Product Details

• Actors: William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison
• Writers: Sydney Newman
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, HiFi Sound, NTSC
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: 20th Century Fox
• VHS Release Date: June 25, 1996
• Run Time: 94 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6304052871
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #214,063 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Doctor Who does a horror version of Forbidden Planet, December 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Doctor Who: Planet of Evil [VHS] (VHS Tape)

In this extremely well directed story with Hammer-like flourishes, The Doctor (Tom Baker) explores a lush alien jungle on a planet at the edge of the known universe. There, Professor Sorenson (Frederick Jaeger), engaged in experiments to harness the power of anti-matter, has unleashed a terrible anti-matter beast that threatens the men onboard the ship sent to rescue him. The alien planet is extremely well designed, and the scenes involving the anti-matter monster leave the viewer with a genuine sense of dread. There are also some very nicely directed sequences involving The Doctor falling into the anti-matter pit. As the anti-matter monster divides itself and attacks from all sides, the claustrophobia and tension increases, making one frequently look behind oneself. In an midst of a very well done Forbidden Planet remake, we have a terrific and genuinely frightening story with nice special effects for the era.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Scariest Dr. Who Story., October 27, 2004

By 

Spanderillo "Spandy" (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Doctor Who - Planet of Evil [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This is one that had me jumping behind the couch when I was 10. Though some reviewers write this story off as rubbish, its one of my personal favorites. I think its because, like much of Hinchcliffe's Who, time and effort go into generating suspense and horror through image, through what we see as much as through plot and character, the two complementing each other, and the story being propelled as much by image as dialogue. The hideous, pig brained "Peking Homonculous" in the Talons of Weng Chiang is a good example of this.

In Face of Evil, potent images of horror abound. Examples include the perpetual twighlight of the forest, the red, purple and black tones dominating the production design, in the fact that we don't see the monster at first, only its effect on the environment (an idea that resurfaced, along with the plastic jungle, in the similarly titled "Face of Evil.") There also is palpable fear generated by surveyors' scruffiness and dirtiness, their desperate rushes through the haunted wood, and the horrific look of their wizened corpses after the monster gets them. The look on Sarah's face when the monster almost gets her is another terrifying (to the 10 year old inside us all) image used in this story.

And the terror is relentless. The suspense builds as the action shifts to the Morestran spaceship. Sorenson's glowing eyes after he morphs into "anti-man," the steaming potion he must gulp (like Dr. Jeckyll) to keep his demons at bay, the corpses ditched from the ship plunging into the endless loneliness of deep space.... all unforgettable images terrifying to the mind of an imaginative 10 year old.

If there was a secret to Hinchcliffe's success as a producer it was this.

Another appealing quality of the Face of Evil is its ending. We get the right sort of closure and denoument, providing the necessary antidote to terror, and thus making it a horror story suitable for kids....(read no further if you're worried by the ending being spoilt.) Sorenson survives, his life is spared by the antimatter force, indicating it is not evil as the title suggests, only misunderstood.

Some Who fans think Sorenson's survival is absurd, out of kilter with his crimes and irresponsibilities, forgetting that ethically speaking, the need to save a dying planet outweighs the deaths of afew individuals. Furthermore, Sorenson's survival is necessitated by the dramatic logic of the script....the Morestrans must have, at the very least, a chance of overcoming the problem of their dying sun for the horror to be truly assuaged. The Doctor empathises with Sorenson, as a fellow scientist and traveller, and suggests alternative sources of energy for his planet.

The moral questions raised by this story exemplify what I like most about Dr. Who (and other great science fiction.) Though the show has a fantastic setting, it is preoccupied with our own moral universe.

Sometimes reviewers forget that Dr Who was a show devised to scare children (in a way that all children want to be scared, in the comfort and safety of their living rooms) and start expecting ridiculously high standards. They want perfect acting and special effects, hole-less plots....they forget that the "feeling tone" i.e. the emotional mood of drama is as important as the plot details...more important in Dr Who's case, as it is dreamlike... it deals with realms of the imagination, where absurdities and illogicallities abound. We would miss out on countless great stories if Dr. Who were constrained by dramatic realism.

