FAN FILM REVIEWS: REAL DOCTORS, FAN STORIES – GENE GENIUS
by DenValdron
STORY: The Seventh Doctor and Ace are attending a breakfast at an old friends place. The Doctor reminisces about how, the last time he was here, in the 1970’s, things got quite sticky. As he flashes back, we see the Third Doctor, riding Bessie to his next adventure….
REVIEW: All right – I’m going to review this one out of order. Gene Genius is a product of a group or collective that goes by the name ‘The Projection Room’ – they seem to have formed around 1994, the same time as Timebase Productions, probably for the same underlying reasons, and their output is comparable in volume, if not necessarily quality. I assume they started for the same reason – the aborted revival and implosion of 1993. The key person seems to be Chris Hoyle, but really, it’s a collective effort.
Gene Genius is one of their later era productions. Really, I suppose I should be watching and reviewing their stuff in order. Why am I jumping the queu? A couple of reasons. First, it seems to be out of continuity with most of Hoyle’s work – you don’t miss anything by not having watched the previous adventures. It’s a safe stand-alone.
Mostly though, it’s because Sylvester McCoy plays the Doctor and Sophie Aldred reprises Ace in it. That’s right: The real actors are playing their characters in a fan film. WTF?
Aldred and McCoy are basically there for a framing sequence. They’re visiting for breakfast at some friends, and McCoy starts to reminisce about some adventure they had the last time they were there, back in the 1970’s. Cue flashback. At the end of the serial, the story returns to them, and they’re back again, to join the action and help wrap things up.
In the main body of the story, doing most of the heavy lifting, we have John Field playing Jon Pertwee, playing the Third Doctor. I had no idea who John Field was, but I googled he was known for dressing up as the Third Doctor, for the Doctor Who Experience in Llangollen.
I had no idea what that was, so I looked it up. It turns out that the Doctor Who Experience in Llangollen was one of the largest exhibition of original props from the series, covering 6000 square feet. Open year round from 1995 to 2003, it averaged about 50,000.00 visitors a year.
So I imagine that John Field was dressing up as the Doctor because at least part of his work was as a host for the Exhibition. It was an actual paying gig – so he has some credit as a semi-professional Third Doctor. John’s connection to the Experience might explain some of the props seen in Gene Genius. By all accounts, he seems to be a charming fellow, nice guy and longtime fan……………..
Episode 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkbDGO_KwCM
Episode 3
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It turns out that if you’re just paging through the blogs, the comments aren’t visible. You have to go looking for them.
So I’d like to take advantage of that little feature to discuss a spoiler. The Monsters in Gene Genius are Cybermen. It’s a spoiler – the Cybermen bursting out of the walls onto the Doctor and Master are the big surprise plot twist/climax of the second episode. Suddenly, the story takes off in a different direction, the scene is surprising, even shocking and dynamic, and it pays off really well. I loved it.
But it’s like Earthshock – the Cybermen are actually played for surprise/shock value here, and it works very well. So I was reluctant to give that away in the review. Hence, just calling them monsters.
The plot twist is that the Master’s been working on an improved immune response system, which he and the Cybermen realize will provide them with an immunity to gold. The Master figures that he can turn these enhanced Cybermen into an unstoppable slave army. The Cybermen have other ideas and play along until they’re ready to turn on the Master.
The third episode features the Cybermen marching along in an impressively one sided battle with UNIT (UNIT is giving its all, and the Cybermen barely pay attention) until the temporarily blinded Doctor comes along and blows them up real good. After that, the McCoy Doctor bamboozles a final Cyberman with trickery and temporal slight of hand.
Overall the Cybermen costumes (the waffle headed variety) are very well done. Is there a store in England that sells these things? A factory that mass produces them. I see the waffle head cybermen a lot. More importantly, the Cybermen are used very well. Their ‘wall-bursting’ appearance at the climax of episode two is genuinely shocking, and in the third episode, they (only three of them) present as impressive, relentless and unstoppable, untroubled by a hail of UNIT gunfire, logical, methodical. It’s a really good representation of the Cybermen, both in action and in terms of their eminently practical/logical mind set. Although small scale with only three Cybermen, they comport themselves like an army. The key McGuffin – a potential immunity to gold, actually creates a sense of scope, of genuine menace and urgency beyond the boundaries of the story itself – it seems like there’s something serious at stake.
That’s not always a guarantee – even the original series was known to get the Cybermen wrong – making them much too easy to stop or destroy, for instance. It’s not an unstoppable alien menace if they keel over when you give them a hard look. Here, they’re handled perfectly, and they do a lot to elevate the story beyond what we’d expect from some random monster.
There’s also the historical cachet that the Third Doctor never faced the Cybermen himself during his run (they did have a cameo appearance in carnival of monsters, and he briefly encountered them in the Five Doctors. So an actual Third Doctor story featuring cybermen is a treat in and of itself. Double treat given the crossover with the genuine Seventh Doctor.
As I said, this just misses out on greatness, undercut by an initial sloppiness and some technical flaws. It’s good, it’s worth watching, but it could have been great on the level of Timebase’s stories.