Dr. Who - season 14

Dr. Who: Season 14

1976

 

The Mask of Mandragora

Director ~ Rodney Bennett

Writer ~ Louis Marks

 

15th century San Martino by way of Portmeirion.

 

A somewhat Gothic TARDIS control room introduced. Men in robes trying to summon forces they barely know for an attempted power-grab in subterranean shrines continues the Gothic feel.

 

The Doctor versus a sparkler effect.

 

Elisabeth Sladen’s slightly tongue-in-cheek and knowing performance does much to keep things on the keel of entertainment, despite regularly being relegated to Damssel In Distress.

 

Although the mash-up of genres and tropes is what ‘Dr. Who’ excels at – TV-style  historical recreation, Gothic horror, science-fiction – this one is a little average. The ending is also both underwhelming and alarming: the Doctor does a little play-acting and leads the worshipers to fry themselves.

 

The Hand of Fear

Director ~ Lennie Mayne

Writers ~ Bob Baker & Dave Martin

 

The one with the creeping hand. And it doesn't top that moment.

 

How can they tell the difference between a quarry and an alien planet (a nice in-joke)?

 

Episode two is mostly filler (must make most of that nuclear plant or whatever: let's run around!). Episode three ends on a quite unexpected cliffhanger, as far as these things go.

 

Eldrad is a villain with some substance, Judith Paris conveying the confusion, until reincarnated as Stephen Thorne who just thunders around in pantomime mode.

 

And it's true that this season already has a lot of mind-control and possession of Sarah-Jane, so it's no wonder she left with a rather nice end note.

 

Enjoyable enough if perhaps not reaching its potential.

 

 

The Deadly Assassin

Director ~ David Maloney

Writer ~ Robert Holmes

 

The one with the truly nightmarish manifestation of The Master.

 

Tom Baker gleefully mugging "I don't need a companion!" at the camera.

 

The other Time Lords revealed as Elitest snobs and doddery old men. Holmes’ script deepens and sets the Time Lord mythos in motion.

 

A whole episode of that particular Seventies style "In A Nightmare!!" scenario (bombed in a quarry! stumbling through faux-jungle! pursued by semi-faceless hunter! almost crushed by a ... miniature train?). There is something appealingly dated about this – ‘Sapphire and Steel’ mastered the form and feeling.

 

The train makes for one of the most wet blanket of cliffhangers whereas the Doctor being drowned is the one that set apparently Mary Whitehouse all fiery and out to destroy Dr Who (and arguably, with some success: opinions on a postcard).

 

And The Master shrinking his victims always seemed uniquely horrible to me.

 

 

The Face Of Evil

Director – Pennant Roberts

Writer – Chris Boucher

 

The one with Mount Doctor Baker.

 

Hello Leela. One for the dads. Maybe, and even if Baker didn’t like her character (probably thought he didn’t need a sidekick - and didn’t I read he even suggested a cabbage as a companion?) she actually complements him well, however unlikely this may seem. Louise Jameson’s plays dead straight and resourceful rather than just savage-and-stupid.

 

Is Leela the only woman in the tribe…?

 

There’s substance to what looks like a dodgy tribe enactment being that way for good pulpy sci-fi reasons as there is to The Doctor realising his do-gooding has consequences that might lead to invisible monsters resembling a nod to ‘Forbidden Planet’. This and a computer driven mad by The Doctor’s input, forcing him to confront his hubris a little fun.

 

Some decent facing-off-in-a-corridor work.

 

The Doctor screaming at himself is quite memorable.

 

The Robots of Death

Director ~ Michael E. Briant

Writer ~ Chris Boucher

 

Special effects by toys and some superior corridors. And there’s no avoiding that, even as Seventies kids, we all knew those red eyes were made with bicycle reflectors. But these are typical shortcomings for old ‘Who’ and doesn’t distract at how memorable and great the robot designs are.

 

The robot designs hint at pretences of elegance and plushness, but it is of course an early warning against AI and the influence of Asimov’s Law of Robotics always lurks in the background of such things. Certainly, the robot’s uncanny valley unnerved me as a boy.

