DVD Review: The Smurfs – The Smurfic Games and Other Favourite Sporting Episodes / Cert: U / Director: Various / Screenplay: Various / Starring: Michael Bell, Lucille Blis, William Callaway / Release Date: July 2nd

There’s a movie Harold Ramis made in the mid-nineties called Multiplicity. In it, Michael Keaton clones himself so he can get all of his chores done in reasonable time. Despite them all being exact clones of himself, the Michael Keatons have different personalities and speech patterns. The Smurfs remind me a lot of Multiplicity. In the first episode of this collection, one of the Smurfs says that every Smurf is different. Except that they all look the same (not in a racist way, alright – they literally all look alike).

Like Michael Keaton, each Smurf is distinguished by its character traits. In this case (and like Snow White’s Seven Dwarves) they’re named for those character traits or functions too. There’s Papa Smurf (boss of the Smurfs), Lazy, Grouchy and so on. Then there’s Smurfette, who serves no other function than being ‘the female one’. Given the lack of females against the overwhelming amount of male Smurfs, it’s best not to question too much the sexual politics (or mechanics) of Smurftown.

Nor should one question too much why a grown man – a scholar and a wizard, no less – is so obsessed with destroying the species. Not that I don’t sympathise: seeing his constant terrorisation at the hands of the little blue creatures, Gargamel emerges as the only sympathetic character in the series. There’s a scene where he’s going about his business in the forest when he is suddenly attacked by Smurfs, who have now invented cars. In another, Gargamel is beckoned to a dying relative’s bedside only to be told what a horrible person he is and how his inheritance (a powerful magic medallion) is to be given to Papa Smurf. Little wonder Gargamel is full of resentment.

The Smurfic Games is a collection of seven sport and competition themed Smurfs episodes, no doubt to cash in on 2011’s movie adaptation and, of course, our forthcoming Olympics. After narrowly escaping capture by Gargamel’s cat, Azrael, Papa Smurf determines that his people are unfit and in need of exercise. Because the Smurfs are too stubborn to exercise for the sake of their own survival, they’re tricked into doing so with the introduction of The Smurfic Games. Meanwhile, Gargamel manages to get his hands on The Medallion of Poseidon, which he uses to magically set things aflame and cause a series of devastating earthquakes. It’s no spoiler to say that Gargamel is foiled and things eventually return to the status quo for the Smurfs, ready to cause some manner of mischief another day. Indeed – there are six other sporty episodes in which the little blue chaps partake in a little driving, mud wrestling, golfing, camping, mountain climbing and karate, amongst other colourful jollities. “You won’t find tales of stadiums going over budget, steroid abuse or Smurfette weeing on the side of the road,” reads the promotional material. That’s a shame, but the episodes are fun nevertheless. We wouldn’t recommend watching all seven episodes in one go though – even if you’ve got a real sweet tooth, there’s a lot of sugar packed into this 100 minutes.

Granted, we’re probably not the intended audience, but The Smurfs is difficult to dislike. The animation is delightfully colourful, the stories don’t outstay their welcome and there will be a high nostalgia factor for those who grew up watching the little blue Belgians. Whether it will appeal to the cynical kids of today remains to be seen, but The Smurfic Games is a lot of fun. It’s… well, it’s Smurfy.

Special Features: None

DVD Review: Blubberella / Cert: 15 / Director: Uwe Boll / Screenplay: Uwe Boll, Lindsay Hollister / Starring: Lindsay Hollister, Brended Fletcher, Michael Pare / Release Date: Out Now

At least with an Uwe Boll film, you pretty much know what you’re getting into.

Love him or hate him, he’s always laughing his way to the bank.

In his latest DVD release, Blubberella, is a silly parody of Bloodrayne 3: The Third Reich filmed simultaneously with the exact same cast and crew. Boll throws in everything including the kitchen sink making sure to offend everyone.

Actress Lindsay Hollister does a good job playing the whiney, 800 year old, bisexual, female vampire, Nazi fighter, doughy superhero aptly named, Blubberella. Doughy superhero in a sense that she could not only eclipse the sun, but blot it out.

Forget about time period continuity. There is none. The majority of the film takes place in the 1940s, yet Blubberella has all the amenities of the 21st Century such as a cell phone, Internet, laptop and a Segway she carts around on.