Makers of kids TV rarely bother to scare children any more. They're all too preoccupied with values laden, politically correct (and mindnumbingly boring) shows about teenagers who think, act, and talk like adults (part of Dr. Who's appeal to me as a kid was the absence of precocious child actors.) Kids get enough of this at school. Soul sucking monsters, mad scientists, aliens who plot to conquer the universe, body counts, the stuff of nightmare and imagination, antidotes to the dull fare of most English classrooms, are all things of the past as far as makers of kid's TV are concerned (my child's heart cries out for another Monkey, another Dr Who.) No wonder the Harry Potter series is so successful. Its fulfilling a deep seated need children have to be frightened out of their wits. The horror element to both series also explains why adults appreciate them as much as children. Thank God not all the episodes of Dr Who were incinerated in the BBC vaults. I'm particularly thankful "Planet of Evil" survived.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nature prunes dumb scientists., November 6, 2003

By 

M. G Watson "Miles Watson" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Doctor Who - Planet of Evil [VHS] (VHS Tape)

There was a trilogy of Tom Baker stories during the shows "Golden Age" which bid homage to the classics of Gothic horror fiction -- "The Brain of Morbius" (Frankenstein); "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" (Dracula); and, of course, "Planet of Evil" which was essentially Dr. Jekkyl & Mr. Hyde in space. This episode is inferior to "Talons" (what isn't?) and not as much fun as "Morbius" but it is still a good outing, concentrating far less on humor and camp and more on the classic elements of Gothic horror -- tampering with forbidden knowledge, the internal struggle of good vs. evil, and the mounting terror of a group which is trapped in a haunted house (so to speak) and being picked off one by one. Like "Talons" which also mixed in homages to Phantom of the Opera and the real-life Jack the Ripper killings, this story also borrows heavily from "Forbidden Planet" in its choice of a semi-invisible monster projected, more or less, from it's victims own minds. There are also less-than-subtle moral messages about colonialism and gross exploitation of the environment, which is always humorous when you consider the Brits spent 300 years doing just that to our little planet. I guess Orwell was right when he said that hypocrisy is THE English vice (then again, he also said, "The Americans always have to go you one better on any type of beastliness" so you can read it either way).

The story is your basic 'trapped in a haunted house with a mysterious killer' bit, but the overlapping plot elements and homages prevent it from falling into parody. Tom Baker plays the Doctor with less humor and more edge in this outing, not troubling to hide his disgust at what he sees as militaristic fools tampering with forces they don't understand, and expressing his usual lack of patience with those less intelligent than himself, which in this story is absolutely everybody. The (relative) humorlessness of the normally cheeky, campy Doc helps underscore the mounting sense of doom. As always, the guest characters help to make the episode. Professor Sorenson, the Jekkyl/Hyde character, is both creepy and pitiable with his sunken, bleary eyes, stubbly face, and mixture of nervousness and exhaustion; he is more complex than your average guest character and it is difficult to see if he will play out as a villain or a hero. Not so with Controller Salamar, a ship's captain so repressed and stuck-up not only would butter not melt in his mouth, but if you inserted a lump of coal into this bloke's you-know-what, in thirty seconds you'd have a diamond. What Salamar lacks in charm, me makes up for with his shoot first, ask-questions-never style of command. Finally there is Vishinsky, the kindly veteran X.O., who seems to have gotten the helping of common sense that Salamar missed out on when he was going back to the buffet for a second course of being a jackass. All of these actors work well.

One interesting feature of the story is its violence. This episode has a huge body count and there are times I half-expected to hear that creepy "ch-ch-ch, ha-ha-ha" music from "Friday the 13th" as our heroes stumble around in the jungle, waiting to die.

Speaking of which, "Planet's" biggest strength is its creepy production design -- Zeta Minor, where most of the story takes place, is strange, jungle-like, very alien and claustrophobic, perfect to the atmosphere of the story. The black pit from whence the creature emerges is truly eerie-looking, and a very nice bit of prop-work, especially the fake bubbles which give it the illusion of depth. And the ship, which serves as the final battleground has an unpleasant, overbright 'death trap' feel to it.

One minor quibble -- when the irradiated Sorenson does his slavering, shamelessly over-the-top Mr. Hyde routine, it takes a will of iron not to burst out into hysterical laughter. Blaaaaah! Yeaaaaahh! Grrrrrr! Trick or treat! He hardly needed to strangle his victims; they would have laughed themselves into heart attacks anyway. This aside, "Planet" is one of the more downright creepy episodes shot during Baker's run, and it does an effective job of putting our heroes through one wringer after another before the Tardis whisks off on its next adventure.