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The Demons of Red Lodge and Other Stories is a collection of four short and bland adventures with Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor and Nyssa doing their best to sell a collection of predictable one-note scripts by employing the best of their acting skills. Put your wellies on because you’re going to have to wade through this lot.
The Demons of Red Lodge, the first adventure in this collection, sees the pair wake up in a spooooky barn. They scream a bit, then run around a spooky 1500s countryside and see spoooky trees until they find an equally spooky cottage. The residents shelter the pair from witchfinders and the black death, before revealing that they’re spooky aliens from the spooky planet of spookiness. This story has all the atmosphere of a Hammer Horror movie – overwrought, melodramatic and entirely shallow.
Final Thoughts: If you like hearing actors deliver their lines as if the biggest threat they’re facing is boredom and loud music, this might appeal to you. Otherwise skip it.
2 out of 5 spooky trees.
The Entropy Composition sees the Doctor come up against the worst thing in this or any other universe; prog rock. Another alien mischief-maker (this one from before the dawn of time; oooh, epic) are up to their usual hijinks, this time convicting some washed-up musician to create an album of eeeeevil music from before the dawn of the cosmos. It’s an interesting catch, but never truly mateialises, instead leaving the Doc and Nyssa to run around an old house with a flustered, clueless housemaid.
Final Thoughts: Honestly, given that prog rock is the most evil thing to ever exist, a story that actually focuses on that would have been great. But this? This is a whole lot of nothing.
1.5 out of 5 crappy albums with zither solos.
Doing Time sees the Doctor get locked up in an alien prison. If you liked the BBC sitcom ‘Porridge’, this aims for the same style and tone. Aims for, and fails miserably. The funniest moments are Nyssa trying, and failing, to get arrested so that she can get back in touch with the Doc, while he was locked up because he has a habit of using the pseudonym ‘Doctor John Smith’, which on this alien planet is the name of a mass murderer or something. That’s the kind of comedy you’re in for with this nonsense, I’m afraid. Eventually he stops the evil prison warden from running for prime minister, but not before all of my goodwill in this adventure has served a life sentence.
Final Thoughts: I would rather get the death penalty than listen to this bollocks again.
Rating: 0.5 out of 5
Special Features is doubtless the best adventure in this collection, and that’s squarely down to the fact that the concept actually works. It is, in short, a bunch of folks who worked on some low-budget 70s Hammer Horror schlock movie getting back together to record a DVD commentary track. Somehow the Doctor coaxed an invite too, and the entire story plays out as if it were an actual commentary track, with the (perhaps intentionally naff) movie playing along in the background. The characters make inane, mindless comments throughout, pointing out things like “That extra there had a lovely dress” and “We had to film all the way into the night to get this scene”, which is… pretty much dead-on for DVD commentaries.
Final Thoughts: It’s all delivered extremely well, and feels like a good concept played out as well as it can be.
4.5 out of 5 DVDs carrying evil alien codes or some such bollocks.