There doesn’t appear to even be a script as most of the dialogue sounds ad-libbed.

Boll regulars Brendan Fletcher (the sexually ambiguous Freedom Fighter), Michael Pare (the Commandant) and Clint Howard (the mentally unbalanced Dr. Mangler) chew up the scenery in some funny moments worth a chuckle such as Pare and Howard discussing the Commandant’s past trichinosis problem or the parody from the film, Precious, that deals with Blubberella and her mother in blackface.

Boll, a former boxer, spares no expense taking jabs at Dancing With the Stars, Elvis, Corey Haim, Michael Jackson and Lindsay Lohan, but the cream of the crop is Boll himself portraying Adolph Hitler accompanied by a Samuel Jackson rhetoric spouting soldier from the Africa Korps in blackface playing a conquer the world board game with Blubberella when a certain Colonel Von Stauffenberg shows up unannounced with a satchel under his good arm.

Vampires, Nazis, drifting accents, sword fights, food fights, zombies, explosions, blackface characters, death by fried chicken flatulence, sex jokes, ethnic jokes, a man in a fish costume, a gay resistance fighter, hot scantily clad ladies and one fat chick. Throw it in a blender and what do you have? One strange-ol’ movie.

Special Features: None

DVD Review: Tales from the Darkside / Cert: 15 / Director: Various / Screenplay: Various / Starring: Catherine Battistone, John Marzilli, Karen Shallo,  / Release Date: June 4th

Clocking up four seasons in the 1980s, Tales from the Darkside evolved out of George A. Romero’s portmanteau movie, Creepshow, and mixed adaptations of short stories by well-known genre authors with original teleplays by various hands and occasional contributions from Romero himself. Inevitably, the result was something of a lucky dip, but then that sense of you-never-know-what-you’re-going-to-get was part-and-parcel of the show’s charm.

Season three, now available on DVD, runs true to this form. With many a nod to the EC comics which were their inspiration, most of the stories are cautionary tales with a (then) up-to-date setting. The hapless butts (and in the weaker tales they really do go like lambs to slaughter) tend to be grasping salesmen, gloopy with sweat, admen who buy their own lies, sharp-suited real estate developers and the like. A general theme is the greed and tawdriness of Reagan’s America (which comes across as all the more tawdry in retrospect due to the show’s bright, cheesy sets and some appalling blow-dried hairdos).

Yet, despite such juicy targets, Tales from the Darkside seems unwilling to take itself seriously. Angels and demons, heaven and hell crop up routinely, but always with a feeling of pantomime. In the funny and engaging Deliver Us From Goodness, an exemplary Southern housewife suddenly discovers she’s become a saint, and sets about methodically breaking the Ten Commandments in order to restore normality. Let The Games Begin very effectively combines pantomime with a strain of grotesquery – a man (Home Improvement regular Earl Hindman, here giving one of the performances of the season) drops dead in the Anthony and Cleopatra suite at the Pocahontas Inn and the race is on to claim his shop-soiled soul.

Black comedy also plays a part in two of this season’s more eccentric tales. Auld Acquaintances concerns a pair of witches shackled together across the centuries, despite their intense mutual loathing, by the power of a talisman – it’s eruditely written by Edithe Swensen and features a snarling turn from Sally Gracie as a most uncouth hag. Black Widows is a slice of Southern Gothic from celebrated cult author Michael McDowell. A girl shocks herself by unexpectedly devouring her husband on her wedding night (she moans to her trailer-trash mother, “I feel like I’ve eaten a horse!”) and has to be hastily inducted into a terrible family secret.

This boxset also delivers two absolute gems. In The Geezenstacks (based on a short story by Fredric Brown,) little Audrey is given a doll house, only for the dolls inside to begin acting out the darker impulses lurking behind her parents’ apparent domestic bliss. Craig Wasson (Ghost Story) is very endearing as the exasperated father, and director Bill Travis choreographs the uncanny goings-on to perfection.

