STARRING:
Daphne Ashbrook, Bill Croft, Dolores Drake, D.J. Jackson,
Sylveste McCoy, Paul McGann., Eric Roberts, Gordon Tipple,
Catherine Lough
1996,
85 Minutes, Directed by: Geoffrey Sax
For those who were also raised on
a diet of mostly dreadful American television shows, the good
Doctor is a rather eccentric renegade time traveler dashing
across various planets and time zones somehow getting into
trouble wherever he goes.
His time machine (called the TARDIS) is
actually an old telephone booth (yes, you Yanks - that's where
they got the idea for Bill &
Ted's Excellent Adventure
from) which
is, for reasons better left unexplained, bigger on the inside
than it is on the outside. Then there's the Daleks and the . . .
And there lies the rub. Non-Doctor Who fans might be
confused by events (who the heck is the Master in any case?) but
I'm sure that Who fans will be just as delighted as I was
at meeting up with an old, but not forgotten, friend.
This
is not to say that I don't have any qualms with this Doctor
Who film. At times its inspiration seems to be glitzy
American sci-fi movies such as The
Terminator instead
of the original series. The Doctor and the other characters come
through as rather undeveloped at times.
What made those books so
good was that despite their myriad of plot twists and turns, the
stories were character-driven rather than anything else. These
qualms aside, this made-for-television movie is better than
expected and may even convert some non-fans to the Doctor Who
cause . . .
For those who were also raised on
a diet of mostly dreadful American television shows, the good
Doctor is a rather eccentric renegade time traveler dashing
across various planets and time zones somehow getting into
trouble wherever he goes.