 

There is also a little social commentary, the kind that vintage ‘Dr. Who’ has always been good at, has always had in its DNA: the managerial crew of the mining ship are just barely useful layabouts, letting the robots do the work. There’s some nice set design by Kenneth Sharp that makes the ship resemble a plush hotel rather than a workspace.

 

 

Talons of Weng-Chiang

Director ~ David Mahoney

Writer ~ Robert Holmes

 

For me, Dr Who at its zenith. The mash-up of all that Victorian pulp creates a delightful concoction: vaudeville, Sherlock Holmes, Fu-Manchu, opium dens, Jack the Ripper, Eliza Doolittle, even a little Phantom of the Opera are all namechecked. The giant rat is an unfortunately lacking effect (best to turn on the new effects option) but Mr Sin remains creepy and arguably even additionally disgusting when we know its origin.

 

Of course, much of this is undone by use of yellowface for John Bennet as Li H'sen Chang. Even so, Bennet gives Chang and almost regal dignity with a great, deluded but sympathetic send-off. And there’s a flicker of knowingness when Chang makes the retort that “I understand we all the look the same.” But there’s no getting past the yellowface and of-the-period racism, or references to “midgets”, even if it feels of-a-piece to penny dreadfuls and the Yellow Peril.

 

But Robert Homes packs it full of great dialogue for everyone, for a six-parter there’s no real padding and just when you think you have it pegged, there’s the introduction of a great Jago and Lightfoot duo. Plenty of horrible detail alluded to, assassins in laundry baskets, a bad guy defeated just by pulling out the battery…

This has always been a favourite since I was a kid, and even with its disqualifying ingredient – which isn’t even incidental – there’s so much to enjoy. A quintessential Dr. Who romp. And Mr. Sin is still unnerving. 

Late Night With The Devil

Late Night with The Devil

Writers and Directors ~ Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes

2023, Australia - United Arab Emirates

Stars ~ David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon, Ian Bliss

 

With this kind of horror premise, there’s only one likely way it will go. And it does, so it is the journey and the execution that counts. Instead of the trending Eighties homage, Cameron and Colin Cairnes go to the Seventies for an era of talk show TV and Satanism. There’s plenty of Seventies aesthetic but played straight instead of kitsch; although it becomes evident quickly that the live and “backstage footage” doesn’t hold up, being too evidently clear and edited for maximum effect to be convincing. And then there’s the disappointment/outrage at AI usage for the transition cards, which at the very least seems lazy. Long before the denouement, the film has jettisoned and kind of “found footage” credulity pinned by the opening narration (Michael Ironside!) summarising a tumultuous decade and the never-quite-making-it career of our central show host. It becomes apparent that any demand for sincerity or continuity as found footage is shrugged off whenever it needs to, even before and especially when we get to the worms. ‘Ghostwatch’ it isn’t. It sets up and then breaks its own rules. If you can’t make allowances for such shrugs, enjoyment will be crimped.

 

 

But what it does have is pleasureable period detail, a little satire on backstage melodrama and fame,‘The Exorcist’ and theremin gags and, mostly, David Dastmalchian. Dastmalchian manages to convey subtlety in a role that could have been just showboating and/or obnoxious in a context where he is always on show. When someone says he’s a good guy, it’s easy to believe that he is misguided rather than egotistic. Everyone projects layers of real characters underneath the televised veneer, even hammy clairvoyant Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), for a broad-strokes producer, Josh Quong Tart (Leo Fiskewhen); and we get to the apparently possessed girl, Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), she’s obviously doing the Creepy Kid thing from the outset, talking like someone half her age, that there is nowhere for her to go. It all escalates into a few shocks and reality breakdown which jettison once and for all the TV format pretence.

 

It's true that this has mostly been heavily guided by gripes about internal logic, but with ‘100 Bloody Acres’, the Cairnes brothers made it clear they are out to offer fun and extremity in equal measure, and there’s plenty in ‘Late Night with the Devil’ so that any shortcomings don’t stop the enjoyment. They know how to serve up a most entertaining horror concoction.

