Abducted By The Daleks

Exterminating Angels

Abducted By The Daleks
aka Abducted BY The Daloids
Directed by Don Skaro
UK 2005 DVD 0
A Stella International Production

I’m pretty sure Don Skaro isn’t the real name of the director of Abducted By The Daleks... and I also suspect he wrote the film and did various other things on it because, on the credits, all kinds of pseudonyms are used, some of them Doctor Who oriented. Story by Billy Hartnell anyone? I’m pretty sure he’s the same director who made the notorious Fantom Killer movies which, I suspect, he also directed under an assumed name. Now, I think I know his real name because I’m pretty sure the director is the man who sold this to me at the Camden Film Fair back in 2005. I’m not going to say what his real name is here because of a) the very slim chance I may be wrong about my assumption and b) because he seemed like a really nice guy (who sold me some rare soundtrack CDs sometimes)... although he did seem to vanish from the scene a few years after this movie came out. He was a regular stall holder at Camden and I saw, on more than one occasion, one of the ‘stars’ of Abducted By The Daleks and other films come and talk to him briefly, making a rendezvous or business engagement for later in the day/week/whatever.

Given the somewhat illegal nature (in the UK at the time) of a lot of the films he had tucked away and behind his stall for ‘ special customers’, I’m guessing he’s one of the reasons the old Camden Film Fair used to occasionally get raided by the police. We customers didn’t mind... stalls being raided for forbidden items just increased ones desirability to keep going to that particular film fair, it has to be said. It was like free publicity. And talking of free publicity... this little film with covers printed on an inkjet printer and burned onto suspicious looking CDRs... had its fifteen minutes of infamy when the British press got a hold on one somehow and were all over it. Dalek porn corrupting the youth of today... or some such rubbish... perhaps forgetting about Jon Pertwee’s wonderful character companion, actress Katy Manning’s naked photo shoot with a Dalek as an embedded part of Doctor Who culture.

The BBC were said to be furious and, the next month, the name of the film had been changed to Abducted By The Daloids. However, since the film has a good many scenes with actual Daleks in it... I can’t imagine the BBC went anywhere near it and probably figured it wasn’t worth suing as the total budget of the film, which runs for only 55 minutes, is probably less than the price of a couple of ham sandwiches in the BBC canteen. I can’t help but think the title change was merely a less than subtle move to stop policemen coming in and realising what was being sold, after it had hit the tabloids. Can’t sell confiscated stock, after all.

And so we come to the film itself, which stars Katarzyna Zelnik, Eliza Borecka, Sonja Karina, Lina Black, Maria Vasolva and... three Daleks. On the way to somewhere, four girls get lost in the woods after running over a grey alien (aka a Zeta Reticulan... which is not mentioned again later in the story at all). Luckily, the driver of the car happens to carry four torches in her glove compartment for just such emergencies. As the night goes on, the girls... first one... then two more.... get teleported up to a Dalek spaceship for interrogation (sans clothing, of course). When their insanely unpersuasive, shouty efforts fail to make them talk about what earthlings are like, they teleport the fourth one up (who is being stalked by a serial killer who skins his victims alive). She turns out to be the Dalek’s dominatrix for hire, who also tries completely non-harmful ways of getting the girls to talk. It’s almost like the Daleks could just have asked her what Earthlings are like instead, rather than go to all this trouble. All the girls are exterminated apart from the makeshift domme who is teleported down to Earth for a scene with the serial killer. Said teleporter accidentally changing her appearance so she can be played by another ‘actress’ when the other one was, presumably, not available for the last part of the shoot.

It’s pretty terrible but the director does have a few ideas which are worth mentioning.. such as using the naked bodies of the girls reflected in the tip of the Dalek eyestalk. But mostly it’s just rubbish and pretty much all the girls seem really bad actresses. Every now and again, music lifted from one of the Godzilla films, One Step Beyond, The Mole People or Pink Floyd will be used to ‘enhance’ the drama. But, everything looks fake... even the terrible pretence at a lesbian scene by ladies who clearly aren’t into it that much. And I suspect that at least one of the girls has more silicon on her than the three daleks put together.

The Daleks themselves are interesting. One looks like a purchased prop from one of the Peter Cushing films, one looks like a Jon Pertwee era Dalek and the third... looks like an old ride or bad waxworks version, with the top section completely out of proportion with its body but still, somehow, looking kinda elegant.* The Daleks just aren’t able to save this terrible film though.

It’s bad but, that certainly doesn’t stop it from being entertaining... in that, “how does anyone make a movie this bad”, kind of way Well, to answer that, the ‘alternate cut’ on the disc is just a series of multiple outtakes and flubs strung together in he same sequence as the movie. And, honestly, if the girls were as hard to work with from take to take during this shoot as is evidenced here... it’ possibly no wonder that the serial killer story had to be, one assumes, tacked onto the end with a different actress to pad the already small running time.

So yeah, the film gets an A for effort but it never really lives up to the unwritten promise of the title and it is very cheesy... the Daleks never even get to use thier sink plungers in a way you might imagine they might in a film with this kind of content. With a title like Abducted By The Daleks though... not to mention some help from the ‘outraged’ tabloids... I suspect this one was a very good seller for the director in question. 

*I actaully saw an archival interview with Terry Nation on television a few days before this post was published and I'm pretty sure that third, overly streamlined Dalek is one which he actually had in his home for a while.