Fan Film Reviews: Planet Video and the Spectre from the Past…

Planet Film Productions was a late 80’s, early 90’s, group of fan film makers. The core seems to have been Kevin Taylor, Nigel Peever and Nigel Windsor. Peever was an actor, Windsor had trained as a cameraman, Taylor was a writer, and at the time, they were basically all young men.

Their first production was ‘The Experiment.’ It was essentially a remake of the Sontaran Experiment, beat for beat, shot for shot, with new actors and swapping out a couple of Cybermen for the Sontaran, and appropriate adjustments in the dialogue. Which goes a way towards explaining the atypical behaviours of the Cybermen.

Having mastered ‘The Experiment’, they Planet Video team decided to proceed with a much more ambitious project, Spectre From The Past, released in 1989.

The story features two Doctors, the second and the fifth, who show up in the same location, separated by a half century or more, but are linked together. In the earlier era, a Victorian scientist is working on crude time travel apparatus, which allows him to travel temporarily and insubstantially to the future, where he’s seen as a ghost. Unfortunately, his experiment is tearing apart the fabric of time, letting … things in. The second Doctor struggles to stop the experiments, even as the fifth Doctor has to wrestle with the increasingly dangerous products of those experiments.

As to the review: Wow!

 

Robots of Death Prequel (8 minutes) (?)

Earthpark/Last Days of Rassilon (22 minutes) (?)

The Trial of Davros – Inserts (13 minutes) (2004)

 

 


9 comments

  1. @denvaldron

    Nope, I read that -the whole way thru. As interesting as the discussion of that particular episode was your referencing of Cat A, B and C was also fascinating -and something I know very little about.

    I find a lot of people on youtube (typically) like to carry-on (as if they know what they’re talking about)  about a ‘B’ movie or a Cat. A movie and I think, if I’m right, your discussion of Cat. A and say, ‘b’ movies is not the same thing? At least I think so! Still, it was interesting to read your opinion as to what made a particular episode a Cat. A or C, for example.

    Thank you for putting in all the episodes  (and the extras -which I’ve never found before) -and you were right! The Davison actor has “more lank” and the Troughton-type actor is a “dead ringer” -I recently watched the fantastic Omen 1 film with my son, and he noticed the priest played by Troughton -did a marvellous job there of weird and terrifying without the typical doctorish playfulness that this Doctor in Spectre of the Past exhibited in an homage to Patrick and which Patrick himself did so well back in the episodes of Who during the 1960s.

    Great Blog as usual. In my tedious nights in hospital I’m always looking for something to read and watch and as they have great wi-fi it’s a perfect opportunity to fiddle about, read and watch your latest offerings.

    Awesome.

    Puro.

  2. Hmmm. Perhaps I should have said category 1. A bit of history is in order.

    We didn’t always watch movies the way we do now. Everything evolves. By the 1930’s, movie watching was a grand experience. Originally, movies had started as short subjects – usually comedies. They were a new medium for a whole chorus of vaudeville performers who had a repertoire of short skits. Now as feature length films were developed, there was a fairly large backlog of those comedy shorts and the genre was well established. As well, there was no television, radio didn’t exist, so there was a market for visual news – ‘newsreels.’ The dramatic form of the serial was also popular on radio and in newspapers and it had transferred. So, there was a lot of competition for the feature length movie in the movie theatre.

    Movie theatres dealt with this and broadened their audience as much as possible, not by picking and choosing, but by throwing in the whole enchilada. So back in the 30’s and 40’s, you’d go to a movie theatre… and it would be for the full evening – it would be like a five course banquet. You’d start off with some comedy shorts, then a newsreel to get you up to speed in the world, then an adventure serial to hopefully make sure you’d come back to see how the cliff hanger turned out, ten a big movie – the ‘A’ picture, the one with bankable stars, big production value etc. Then another short. And then another movie.

    Seriously, the idea was that a movie theatre program would run you about five or six hours, a full evenings entertainment.

    Well, thing was that a lot of the movie house fair was fairly cheap – newsreels, that was just newspapers with moving pictures, comedy shorts were cheap and there was a supply, cartoons same thing. The most costly item was the ‘A’ movie, big and expensive and a draw.

    What about the second movie of the night? Well, a lot of the audience was going away or going to bed. You already had your big ‘A’ draw. So… the second movie was the ‘B’ movie. It was there to fill out the card, fill out the time. Typically, it would cost a lot less, there would be lower production values, smaller casts, sometimes no stars, or sometimes stars who hadn’t come into their own, or stars who had faded. They evolved a style all their own – a kind of cinematic minimalism based on not having a lot of money for elaborate sets and therefore needing to make extensive use of light and shadow to conceal that shortcoming, the absence of powerful stars meant that plots and stories had more flexibility. This makes it all sound innovative and dynamic, some of it was… enough to attract critical and cult attention. A lot of it was just dull, sludgy and formulaic poverty row quickies, cranked out to make a modest buck and fill a hole in the schedules.

