger than 7 (or a bit on the daft side) they might find it all a little too goofy and dull.Granpa, a small girl with an IQ of 249, a comic-relief oaf, and his blond gal accidentally leave Earth in Cushing's time/space-travel "room", when the blond sexually assaults her boyfriend with an attempted hug and kiss. The four cartoon characters suddenly find themselves in the midst of an age-old conflict between some tin-cans and a tribe of very lazy blond people who do nothing all day but sit around their forest, staring into trees and putting on bad make-up. It is up to the 4 silly Earthlings to restore peace to this strange cardboard planet. After all, isn't that what Earthlings are well-known for, restoring peace everywhere they go? The Daleks aren't even proper robots. Sure, they speak in a slow, almost retarded monotone, and they move slowly (on wheels?), but inside each tin-can there is a small Dalek whom we (conveniently for the budget-restrained special-effects department) never get to see. Not that I was dying from curiosity to find out what they look like, mind you. The Daleks are given voices that are so over-the-top annoying that I had to mute the sound on occasion when they were talking, I simply couldn't bare to listen to them anymore. The movie's biggest crime.Cushing & co visit the Dalek city upon their arrival, and then they go back to their "room" in the forest. Then they return to the city, get captured, then manage to escape back to the forest, only to get re-captured. Yes, it's that kind of cheesy sci-fi with the usual table-tennis plot that goes nowhere. The Earthlings are basically like four ping-pong balls that move between the Daleks and the Thaals, between the city and the woods. Yes, the Thaals. Their name has a double A in it and they're all extremely blond. Dutch? Who knows.Funny creatures, the Thaals. They start off as a bunch of placid, apathetic, cowardly Gandhinistas, refusing to fight or kill anything or anybody in the name of pacifism, even finding excuses to not defend themselves against a bunch of decidedly anti-Thaalian quasi-robots. Cushing keeps trying to change their minds, to make them appreciate all the joys which armed conflict brings with it, but they simply won't budge. Yet all it took, in the end, was for one punch to be thrown by a Thaal, and these formerly inactive lazy hippies rapidly become a bloodthirsty fighting army, ready to destroy as many Daleks as they could. They suddenly understood: violence can be a lot of fun.Yes, it's that kind of 60s movie. To top it all off, we are even forced to watch a protracted climbing sequence. I mean, what would a goofy 60s sci-fi film be without some mountain-climbing-related padding?

DigitalRevenantX7 PLOT OUTLINE: While demonstrating his latest invention, a time machine, to his granddaughter's boyfriend, Dr. Who accidentally activates the machine, causing them to teleport to a distant planet where they battle radiation sickness & the Daleks.This is the first of two feature films to have been made from the groundbreaking classic TV series DOCTOR WHO. The show, originally designed to teach Britain's young audiences about history, morphed into some kind of space opera, with its main cast travelling across time & space, encountering numerous aliens & monsters & defending Earth from countless evil schemes & invasions. There have been comparisons with the series STAR TREK, but what sets them apart is the fact that while Star Trek, while bigger-budgeted than Doctor Who, was nothing more than lightweight sci-fi that was a bit low on ideas (all it did was visit a new civilisation each week & change it so they turn out like Earth), Doctor Who was an incredibly sophisticated science fiction series that had some truly mind-blowing concepts (the TARDIS, an alien spaceship / time machine that could take on any form, but ultimately ending up looking like a police telephone booth, is without doubt the most iconic time-travel machine ever) & having some memorable creatures.Which brings us to the Daleks. Appearing in the show's second adventure, a seven-part serial written by Terry Nation, the Daleks were a race of mutants that live inside tank-like cyborg bodies & whose nefarious schemes involve taking over every planet in the galaxy (or at least they did from their second appearance onwards). Here, Nation uses the alien race as a metaphor for the Nazis, with the peaceful Thals a stand-in for the Jews (the Thals don't make any return appearances for the rest of the series, except for the prequel adventure Genesis of the Daleks in the early 1970s).While the original adventure was a low-budget masterpiece, Dr Who and the Daleks is nothing more than a dumbed-down sci-fi flick that has wasted a novel concept & turned it into a lightweight children's film (to be fair, the show itself was aimed at children but it also catered for the adults), with Nation's script re-written so that the anti-war paranoia that the story had was removed & replaced with a militant pro-war stance. As a result, the film negates any cleverness that the original story had.That said, the film, while not as good as the original story, does work somewhat as a kid's film. The production values are top-notch but ultimately lapse into being pointlessly flashy – the show had values that would make Ed Wood blush but compensated by having a script that was very intelligent – here the film is reduced to resembling one of Irwin Allen's TV shows (for the uninitiated, Irwin Allen was a producer who made shows that claimed to be sci-fi but which were so lacking in basic science that they ended up insulting the viewer – LOST IN SPACE was one example). Even with this in mind, the film does manage to entertain, with the Daleks looking fearsome, moving around their (poorly designed) metal city & squawking "EXTERMINATE" while firing lethal smoke at their victims.The acting is very mixed. Peter Cushing, who has made a career out of playing gentlemen scientists, is right at home here playing the titular hero (which has been changed from an alien exile to a human scientist). He makes a valiant effort to give life to the role but ultimately loses due to Subotsky's poorly written script. On the other side of the coin is Roy Castle, who is a real pain to watch – his clowning skills might make children laugh but it proves to be so irritating that his performance really drags the film down the gurgler. The supporting cast, most notably young Roberta Tovey, is passable.

c_rys Yo, this movie's title: the main character in Doctor Who is named The Doctor. The shark in Jaws is not named Jaws; the main character of Die Hard is not named Die Hard. So, this film joins the ignoble ranks of Krakatoa, East of Java, &...no, wait, that's the only other one I can think of...as a film to make a goof right there in its title. This should be a clear warning flag to fans of the show regarding how much respect the material is afforded: Peter Cushing plays this "Dr. Who" as some sort of kindly old professor, & apparently, this film also believes he's human, not Time Lord. The entirely unmenacing Daleks have been downgraded from hate-driven killing machines to something more reminiscent of inept Bond villains, constantly trying to capture - not kill - "Dr. Who", occasionally puffing some sort of gas that does nothing & colliding with each other. In spite of all that, though, there is some sort of enjoyable Hammer alchemy going on here. Pretend that it's just some SF film with nothing to do with the Doctor Who series, & it's a mildly diverting ninety minutes. That's really the best course of action in watching this.