Best of all, though, is Miss May Dusa. On the New York City subway, a saxophonist and a figure from ancient myth have a rambling late-night conversation. Hip, touching, poetical, intelligent, witty and full of unexpected resonances, it’s the kind of thing you would imagine Neil Gaiman penning for the show. In fact, it was written and directed by the mysterious but numinous Richard Blackburn, who co-scripted Eating Raoul and helmed the cult movie Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural. As every horror fan knows, it’s amazing what can turn up in a lucky dip.

DVD Review: Sherlock Holmes – A Game of Shadows / Cert: 12A / Director: Guy Ritchie / Screenplay: Michele Mulroney, Kieran Mulroney / Starring: Robert Downey Jr, Jude Law, Noomi Rapace, Rachel McAdams, Jared Harris, Stephen Fry / Release Date: Out Now

With the plethora of Sherlock Holmes adventures (including classic film versions and not so classic television interpretations) currently doing the rounds, anything new to this market has really got to add something sharp to the myth in order to pique your interest.  Unfortunately Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, the latest adventure from director Guy (ex-Mr Madonna) Ritchie to feature the Victorian super sleuth, though undeniably slick and fun, just doesn’t have that special something to make it stand out.

The basic plot-line follows Holmes (Robert Downey Jr) as he yet again faces his old nemesis Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris), who has the usual megalomaniac plans for world domination. When his trusted friend Dr Watson (Jude Law) decides to get hitched to his sweetheart Mary (Kelly Reilly), Holmes is left to tackle the mad professor alone. However, after Moriarty threatens Watson and his new bride, the doctor has no choice but to pitch in with his old friend in order to stop Moriarty from carrying out his devious endeavours.

Like fans of all fictional detectives, those of Conan Doyle’s perennial creation will have their own favourites. But whether it be the playfully sardonic Peter Cushing in Hammer’s masterpiece The Hound of the Baskervilles, or the dryly witty Vasili Livanov in the superlative Russian takes by legendary director Igor Maslennikov, it is an overriding air of seriousness which generally makes for the most successful Holmes films.

Ritchie however is never a director to go with the flow, and as a result prefers a lighter approach which, despite an undeniable edginess, ultimately fails through its sheer unbelievability. Holmes, as pointed out, like all the best detectives, took his business seriously – after all murder and mayhem, particularly on a world-wide scale, is no laughing matter. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, though every-bit the flawless production you’d expect – from edge-of-the-seat set pieces and detailed period costumes to the excellent supporting cast of stalwart Brits including Law, Stephen Fry as Holmes’ brother Mycroft, and Geraldine James as the long-suffering housekeeper Mrs Hudson – is all entered into so tongue-in-cheek that the result appears a bit of a joke.

The problem is that this is Ritchie and Downey’s show – a fact made glaringly obvious at every opportunity. With Downey constantly camping it up whilst Ritchie introduces as many trademark explosions and fight scenes as possible, the film leaves the viewer somewhat dazed by the final credits.

As with its 2009 predecessor, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is a reasonably fun way to spend a couple of hours. For the serious Holmes aficionado though, it lacks the depth to leave any lasting impression.

Special Features: The Dynamic Duo, The Moriarty Gambit, Holmsavision on Steroids

Review: Abraham Lincoln Vs. Zombies / Cert: TBC / Director: Richard Schenkman  / Screenplay: Karl T. Hirsch, J. Lauren Proctor / Starring: Bill Oberst Jr, Chris Hlozek, Richard Schenkman, John Wilkinson / Release Date: (US) Out Now, (UK) July 16th

In the land of Mockbusters, The Asylum rules all. Then again, remember the phrase, caveat emptor.

Abraham Lincoln Vs. Zombies is a sluggishly directed film from a weak script. Kicking off with a pre-credits sequence, circa 1819, where a ten year old Abe Lincoln is ordered to kill his zombified mother by his father, who is bleeding to death due to his father’s terrible marksmanship from three feet away. Before you can say, four score and seven years, Honest Abe plants one between her eyes and the credits role.

It is now approximately 1864. The Civil War rages. Abe Lincoln has sent out a group of Union Soldiers on Operation Big Shanty in order to take the Confederate held Fort Pulaski in Savannah, Georgia (considering Ft. Pulaski was taken by Union warships on April 11-12, 1862, but continuity, historical facts or the laws of physics don’t apply here at the Asylum.) that have completely disappeared except for one, lone Confederate officer that was discovered who has become a raving madman.

