DALEKS INVASION EARTH 2150 A.D. (1966)
DIRECTED by Gordon Flemyng.
SCREENPLAY by Milton Subotsky and David Whittaker based on the BBC television serial "The Dalek Invasion Of Earth" by Terry Nation.
STARRING - Peter Cushing as Dr.Who, Bernard Cribbins as Tom Campbell, Ray Brooks as David, Andrew Kier as Wyler, Roberta Tovey as Susan Who, Jill Curzon as Louise Who, Godfrey Quigley as Dortmun, Phillip Madoc as Brockley, David Graham & Peter Hawkins as Dalek voices.
PLOT - Whilst attempting to stop a raid by armed robbers upon a jewellers, P.C. Tom Campbell is struck over the head. Dazed and injured, Tom wanders into a nearby Police Box looking to call for backup. What he finds inside the police box astounds him. For this is no ordinary police box. Tom has stumbled into the time/space ship - Tardis, crewed by the eccentric inventor Dr. Who, his grandaughter Susan and his niece Louise. Tending to Tom's wounds, Dr. Who whisks the policeman into an adventure in time and space.
Arriving in a bombed out, desolate London in the year 2150A.D, Dr. Who is horrified to discover that planet Earth has been invaded and overrun by his old enemies - the Daleks. Aided by thier robotised slaves, The Robomen, the Daleks have ground humanity underfoot. Soon the Doctor and his companions have joined a local resistance group dedicated to overthrowing the Daleks. However, what the valiant freedom fighters don't know is the Daleks are in the process of digging down to the Earth's core with the intention of blowing up the core and turning the hollowed out planet into a gigantic floating battle station with which to conquer the rest of the universe. Can Dr. Who stop these evil plans or is it already too late for the people of Earth ?
Dialogue - Dalek - "SURRENDER NOW AND YOU WILL LIVE. RESIST AND YOU WILL BE EXTERMINATED. SHOW YOURSELVES IN THE STREETS IMMEDIATELY AND OBEY THE ORDERS OF YOUR MASTERS, THE DALEKS !" Dortmun - "Obey motorised dustbins ? We'll see about that !"
PERFORMANCES - Peter Cushing's version of the Doctor grows as a character in this film. He's still a friendly, plucky, eccentric old man like in the first movie, but this time around Cushing has dialled down the eccentricity and comedic bumbling of the original film and given his Doctor a more steely backbone. There is a sense here that Dr. Who is a lot more cunning and calculating than he lets on. That he's grown in confidence since the first film and is now used to staring down alien megalomaniacs and stopping thier dastardly schemes. In short, he has become a lot more like the character as seen on TV, he has developed and grown and Cushing's Doctor is all the better for it.
Ian and Barbara where still the companions in the TV story, yet here they don't appear. They are replaced with two new companions - Tom and Louise. Tom is played by Bernard Cribbins. Tom is a much more traditional male lead hero than Ian was in the first film. As with Cushing's Doctor the silliness of the first film has been stripped down slightly. Cribbins still has a comedy scene where Tom is disguised as a Roboman and has to keep in step with a squad of them with "hilliarious" consequences, but for the rest of the movie he plays it quite straight.
Jill Curzon is Louise, Dr. Who's niece. Louise gets a lot more to do than Barbara did in the first film. Clad in a sort of female Sherlock Holmes outfit she looks almost as eccentric and out of time as Dr. Who himself. She appears to be a much more seasoned and experienced adventurer in time and space and gives off a kind of Emma Peel or Bond girl vibe.
Roberta Tovey is back as Susan and gives the same solid performance as she did in the first film, she's probably the one character and element from Dr. Who and the Daleks that has changed the least and that's fine. If it ain't broke don't try to fix it as they say.