 

 

 

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

Director ~ David Lynch

Writers ~ David Lynch, Robert Engels, Mark Frost

1992, France-USA

Stars ~ Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Mädchen Amick

Begins with Lynch’s imitable humorous non sequiturs and eccentricities and notable cast/cameos (Isaak! Bowie! Sutherland!) with only the discordance of Badalamenti’s score to hint at what’s to come. Then, when this set-up is over, the twang of Badalamenti’s iconic theme tune kicks in and triggers a rush of instantaneous bliss for Twin Peaks fans as that beguiling Americana suburban rock’n’roll-retro-fantasia kicks in. This being a film (yes yes, it starts with the declarative destruction of a television set), there’s extra gore and the nastiness is less oblique as Laura Palmer mood-swings and spirals her way down to the inevitable. On the way, several series regulars stop by to make appearances and there’s a pitstop to a sublime Julee Cruise number. For all the dream-like and nightmarish textures, there’s always the sense that we’re only a thin layer away from the worst, from ugly neo-realism. Even the unknowable motivations, enigmas and violence of this ugliness is dressed up in the otherworldliness of the red room. Or, as Michael Wilmigton called it: "horror kitsch".

Widely critically panned at the time of release, actually it always seemed within Lynch’s spectrum. Perhaps people were expecting his more comedic, goofy side after ‘Wild at Heart’ (which I consider Lynch’s comedy), but its tone was no surprise if you were familiar with his earlier works. And for all its eccentricities, which had served him well for the series, ‘Twin Peaks’ was always about the ripple effect the murder of Laura Palmer had on the whole community and focus on her story is not a nice one which goofiness would serve well. Rather, having enticed the audience in with oddball humour, it descends into in increasingly claustrophobic nightmarishness with little reprieve. As befits the tale of a murdered girl. Lynch took the opportunity in film to show what could only been alluded to in the show ~ drugs, breasts, blood, general smalltown degeneracy.

Lynch’s insistence that dreaminess and nightmarish are interchangeable, or at least divided by a wafer-thin membrane of dissonance, is integral to his particularly unique grasp of tone. Lynch has always conveyed bleakness through this dreaminess, with the uncanny and the supernatural the only way to articulate the nightmarish forces against you and within you. Or at least to represent the cognitive dissonance plaguing the characters such as Laura Palmer. Lynch’s projection of this liminal space through both a fetishisation-homage of the mythology of an American Rock’n’Roll era and a modern horror sensibility creates something singularly appealing and disturbing. ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’ certainly shed the more superfluous Lynch fans as he headed into increasingly nightmarish supernatural cryptograms, ‘Straight Story’ excepted, and finally landed in the near-impenetrable ‘Inland Empire’.

Sheryl Lee gives a great performance, veering from wholesome to off-the-rails to traumatised as demanded by the troubled Laura Palmer. While Moira Kelly makes for a rather unmemorable Donna Hayward, it is Ray Wise that is never to be forgotten, following Willem Defo and Dennis Hopper as another Lynchian almost cartoonish portrayal of violent, unhinged, toxic masculinity. And just a glimpse of Bob clutching a chest of drawers remains an indelibly unnerving ‘Twin Peaks’ tableau.

 

 

‘Twin Peaks’ surely holds the unique position in TV history as even the dream sequences in ‘The Sopranos’ seemed permitted by Lynch’s wilful weirdness and play with the repressed. For a while after the initial series, everyone tried to be “weird” and “eccentric” (my favourite is ‘Eerie, Indiana’), but arguably it was only when the freedoms of the initial streaming age occurred that the legacy of ‘Twin Peaks’, which showed just a little loosening of the tie was popular, would reach full fruition. We have a lot to thank Lynch and Mark Frost for, even as ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ can be seen as Lynch reiterating his more oblique agenda.

And, of course, we now know there was more to come.