Lincoln visits the soldier, realizes he’s seen these symptoms once before as the soldier breaks loose and gnaws his way through the Union Army until Abe pulls out his custom made switchblade scythe and decapitates him. Taking ten Secret Service Agents with him (more like bodyguards, as the Secret Service wasn’t created until after Lincoln’s death in 1865 and not until 1901 was it responsible for presidential protection after President William McKinley’s assassination) that include a double agent, openly, Southern sympathizer named John Wilkinson Boothe, a Union man that looks like ex-American Vice President Al Gore and to top it off; a railroad track, slow-motion walk shot homage to Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. All that was missing was the George Baker Selection’s Little Green Bag song playing in the background. I guess this would make Abe Mr.Blonde with that scythe of his cutting off zombie heads. Steeler’s Wheels, Stuck In the Middle With You comes to mind as the perfect theme song for him. Emancipate this!

Battling zombies (albeit, bargain rate zombies, but what do you expect on a reported budget of $150,000?), they arrive at the fort where they meet several Confederate survivors that include General Stonewall Jackson (who lost an arm and was killed accidentally by his own men in 1863) and Corporal Pat Garrett (yes, that Pat Garrett who never fought in the Civil War) who reluctantly join forces with our presidential zombie killer and what’s left of his men.

Later, Abe’s long lost love, Mary Owens, now a Southern brothel madame with a couple of her ladies and a ten year old, Teddy Roosevelt, whom Abe instructs to carry a big stick and walk softly around the zombies join up with the group before the final battle with the living dead.

The way this picture was heading, I was kind of hoping for Doctor Who, the gang from Tis Was or Thunderbird 2 landing to show up and help them out.

Oh, and Abe’s explanation of why the dead have come back to life in the past forty years? It’s either black magic or bad meat. Gee, you couldn’t think of something like a chemical or biological weapon that pre-steam punk scientists back in 1819 tested out on an unaware populace with uncontrollable results then decided to cover it up? Dr. Miguelito Lovelace is ashamed of you!

The director does use some local Civil War reenactment groups that add briefly to the production value and the costumes looked authentic, as Ed Wood would have said.

Aside from all the historical inaccuracies, laborious direction and bad script, it’s Bill Oberest Jr’s stand out performance as Abe Lincoln that steals the show. He’s worth watching and he’s what saves the picture.

DVD Review: Teen Wolf – The Complete Season One / Cert: TBC / Director: Various / Screenplay: Various / Starring: Tyler Posey, Dylan O’Brien, Crystal Reed, Colton Haynes, Eaddy Mays, Melissa Ponzio / Release Date: July 9th

One of the ‘special features’ on this three-disc DVD release of the first season of MTV’s supernatural drama Teen Wolf (based on the dated 1985 Michael J Fox movie in name only) is a ‘shirtless montage’. Much as I enjoyed this racey, pacey and actually rather clever little series, this was the final evidence I needed to convince me that this show’s designed for a screamier teenier audience and not a grizzled old Starburst reviewer who won’t see twenty-one again until it comes around for the third time. But what the Hell, it’s always fun seeing what those all-American High School kids are up to even if watching shows like Teen Wolf makes you feel like the sad old perv lurking outside the school gates gazing at the youngsters with their lithe young bodies leaping and jumping and… sorry, where was I?

Clearly taking its lead from the likes of Twilight and The Vampire Diaries in making the supernatural accessible and dreamy and romantic for ferociously hormonal kids, Teen Wolf is actually a damned sight better than either because it doesn’t allow itself to get too bogged down in its boy-meets-girl-but-boy’s-a-monster trappings. Awkward High School teen Scott McCall (Posey) is bitten by a mysterious wolf-creature in the woods outside his hometown of Beacon Hills. Before long he notices strange physical changes; his senses are heightened, his athleticism has increased. With his comic relief best friend ‘Stiles’ Stilinski (O’Brien) at his side and the charismatic older werewolf Derek Hale (Hochlin) watching his back, Scott tries to keep his inner beast under control whilst smooching and spooning with his gorgeous new girlfriend Alison (Reed). So far so Twilight. Fortunately Teen Wolf doesn’t focus exclusively on Scott’s romance; he and Alison are no soft focus doomed lovers mooning over each other week after week. They’re very much just a pair of High School kids embarking on that ‘first love’ journey as Scott tries to keep his secret nature hidden and control his animal urges when he transforms. But there’s much more going on here. At first Scott assumes that Derek (scary werewolf name) is the wolf who infected him but it turns out that there’s another, far more vicious monster out there stalking the town and terrorising the locals. And as a further complication, Alison’s father is involved with a determined group of werewolf-hunters who are closing in on the creatures which prowl the woods around Beacon Hills.

