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1966's Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD is another of those weird little movies that somehow got on Turner Classic Movies. One of the many weird things about it is that it's a Doctor Who movie, more or less, starring Peter Cushing as a version of the First Doctor; they hadn't thought of regenerations when it came out. Mostly they'd thought of doing some movies to capitalize on the popularity of Daleks.
Of all the weird things about this, the chopping off all that Doctor Who stuff other than the Daleks has to take the cake. Oh, there's a Doctor, yes, but in the movie this is a sequel to he's established to be a human who just whipped up a time machine that happens to look like a 1960s British police box because oh look there's something else going on. They drop the alien thing because ... I dunno. Was any of the likely audience going to be confused by The Doctor being an alien? It's like making a Star Trek film where Spock turns out to be half-Catalan.
The film opens with a robbery in mid-60s London, where Bernard Cribbins as a police officer gets whacked with his own truncheon, stumbles into the Tardis mistakenly thinking it's a real police box, and gets whisked off to the future because The Doctor saw he fainted at the interior and he couldn't just be left where he was. I realize The Doctor has various levels of common sense and dopiness, but this seems extreme. Also, possibly Cribbins fainted at the view of the Tardis interior, which for a real full-color movie manages looks cheaper, more ramshackle, and less plausible than the corresponding set of the Doctor Who TV series did. Let me make this clear. The movie Tardis set manages to look cheaper, more ramshackle, and less plausible than the corresponding set on the Doctor Who TV series did.
Anyway, they land in 2150, where everything is ruins in London apart from the Sugar Puffs and Del Monte advertisements and the warehouses full of cardboard boxes, where some debris falls all over the Tardis, which could only possibly be cleared if someone were to try. The Doctor, the officer and two female units who hover around The Doctor --- I'm not sure if they're his daughters or granddaughters, in this continuity --- wander off, finding the first of the ``robo-men'', who're dressed in black garbage bags and wander around like the world's biggest Devo tribute band. The robo-men are working at the direction of the Daleks, who have once again conquered Earth and are turning humans into their robo-slaves in order to --- I'm sorry, I have to pause and giggle about this.
The Dalek plan is to mine deep within London --- it's Old School Doctor Who Sort Of, they have to at least make you think of a quarry --- so they can drill to the center of the Earth and set off an explosion that turns the Earth into a spaceship for them. No, seriously. Fortunately, The Doctor figures out a way to apply magnetism, which is what they used in the 1960s before quantum was discovered, to such the Daleks into the core of the Earth and that's the end of the problem. When Star Trek: Voyager is pointing and snickering at your sciencey plan you have a problem.
Anyway, the story is one of contacting the free underground, invading the Dalek spaceship (ably portrayed by a fancy Gilette electric shaver or, in close-up, Newark Airport's Terminal C), being distracted by the lovely contrast of bright iDalek primary colours and pastel dots on the 1966 model Dalek or their swinging tan-and-powdered-egg-blue spaceship interior, and kind of paying attention while waiting for a scene where something happens.
Is it effective? Well, it keeps having moments that work nicely enough, but then you run into slow patches, or the discovery that the Daleks will spontaneously blow up if the humans around them roughhouse too much. Seriously: one gets blown up because it slides down a long ramp. Left unanswered is how they managed to conquer Earth if they can be defeated by the inclined plane. And there's the problem that Peter Cushing, whatever his other talents, just doesn't convey the sense of otherworldliness that makes The Doctor so effective. All right, maybe he's not an alien this time around, but he should at least be that kind of genius who doesn't think the way you or I might-only-faster, he should think different. Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka makes a more believable Doctor.
There's good spots. Cribbin as the police officer is a character of general cluefulness throughout, handling really quite extreme surprises with pretty good sense and daring --- better than The Doctor, really, who ends up stumbling around looking confused much of the story --- despite some physical comedy bits like trying to fit in a squadron of robo-men as they eat, or accidentally turning on the food pill conveyor belt. And the color scheme's surprisingly attractive; London may be destroyed and the Dalek spaceship may be alien, but it's all pretty easy on the eyes. The robo-men uniform even manages to look not absurd for being shiny plastic. And there's a surprisingly low level of histrionics from The Doctor over the existence of the Daleks and all their trouble, though of course my standard here is the Modern Doctor, who hasn't got any modes of Dalek interaction besides hair-pulling tear-shedding outrage that they somehow evaded being completely and utterly destroyed yet again this time just like the last sixty times and this is unimaginably impossible.
But mostly there's this pall of ``we don't really have to try, do we?'' that drags down the whole project. It may be set in a post-apocalyptic London of 2150, but they haven't done a thing to make the clothes, the buildings, the vehicles, the advertisements, or the way anyone acts or talks look like anything but London, Circa 1965, Only Without That Pesky Mod Stuff. The mine even looks to me kind of like Fort Courage, somehow. Toss in Daleks blowing up when a milk truck knocks them over and it's kind of an interesting glimpse into something that's just ... like Doctor Who without the distinctive Doctor Who flavoring. They don't even use its iconic iambic theme.
It's fun yet somehow hollow.
Trivia: In 1613, Amsterdam already had about five inns for every hundred inhabitants. By 1636 there were likely two hundred within the city walls of Haarlem, an area not much larger than Hyde Park. Source: Tulipomania: The Story Of The World's Most Coveted Flower And The Extraordinary Passions It Aroused, Mike Dash.
Currently Reading: The Stochastic Man, Robert Silverberg.
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