The supporting cast all aquit themselves well. Bernard Quatermass himself, Andrew Kier, plays Wyler. A gruff Scottish freedom fighter with a heart of gold, he takes little Susan under his wing and looks out for her when she is separated from her grandfather and the two go on the run together. I've always liked Kier as an actor, he was the best Quatermass and he was great as Father Sandor, the vampire hunting priest in Dracula: Prince of Darkness. He's good here too playing the grizzled resistance man, making him both tough and likeable at the same time.
Ray Brooks plays another member of the resistance - a young man named David. In the original TV story David pairs up with Susan and the two fall in love. Susan leaves the Doctor and stays behind to marry David at the end of the story. Obviously, with Susan only being a child in this version that couldn't be the case, so in this version David instead teams up with Dr. Who, becoming his defacto sidekick as the two journey to the Dalek's mine in Bedford. It's a workmanlike performance, Brook's character doesn't really do a lot except wave a gun around and punch the occasional Roboman in the face, but he's solid enough in the part.
Philip Madoc does a good turn as Brockley, a ruthless black marketeer exploiting the situation for his own ends. He's a shifty, slimy character and its satisfying when he gets his comeuppance as the Daleks turn on him. He's not in the film for long but he certainly makes an impression and his explosive death scene is great.
SFX - The budget has been ramped up considerably for this sequel. There are a lot more Daleks seen onscreen at any one time than in the first film. The Daleks have also been given something of a makeover. They're much less colourful than they where in Dr. Who and the Daleks, instead the trooper Daleks are a silver colour, only the Dalek high command retain the bright coloured shells of the original movie. These less garish Daleks work well and fit in with this films grittier feel.
There's quite a lot of pyrotechnics in this film. Daleks explode. Vehicles explode. Garden sheds explode. The planet Earth in 2150A.D seems to be a highly combustable place in which to live.
The Daleks retain the fly spray style exterminator guns that they had in the first film, it still works as a pleasantly nasty idea but this film does show up its limitations a bit more. In the first movie, the Thals where throwing rocks and sticks at the Daleks, making it easy for the pepperpots to get up close and personal to carry out an extermination. In this film, the humans are throwing grenades and firing guns at them, so the fly spray gun is shown up as being not very good as a long range weapon. The Daleks really did need lasers here, I'm surprised they managed to conquer Earth in the first place with such craply ineffective weaponry.
We even get to see a Dalek spaceship, it's described as being a flying saucer, but it isn't really...
We also, unfortunately, get to see the strings that are holding the model spaceship up as it flys over London. It doesn't ruin the film but it does momentarily take you out of it.
SEX & VIOLENCE - Daleks Invasion Earth 2150A.D is a much more action packed and violent film than Dr. Who and the Daleks. We get more exterminations and explosions and we see Robomen get shot with actual guns. There are quite a few close ups of dead Robomen and human resistance fighters, piles of them in one case. Theres no blood or gore of course, but the film does have a surprisingly high body count for something that was marketed as a kids movie.
RATING - As you can probably guess, this film is a lot grittier and darker than the first movie, its nearly as grim as the original TV version. Gone are the bright alien landscapes of Dr. Who and the Daleks to be replaced by a bombed out, run down London. For older members of the audience, World War 2 and the horrors of the London blitz where still within living memory, so this setting must have made some people feel very uneasy. Gone also are the effete, campy, pacifist Thals, replaced with desparate, gun weilding humans fighting a guerilla war. Whilst every supporting character in the first movie (bar the Daleks) was friendly and trustworthy, here you get human beings selling each other out, even profiting from the misery of others. Overall a much darker and cynical picture of humanity is painted.
I think this darker tone works, but I do think it harmed the films performance at the box office. It was fairly well reviewed at the time but there just weren't as many bums on seats this time round and the film tanked at the box office. The planned third film was dropped as a result. Maybe Dalekmania was waning, or maybe word of mouth got round and people weren't ready to see a Dr. Who film that was concerned with more adult themes. It's a shame as this is a great little film. Well paced, well acted and much more epic in scope than the first film.
Overall - 4 psychotic pepperpots out of 5.
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