It’d be easy to dismiss Teen Wolf as a bit of a howler but it’s actually a lot smarter and sassier than it really has any right to be. The scripts are snappy, the acting’s far better and more naturalistic than in the sappy Twilight saga and the show has the good sense to mix some surprisingly graphic violence and genuine horror in with its sweet ’n’ sour Alison/Scott romance. Posey’s Scott can occasionally drift towards the bland side but Dylan O’Brien is a revelation as the wise-cracking Stiles who’s been gifted the sort of genuinely-witty dialogue Joss Whedon himself would be proud of. Visually it’s a mixed-bag; Scott’s werewolf transformation involves little more than a couple of fangs and some fur and there’s a bit of dodgy CGI now and again. But the show’s directors are wise enough to tease the audience with glimpses of fully-transformed werewolves from time to time rather than risk blowing their credibility by revealing some unconvincing man-in-werewolf’s clothing.

At just twelve episodes, Teen Wolf flies by and, in the tradition of practically all American genre TV these days, builds towards the sort of game-changing finale which is bound to have repercussions for the second season, due to start airing in the US in June. It’s an assured, confident little series which will have slipped under most people’s radars but if you’re in the mood for some likable lycanthropic lunacy this is a show which, I’m surprised to find myself saying, I can thoroughly recommend.

Special Features: Beyond the ‘shirtless montage’ (which I’m relieved to tell you I’ve not checked out), there’s a few puff publicity pieces, an extended season finale, gag reel, deleted scenes.

DVD Review: Deadtime / Cert: 18 / Director: Tony Jopia / Screenplay: Stephen Bishop / Starring: Laurence Saunders, Carl Coleman, Elisabeth Shahlavi, Leslie Grantham, Terry Christian / Release Date: Out Now

Often, when you’re watching a small-budget B-movie, you can see the fun that the artists are having on screen. The fun of making a horror movie bleeds into the audience, and a good time is had by all. This is pretty much the only saving grace of Deadtime, which is not a good movie, but it is the sort of fun that old fashioned gore-hounds will enjoy.

The premise of Deadtime is a pretty standard schlock-fest plot. Love Meets Murder are a down on their luck rockband who get sent by their label to an abandoned warehouse. The move features cameos by both Leslie Grantham and Terry Christian, who are both utterly terrible in their bit parts. (Yes, this is a film where the stunt-casting is wide-mouthed gobshite Terry Christian and Dirty Den, both of whom aren’t even trying to act. This is as good as the movie gets. Seriously.)  Once the hapless victims get to the warehouse  murder, mayhem and utter nonsense ensues.

The production team clearly had more fun making it than you’ll have watching it, but as a bad horror movie for beer-o-clock, you could do a lot worse. It’s pretty gory, the plot is incoherent and I’m sorry to say that the acting is terrible.  The cast aren’t terribly pretty and the production values are very, very cheap. But it is also totally aware that it isn’t any good, and rather than playing for laughs, it does its best to be a horror romp. If this movie was a Christmas present, it’d be a pair of Day-Glo socks that don’t fit and happen to be covered in fake blood. If you’re looking for an action filled, awful movie, watch Ninja Terminator. If you want to see a crap but gory film made in Birmingham, watch Deadtime.

Special Features: Behind the scenes, Interviews with cast and crew.

DVD Review: The Captains / Cert: TBC / Director: William Shatner / Screenplay: William Shatner / Starring: William Shatner, Patrick Stewart, Avery Brooks, Kate Mulgrew, Scott Bakula, Chris Pine / Release Date: Out Now (Region 1 US Import Only)

William Shatner has taken us on many exciting adventures over the years, most famously playing James Kirk. This particular adventure takes us on a journey to meet each of the Star Trek captains that followed him, so that Shatner can interview them and talk at length about himself.