    Anyway, that’s where the term ‘B’ movie came from. When American television developed as a force in the 1950’s, it needed to fill time, it needed to fill a lot of time. Say 12 or 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks of the year. A lot of that time was ‘off premium’ – ie, it wouldn’t earn them a lot of money, it wasn’t the big money time slot, but they couldn’t afford to give it away to their rivals. So they were looking for cheap product.

    Luckily, studios and production companies had decades of very cheap, low value ‘B’ movies that they could just sell to the television stations and networks, often for late nights. And ‘B’ movies became an established term for a particular genre and category of film.

    The movie categorization of ‘A’ and ‘B’ movies is around today, and sometimes it takes new form. For a while, there was a distinction between Theatrical Release movies and Direct to Video Store movies. Or Theatrical Release and Made for Television. Technically, there’s no such thing as ‘C’ movies. But the term ‘A’, ‘B’ got applied to celebrities, to describe their drawing power, the salaries they commanded and the sort of movies that they would star in, and from there, you have the categories of ‘C’ List, and even ‘D’ List celebrities being added.

    In terms of my classification system, I wasn’t thinking of any of that. I was just trying to sort out a way to make distinctions from one sort of fan film to the next. Fan purity or fidelity didn’t seem to get me anywhere, so I came up with a sort of ‘lay accessibility’ test. Basically, the ability of a fan film to sell itself to the broadest audience – A goes over for a mass audience, B works for fans a narrower audience, and C is family and friends, the narrowest audience.

    Subordinate to that you can look at things like quality of acting, the image or resolution quality of the film, sound and music quality ranging from pristine to an omnidirectional mike on a windy day, or things like sets, locations, props. It all runs the ranges, from dead accurate Tardises and Consoles, to a Tardis that amounts to a shower curtain or is visibly cardboard and a console made out of Styrofoam cups, a teapot and a couple of old keyboards on a picnic table.

    If you’d like some examples of fairly decent Category “B”, then I’d recommend the following:

    “Theta G’ 1989, about 100 minutes, produced by the Beeble Brox Company (psss, spell the initials!) on a relatively low end (by modern standards) VHS camcorder, by two fan groups in North Carolina and Connecticut who, as legend has it collaborated mostly through mail and telephone and only actually met when it was time to put the thing together. A lot of work and enthusiasm went into it from the young crew and cast. I figure that you can either be charmed by its commitment and sincerity and overlook its flaws, or you’ll be jumping out of it like a scalded cat. But it’s a pretty good representative of what I call the “B” Category in terms of its strengths and weaknesses.
    https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Theta+G

    “Alliance” circa 1996 I think, by Stone Circle (formerly Armageddon) productions, a three episode serial of about 75 minutes in total. This little epic features the second appearance of Sharon Crookes, the second known female Doctor. Her first outing was a little 20 minute thing called Rutan. (Crookes had appeared even before that as the Gallifreyan Companion Amara, accompanying the Doctor in another short called Vaulkherd, but that’s neither here nor there, except for continuity). Anyway, lot of CGI, very large cast, some real investment in costumes and locations, an interesting story … but Category “B” Watch it, if you’re charmed watch the whole thing, otherwise watch as much as you can stand, and then I think you’ll see the distinction.
    Episode One – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Kte_SizY5M
    Episode Two – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx6-4vwRrcE
    Episode Three – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z37shS8ReDs

    “Rise of the Doctor” 2015, about 20 minutes, but actually pretty representative of the modern Category “B” genre – this one has gone to some effort, which I respect. In one sense, it looks good, which is partly a factor of modern high end or mid range camcorders, and it sounds good, because they’ve sampled large parts of the music from the show, and they’ve had a lot of access to computer editing which even a decade ago was a lot tougher. But by a fan, for fans.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GVDA58BmBs

    I watch a lot of Category B, searching out the Category A’s, or at least the highest end B’s to write about. I’ve shown you links to a few category B’s, and mostly, while they’re not without merit, they also require a lot of goodwill and forgiveness.

    In terms of the B1 stuff, there’s a lot of interesting and fun treats – there’s the Puppet Doctor seris, a Claymation Doctor, there’s Action Figure Theatre, a fake Trailer for a third Cushing film, a 12 minute ‘scenes from 90’s anime action Doctor Who,’ with the actual voice of Pertwee, a young man who does a credible Matt Smith impersonation who does things like ‘Cooking With the Doctor’, etc.
    Mileage may vary, quality varies, but it’s all clearly derivative to the show, it’s second order stuff. Some of it is very very entertaining. I’ve touched on Doctor Hoo. I may do more of those.

    Then there’s Category “C” stuff… I’ll let you find that for yourself, if you dare.

  3. The Troughton lookalike I think was probably Nigel Peever. Both Peever and Cullen had other roles in other fanfilms so all I need to do is track them down and freeze frame and I’ll have it nailed. Their body frames are different enough it should be a snap.

    By the way, there was a fan outfit called Pacific UK which produced three fan films. Shade of Death (30 minutes), Shade of Death 2 (10 minutes) and another piece of work I haven’t been able to track. Shade of Death features John Field as the sixth Doctor, he’s recognizeable (don’t bother watching it, it’s pretty tough going), but has no credits.

