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: 2
• Studio: 20th Century Fox
• VHS Release Date: May 6, 1997
• Run Time: 149 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6304432429
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #225,086 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars See the Silurians' cousins by the sea-shore!, April 16, 2001

By 

"rpmauction" (Ann Arbor, MI United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Doctor Who - The Sea Devils [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Malcolm Hulke's 1972 sequel to The Silurians is a fine example of a 3rd Doctor / Jo Grant story, starring Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning. At first one wonders why the beloved UNIT gang isn't here, as they feature in nearly all of the Doctor's earthbound stories (he is exiled to Earth during seasons 7 through 9, only able to leave when on a mission for the Time Lords). But capable acting from the guest cast, including Edwin Richfield as Captain Hart, allows me to forgive and forget the absence of UNIT and the Brigadier. All around the acting is good, with Roger Delgado on top form as the imprisoned, seemingly thwarted Master. Clive Morton is believable as the gullible old prison warden Trenchard. The pace is energetic compared to most Who stories, and the HAVOC stunt team appear for some action scenes. The Sea Devils has a larger cast than most stories, and various outdoor locations in Portsmouth and a sea fort off the Isle of Wight bring this Earthbound story to life. The only large detractor for me is the Moog synthesized incidental music: while experimental for the time, it does date the story somewhat. Let's not forget the Sea Devils themselves. Granted they are not the best designed Who monster out there, but something about their simple design, that cold tortoise stare, and their slow lurching from the sea onto the shore makes them more realistic, more memorable than most. Those hissing, reptilian Sea-Devil voices remain chilling almost 30 years since this program first aired.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Attack of the Sea Devils...aka the Green Gilberts, November 30, 2003

By 

Daniel J. Hamlow (Narita, Japan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Doctor Who - The Sea Devils [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Why Sea Devils? Because a maintenance worker at a sea fort frightened by them babbles in his delirium about "sea devils, sea monsters." As for Green Gilbert, an officer of a submarine crew, held hostage by them, still finds time to humorously give them that nickname,...once. Frightening...not really, as they look like giant turtles.

Three ships have vanished in a triangulated area bound by an old Sea Fort, whose foundations have been rebuilt. The Doctor insists upon the initially skeptical and uptight Captain Hart of the HMS Seaspite naval base that there is a connection between the Sea Fort and the attacks.

The Master, captured in the last story of the previous season, is spending a life sentence in an old castle converted as a prison. He has everything he needs except his freedom. Indeed, as the prison governor, an ex-colonial administrator named Trenchard, who is bureaucratically carefully to checking the Doctor and Jo's passes both in and out, demonstrates, the prison guards are immune to hypnotism.

The Master's claims that he is turning over a new leaf surprises the Doctor and Jo, but that's far from the truth, as he's allying himself with some aquatic cousins of the Silurians, the Earth Reptile race who previously owned the Earth before ape became man. Like the Silurians, the Sea Devils "still think of Earth as their planet and they want it back. As far as they're concerned, man is just an ape who got above himself."

Things get to a crisis when a navy submarine is hijacked by the Sea Devils and when Walker, a Parliamentary Private Secretary with special powers, threatens a nuclear strike. He's the epitomy of the warmongering politician. When Jo protests that an attack on the Sea Devils might jeopardize innocent people, including the Doctor, that it's murder, Walker casually says "War is murder. Now where's that girl with my toast?"

Some use of fancy equipment include a diving ball and a navy hovercraft. And there's a sword duel between the Doctor and Master, with the former telling the latter, "How many times have I told you? Violence will never get you anywhere."

The Doctor-Master interraction doesn't just run into clearcut good versus evil. Indeed, the Doctor doesn't totally hate him because as he tells Jo, "he used to be a friend of mine once, a very good friend. In fact, you might say we were at school together." And I can't help feeling that the Master spares the Doctor because other than needing him for his skills, the Master has a bit of that feeling as well.

This was one of the highest rated stories for Who, episode 2 netting 9.7 million viewers. In fact, when rerun on BBC2 in March/April 1992, the highest position was 12 (Ep. 4), the lowest 15 (Ep. 3 and 6). Not bad at all!

As for the weird computerized score, that's Malcolm Clarke's Delaware, a modular analogue synthesizer that took up a whole room, and the music "eschews conventional tonality and replaces even remotely-recognisable timbre with a palette of weird pulsings and semi-random noise."

The paleontology of the Earth Reptiles is seemingly corrected, as the Silurians, whom the Sea Devils are related to, were misnamed. The Doctor says they should've been called Eocenes, thus placing them after the death of the dinosaurs. But then what was the catastrophe that sent them into hibernation? It couldn't have been the moon as the Doctor surmised in The Silurians story. But as in the previous story, perhaps haunted by what happened to the Silurians, the Doctor again tries to act as a liaison for peace between Earthmen and Earth Reptiles.

Another pop culture thing here is the Master pushing the then-new concept of colour TV in Britain, as he asks Trenchard for one for the bedroom. And it's funny when he watches a stop-motion puppet show, The Clangers, and mistaking the mouse-like creatures for an interesting alien form.

Apart from the location work around Norris Castle, the navy footage helped in the credibility of the story. The Royal Navy waived any royalty fees, asking for a mere credit of thanks at the end of each episode, which they got. And the six-episodes are put to good use in this great action yarn.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Doctor Who Versus Parrot-Pigs In Diaphanous Robes!, April 28, 2010

By 

Robert I. Hedges - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Doctor Who - The Sea Devils [VHS] (VHS Tape)

"The Sea Devils," episode 62 of the legendary BBC sci-fi series "Doctor Who," stars Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, and features Katy Manning as the Doctor's sidekick Jo Grant, Edwin Richfield as the upstanding naval officer Captain Hart, and the nefarious Roger Delgado as the Doctor's old friend and current arch-nemesis, "The Master." An extra treat is the presence of an extremely young David Griffin (best known as Emmet Hawksworth from the brilliant series "Keeping Up Appearances") as Lieutenant Commander Mitchell, known onboard his nuclear submarine simply as "Number One."

The plot concerns the Master allying himself with an ancient race of aquatic beings who have long been hibernating, and assisting with their dreams of world domination. The Master is allegedly in prison, but in actuality is running the prison, and promptly breaks out of jail and into a top secret naval base without difficulty. The Sea Devils are monsters who look like crosses between parrots and pigs, and are dressed in glimmering robes or coveralls depending on the situation. A Royal Navy submarine quickly finds itself in Sea Devil-related danger, and so does the Doctor thanks to the warmongering ways of a political buffoon, despite the restraint of Captain Hart and the Royal Navy. Ultimately the Doctor grabs victory from the jaws of defeat, and the forces of good and evil are put back in alignment.

The effects and technological gadgets (like the "sonic screwdriver") also strain credulity (especially the submarine model, which was literally purchased at Woolworth's.) Noteworthy in this series is the extreme cooperation of the Royal Navy in providing access to numerous facilities, ships, and structures, which adds the most authentic element of the show. The Sea Devils themselves are rather ridiculous looking, and the six episodes of the story drag a bit (especially in episodes four and five,) but overall this is an excellent example of the genre. Further dating this episode (and the series in general) are the constant use of synthesizer sound effects at perfectly random moments throughout the entire set.

For fans of "Doctor Who," fans of weird serial sci-fi, or fans of early 1970s British television, this is a winner. "The Sea Devils" is now available on DVD with lots of extras, making a good series even better; unless you can only watch VHS format, I strongly recommend searching out the DVD.