Let me start by explaining one very important caveat of this review – I really like William Shatner and Star Trek. If you aren’t a fan of either, there is nothing for you in The Captains. You will feel both lost and irritated.

“You’re not exactly catching us at our best.”

Of the five actors that Shatner speaks to, only one is currently serving Starfleet, Chris Pine in J.J. Abrams’ rebooted film series. The rest have found other projects, moved on, returned to live theatre. All of them, however, seem to have been profoundly affected by their time in the Captain’s chair.

We spend the most time with Sir Patrick Stewart, who seems to have the best connection with Shatner. He admits that he only took the role of Picard because he thought the show would fail – and talks candidly about his worries following such an iconic show as the original Star Trek. When Shatner takes the conversation to the sacrifices that these roles demand, Stewart is again refreshingly candid and thoughtful on the subject.

Avery Brooks has nearly as much personality as William Shatner, and seeing them both on screen together is one of the most entertaining parts of the documentary. Early on we are warned that Brooks is an accomplished jazz pianist and singer. Most of their discussion takes place behind a piano, with one or both of them singing. It is bonkers, but brilliant.

Kate Mulgrew has always been good at snappy dialogue, and this really comes across in her interview, which cuts quickly between them. The discussion covers a lot of ground. Mulgrew is the only female captain, and she was also a single parent while shooting Voyager and these aspects are explored.

Also star of sci-fi favourite Quantum Leap Scott Bakula knew what he was getting into when he signed up for another long-running show. He explains that he only did it because he got to be the first captain, before even Kirk. With the experience of both shows, his thoughts are very interesting, and the discussion of things he’s given up is moving.

We spend the least amount of time with the newest Captain – Chris Pine. He is much more smooth and professional in his answers, giving little away but praise. A sign of different generations, perhaps, with much more media savvy responses. Either way, it is fun to see the two Kirks engage in an arm-wrestle.

“Please Captain, not in front of the Klingons.”

Not one of the six Star Trek Captains, Shatner also manages to fit in a brief interview with Christopher Plummer – who played General Chang in The Undiscovered Country. An unexpected treat, this also serves as a stepping stone for Shatner to talk about his days on stage before being cast as Kirk.

“One of the advantages of being a Captain is being able to ask for advice without necessarily having to take it.”

This is a William Shatner film, and he takes centre stage. His interview technique is original – ask a question / get an answer / speak about himself for a bit. He is good at touching on serious subjects without losing the upbeat feel that runs through the film.

“Captain, life is not a dream.”

The documentary is very enjoyable, and extremely silly in places. What comes across is the huge amount of work that each of these actors put into their show, and just how much they sacrificed. There is no doubt that it does take someone special to sit in that captain’s chair.

DVD Review: Death to the Daleks / Cert: PG / Director: Michael Briant / Screenplay: Terry Nation / Starring: Jon Pertwee, Elisabeth Sladen, Duncan Lamont, Julian Fox, John Abineri, Arnold Yarrow / Release Date: June 18th

By 1974 the Daleks had firmly re-established themselves in Doctor Who after their protracted absence between 1967 and 1972 and the production team were now routinely commissioning a new Dalek serial each season, with their creator Terry Nation given first refusal on providing the scripts. With Nation having cheerfully plundered his own debut serial from 1963 for Planet of the Daleks in 1973, he opted to cherry-pick bits and pieces from his subsequent stories in writing 1974’s Death to the Daleks, a good-old fashioned space opera romp for Jon Pertwee’s final season. The result is an ambitious, colourful, utterly predictable four-parter which nicks bits from Nation’s own 1960’s serials The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Chase and, in attempting to take the Daleks into new territory, ends up making them a bit bland and colourless.