    Shade of Death 2, however, is written by Kevin Taylor, and the credits for cast and crew list Nigel Peever, Nigel Windsor and Dave Cullen. So I think that Pacific UK is simply the same crew as Planet Video, just operating under a different name.

    It’s hard to reconstruct sequence, there’s very little actual information about them apart from the videos themselves, but I think, going by contextual clues and the apparent learning curve evident in the films is this:

    *Shade of Death comes about first, perhaps during the hiatus or trial, or maybe as late as 86, kind of a mess, Colin Baker costume.
    *Followed by Earthpark, abandoned unfinished, but there’s a cyberman costume and some unit soldier costumes, Colin Baker costume, with Romana… which suggests that the Tom Baker costume wasn’t yet available. Maybe 1986.
    *Last days of Rassilon, abandoned, unfinished, again but the soldier costumes are on display. Also 1986.
    Then they do the Experiment, which is their big crash course in doing a real film – using the soldier and cybermen costumes, and a tom baker costume. 1986-1987.
    * They go back and do Shade of Death 2 as a much more polished short, it’s got the cyberman costume and both the Tom Baker and the Patrick Troughton costumes, as well as a Sylvester McCoy. The McCoy performance feels like first year, before the character has gelled. I think that they’d want to prove to themselves they could do an independent story competently. It’s a lot further up the learning curve than Shade of Death 1. Say 1988.
    * They get ambitious with The Experiment, a couple of full sized episodes, so I’m assuming that it takes at least one or two years – 1988-1989.
    * Then they overreach and fall apart with Second Spawn, in part because they’ve laid hands on a major actual costume/prop, the Crynoid from the BBC show. They build themselves a Crynoid-Man suit. It wears them down, done between 1990-1991.
    * That Crynoid-man suit shows up in one of their two Unit stories, so I imagine that the Unit stories were probably shot concurrently with or during the wreckage following second Spawn.
    * There’s a retrenchment and healing period, and they follow up with Daleks Invade Stockton, short but polished, 1992.
    * I’m not sure where the Robots of Death Prequel comes in. There’s no contextual clues.
    * It wraps up with Trial of Davros, maybe recycling the Daleks from Stockton, in 1994.

  4. Hi, I wanted to add some clarity to the above timeline, since I was part of the team who brought them to life.  Earthpark was the first film, made in the Rochdale area and would have been around 1986. A Shade of Death followed, in which I played (badly!) Shade himself. Mostly filmed in the same quarry as Earthpark, but also in Blackpool.  John Field, who played the Doctor has always had a Tom Baker costume, but since Colin Baker was the current Doctor, it was decided to go with him.

    Last Days, was I believe next, with The Experiment following. Two years in the making? Nope. Filmed over a weekend in July 1988!  I played Harry in it. Filmed at Blackstone Edge.

    I get a little mixed up with the Second Spawn, Daleks invade Stockton and Shade of Death 2 as I had no part in them, but they are all pre 1989.

    I did have involvement with the Robots of Death prequel, playing the gobby leader of the cannibal group, and my wife was Taren Capel’s mother! It was filmed on the West Pennine moors above Bolton. Kevin Taylor and John Field also starred.

    Nigel took the lead in terms of ownership in all these films, and I’ve always known them under Planet Video. Thats what it also says on my video copies.

    Meanwhile, my own group, AdLib Productions were also making Dr Who materials, though ours were irreverent and comic. They started with Labyrinth of the Blud Devils in 1984-85, with its two sequels in 1988 and 1989. We also made The Legend of Drog, which was filmed in Portmeirion in 1987, I believe.

    Hope that fills in a few details for you.

    regards Ian T

     

  5. One other thing. The Troughton lookalike is indeed Nigel Peever, and it is Gary Cullen as the Fifth Doctor. Another anecdote: The Krynoid pod seen in Deadly Spawn is one of the originals from The Seeds of Doom, which was “rescued” from the Blackpool Dr Who exhibition and given to Nigel.

    regards

  6. Hi, Can I enquire about your comment that one of my films appears on a BBC DVD as an extra?

    “In addition, they made a peculiar short, a Prequel to Robots of Death, covering an earlier incident in the life of Taron Kapel. This ended up on the official BBC Robots of Death DVD as an extra. This is one of only two instances where fan films made it into the BBC DVD series that I know of.”

    As it’s certainly something that I was completely unaware of and has never been mentioned to me before. Neither can I find on my DVD copy.

    Many Thanks

    Nige

  7. Also adding a little Clarity myself, although we were all buddies making films together we were also several different individuals who made them in our own styles so the Shade of deaths (Pacific UK) Were by Kevin Taylor. Experiment and Spectre were my attempts at real Dr Who. We made Experiment because I wanted to do a classic script, in the same way that people want to play Macbeth etc It’s “real” Dr Who. It was made in three days over two weekends. 3rd-10th July 1988. Earthpark and Last days of Rassilon were literally the first ones I made with my first video camera on video 8 tape.

    Thanks for the kind comments.

    Nige

  8. Whoops making mistakes myself now. Earthpark was a hired video camera off the police or someone that our Rochdale based contingent knew 🙂 Sorry.

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