5 More Doctor Who Monsters Which Shouldn't Have Worked (But Did)

3. The Krynoid from Seeds of Doom (1976)

OK, I'm cheating a little with this one because even conceptually, the idea of an alien form of plant life that feeds on animals and turns them into copies of itself is downright scary. Anyone who's read John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids (or watched any of the numerous TV and movie version of it) knows that plants can be scary even without the whole body-morphing part. And in fact, there's only one version of the Krynoid from Seeds of Doom that doesn't quite do the job, and that's the one above. It looks fine in a still shot, but as anyone who has ever seen the cliffhanger for Episode Four knows, the thing in motion looks a bit like someone's overweight aunt running in a mumu. But that's only one form of the Krynoid, and the visual effects guys had to stretch that $200 or whatever they had to cover not one, not two, but four different versions of the creature. It's only fair that one just wasn't up to snuff. The rest are pretty damned scary. Even the seedpods aren't safe:

The first part of the process of turning into a Krynoid begins when one is infected by the shoot of a seed pod. The visual effects designers depict this using what amounts to a puppet on strings and the simple expedient of running the videotape in reverse. Shouldn't work, but it gives the effect an alien jerkiness that it wouldn't otherwise have. And to make it worse, we get to see it happen twice, and it's scarier the second time around because we almost see it happen to our favorite companion, Sarah Jane Smith. I still give my roommate's plants a wide berth to this day as a result of these scenes.

And then, to paraphrase Dan Savage, it gets worse:

The plant starts changing the blood into vegetable soup (hey, those are the Doctor's words, not mine - he can be a real bastard sometimes), the skin goes all green, and leaves start sprouting everywhere - because it's feeding on the animal tissue of the human it's infected. Bad enough to be turned into a plant, but to have that plant eat you from the inside outside as it does so is even worse. From a visual effects point of view, this one was probably the easiest stage to do: just graft on some really uncomfortable makeup, and there you go. They also briefly got to recycle one of the Axon costumes from the Jon Pertwee story The Claws of Axos after giving it a green paint job. If anyone spotted this, there wasn't an Internet back then for them to check to make sure. Then we get the overweight aunt in the mumu. Moving on... And then we get this: Puppets and models - but what a great puppet, and what a great model. It really shouldn't work, especially given that the shot above is from footage caught on film while the entire rest of the story, even the location work, was done on video, so even for the casual viewer there's an obvious mismatch - but who cares about such things when you're getting to watch a giant cabbage crushing a house? What other show can give you that?