Nation’s on familiar ground in episode one where, as usual, he dumps the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith on an alien planet, the TARDIS incapacitated by some hostile power source. The travellers are quickly separated in the eerie mists of the quarry-like planet Exxillon; the Doctor falls in with a bunch of stiff upper-lip Earth astronauts searching for a rare mineral which will cure a devastating space plague, Sarah Jane captured by the planet’s sack-cloth inhabitants the Exxillons and taken for sacrifice for daring to violate their sacred monolithic city. The Earth crowd are delighted when what they assume to be a rescue ship (although it looks more like a lampshade) touches down; they’re not so delighted when a troop of silver-painted Daleks sweep out squawking their traditional battle cry. But these Daleks, it turns out, are powerless too. Whatever’s causing the power losses (and brighter viewers might have already made the connection with the Exxillon city and its pulsating beacon) has robbed the Daleks of their firepower and they find themselves as vulnerable to Exxillon bow-and-arrow attack as the Doctor and the humans they’re reluctantly forced to team up with.

The best that can really be said about Death to the Daleks is that it’s a sturdy, workmanlike bunch of episodes. Once we’re used to the concept of powerless Daleks, the story’s only real USP, there aren’t any real surprises in store and the serial trundles along with typical unfussy Terry Nation efficiency. The Daleks are inevitably untrustworthy and duplicitous (their death-rays being replaced by clattering machine guns is, admittedly, a stroke of genius), the humans are dull and largely one-dimensional, the alien Exxillons disposable, clichéd Nation cloaked-aliens-who-might-be-hideous. But there are some interesting ideas, even if some of them aren’t especially well-executed. Bellal, the timid, shrunken underground Exxillon is an interesting foil for the Doctor when Sarah Jane is busy with her own subplot and the city’s root-like self-defence system is a bravely-ambitious idea even if its realisation is way beyond the show’s capabilities. Nation’s clearly run out of steam by the end of episode three (which under-ran, necessitating the moving of material from episode four to pad it out – leading to one of the most underwhelming cliff-hangers in the show’s history) and he has to pad out his final episode with an extended sequence where the Doctor and Bellal penetrate the city and have to contend with a series of mundane booby-traps designed to prevent intruders reaching the control centre.

Directed in perfunctory style by Michael Briant who was pretty underwhelmed by the scripts, Death to the Daleks suffers from over-familiarity and the same air of tiredness which pervaded much of Pertwee’s final season. The actor himself, no great fan of the Daleks, is clearly going through the motions as he coasts towards his finishing line and the guest cast, such as they are, have so little to work with they really don’t make much of an impact, with even character actor Duncan Lamont failing to invest the traitorous Galloway with much character beyond the odd sneer or shifty look.

Impressive location filming is undermined by clunky studio sets, Carey Blyton’s incidental music is so inappropriate it seems to have been lifted from the soundtrack of an entirely different programme and the special effects are at the distinctly shoddier end of the BBC’s 1970’s spectrum. Yet despite all its faults and its oh-this-again Nation storytelling, Death to the Daleks just can’t help but be fascinatingly entertaining. The Daleks are always good value and it’s hard to fault the production team who, aware of the Daleks’ shortcomings at least tried to find a new way of depicting them on screen. But, bearing in mind that this serial would be the last time for over thirty years that the Daleks would appear on Doctor Who without their creator Davros (introduced the following year in Tom Baker’s debut season) directing their machinations, it can’t help but feel like a bit of a damp squib, Daleks-by-numbers from a cast and crew who had become a bit bored by the series’ most popular monsters. But hey, it’s 1970s Doctor Who, it’s the Daleks; it’s got to be worth your time.

Special Features: As a story it’s a bit of an ignominious end to the BBC’s DVD releases of complete Daleks serials but, as ever, there’s good stuff amongst the extras. The usual ‘talking heads’ making of (with just a bit too much Nick Briggs) is joined by a genuinely-interesting – if anachronistic – look at the making of the 1965 Doctor Who and the Daleks feature film with silent behind-the-scenes footage and comments from director Gordon Flemying’s actor son Jason, a feature on the Dalek operators and over twenty-minutes of studio footage which is worth slogging through for an hilarious unused sequence featuring whispering Daleks. Martin Wiggins’ production subtitles are witty and informative and the usual commentary, photo gallery and trailer for the next release (Troughton’s ‘The Krotons’) round off a typically-eclectic and thorough selection of bits ’n’ pieces for a fairly ordinary slice of Doctor Who.