Oh boy oh boy, I’ve been looking forward to this! Hello once again folks and welcome to the wacky world of Time Travel and rubber beasties, aka Classic Doctor Who. And this time its one of the hilarious stinkers.
One of my least favourite things about the new series is that the bad episodes are never funny. They’re always eye rolling, headaches full of moping and whining. Classic DrWho had the decency of having some of its bad episodes to be utterly hilarious. And Horns of Nimon is the king of of trashy fun. But first a bit of backstory;
The end of the 70s was a rough time for DrWho. It was getting old and rather tacky looking. The last season of the 70s is also one of the worst in the entire series. It did have one huge high point, City of Death, but the rest was just blasé and not that great. The fact that most of the money was spent on City of Death with opulent sets and location filming in Paris and therefore the rest of the series looked shoddy. Seeing the way the season was going the producer, Douglas Adams (yes that Douglas Adams of Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame.) decided to pen the season’s finale to make up for the lacklustre scripts of the previous stories. The result was the infamous Shada. But to fill in season he also recovered a rejected script, Horns of Nimon. He knew it was a terrible story, but he didn’t care, he just needed something to bridge the gap between the story before it and Shada, hoping Shada would overshadow it. So when Nimon hit financial and scheduling problems, no-one cared; Shada would solve everything! And then there were BBC strikes and Shada got cancelled...oh boy.
Production mismanagements, rushed filming, low budget; sounds like we got a winner! But what about Nimon’s story?

Basically Horns of Nimon is Theseus and the Minotaur in space if they were all aliens and the Nimons were space locusts who sold tech. The remnants of an empire called Skonnos (Knossos), which has a Nimon (minotaur) living in a power complex (Labyrinth) who provides them with technology in exchange for tributes of people from the planet Aneth (Athens) which he stores in a fridge thing. Skonnos is lead by the tyrannical Soldeed (Daedalus, which is weird because he wasn’t a villain, that was Minos) who is down right insane and clearly has a thing for cardboard bulls. Of course the Doctor and his companion, Romana a Time Lady (thats female for Time Lord) get involved and on the wrong side of Soldeed who tries to let the Nimon nom them. All the while the Nimon is building a wormhole opening device to bring in the other Nimon to sap Skonnos of all its life. But along with the Anethian Seth (Theseus), his clearly soon to be girlfriend Teka, a survivor from the Nimon’s previous host and a few Skonnoians who realise Soldeed is bonkers and want him gone, the Doctor solves the problem pretty darn easily.

Horns of Nimon is utterly terrible but in a wonderful way. The costumes for the Nimons are laughable, with a cardboard bull head, a gold loincloth and platform shoes. You can clearly see the actors in the suits can’t see a thing, they waddle slowly with their arms stretched out so they won’t collide into things, not exactly a threatening life sapping beast, a real pity because their voices sound really cool.
The actor who plays Soldeed is very over the top and silly, with wide eyes and a constant manic voice, but its so hilarious watching him. He’s one of the most entertaining things about this episode. Oh also that actor was slated to be the fourth Doctor….just so you know.
Aside from that none of the cast aside from the regulars stand out; the Anethians are a bunch of bland idiots. In fact in one scene, Romana, Teka and Seth run away from the Nimon, but the rest of the Anethians just stand there and let themselves be herded away by it. DUUUUUUUUUUUUHHHH! Looks like drinking heavily while pregnant is a common custom on their planet. There’s also a scene where Romana and the Anethians find a drained corpse and Teka asks; “Is it dead?”
No Teka, no, that body will be just fine. And then she touches it and disintegrates. I just wonder if she puts that finger in her mouth a few seconds later, while the camera was away from her.
That is one of the biggest flaws of Horns of Nimon; the good guy aliens the Anethians are not interesting. While the real Theseus was flawed and pigheaded, Seth is bland and boring with very little personality, well except for one scene where he tells Romana that he’s scared and asks her not to tell Teka...who is about 4 meters behind him, HELLO!

The second biggest flaw of the story is the realisation. This is one cheap looking episode for the most part. The spaceship and sets inside it at the beginning are very tacky looking; the spaceship looks like its made from empty chocolate boxes and the ‘engines’ are bike reflectors. On Skonnos things are a bit better, with some pretty surreal and interesting designs, especially in the Nimon’s Power Complex. The costumes for the Nimon may be pretty shoddy, but the Skonnon costumes look pretty decent, if a bit laughable. But predictably, the worst (well second worse after the Nimon) costumes belong to the Anethians, with their ugly yellow pyjamas. They look like hippies who forgot what fun and happiness were and never washed their clothes, its not a good look.

The Horns of Nimon pretty much ended 70s Doctor Who. From 1980 onwards the whole series would have a refreshed new look and a new direction and while some people really don’t like 80s Who and it did eventually destroy itself, I think it was good for the time. It felt like a breath of fresh air after many things felt stale and dull.
But what is my opinion of The Horns of Nimon? Personally I adore this episode. It is one of the funniest bits of Doctor Who you’ll ever see, its like the Room or Planet 9 From Outer Space, with some hilarious goofs (there’s a scene were someone is shot down by a Nimon and splits his pants), the Nimon waddling around, the over the top performance of Soldeed and some really silly writing make it a joy to watch. Aside from the bad stuff there is still one or two good things here and there, like some pretty well done visual effects for 1979, so its not all terribleness.
All in all a classic ‘Its So Bad Its Actually Pretty Good’

I hope you have enjoyed this review! I enjoyed writing it and I hope to get another one out soon. If you have the time, what do you think I should look at next? Here are your choices:

-Destiny of the Daleks, where the Daleks battle robot space Egyptians.
-Time and the Rani; where an evil female Time Lord with an obsession for dinosaurs and chemicals called the Rani grows a giant brain for nefarious reasons.
-The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, my favourite DrWho episode set in a creepy circus.
-Earthshock, an episode starring the Cybermen where a companion meets a grisly end
-Pyramids of Mars, where Egyptian gods are aliens (going for an Egypt theme here).