"Actor: Ariane Pel"

• Straight To Hell / Death And The Compass | DVD | (31/10/2005) from £25.63   |  Saving you £-5.64 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Straight To Hell:A team of inept hitmen (Sy Richardson Joe Strummer and Dick Rude) oversleep on the day of their big job and find their target has already fled town. Fearing reprisals from their boss (Jim Jarmusch) they pull a bank job and escape into the desert with Richardson's pregnant girlfriend (Courtney Love). When their car breaks down they seek shelter in a ghost town inhabited by the McMahons (The Pogues Biff Yeager) a murderous and incestuous clan of gun-crazy coffee addicts.Death And The Compass:In a totalitarian metropolis of the future Erik Lonnrot (Peter Boyle) a gifted detective investigates a series of strange murders and disappearances that seem to implicate the insane crime lord Red Scarlach. Enlisting the help of Alonso Zunz (Christopher Eccleston) a principled journalist Lonnrot believes that he has uncovered a labyrinthine occult conspiracy. However has the investigator's brilliance merely precipitated his own destruction?

• Death And The Compass | DVD | (15/02/2005) from £14.91   |  Saving you £-5.93 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  An adaptation of the José Luis Borges short story, Death and the Compass is a baroque murder mystery with a comic touch. Plagued by his involvement in a prior investigation, weary and embittered Police Commissioner Treviranus (played by Cox regular Miguel Sandoval, Straight to Hell, Three Businessmen) attempts to set a peculiar history straight. When his star detective Lonnrot (Peter Boyle), an intuitive, blue-suited Buddhist, is stumped as to the motive behind a series of unsolved psycho-geographical murders with Kabbalistic overtones, Treviranus suspects master criminal Scharlach (Christopher Eccleston), at large in the city. But Lonnrot rejects this thesis and, with the aide of enthusiastic, atheist journalist, Zunz (Chistopher Eccleston), he is lead to believe that the crimes are allied to points on the compass. Drawn fatefully to where he believes a final crime will be committed, Lonnrot and Zunz search for the solution within a mysterious deserted mansion to the South of the city. Shot with a comic book sensibility (like a 1930s movie serial) on richly coloured modernist sets with futurist flourishes, Cox's film looks sumptuous and follows the style of Borges' labryinthine scenario to the letter without losing the plot. The three leads all acquit themselves admirably. Boyle's mystical detective is awkward and aloof in contrast to Sandoval's cunning, career-minded police inspector, while Ecceleston shape-shifts between three roles with alarming ease. On the DVD: An audio commentary by Alex Cox and composer Dan Wool of Pray for Rain (who also scored Cox's Straight to Hell and Three Businessmen) primarily examines the relationship between sound and setting. Paul Miller's "Spiderweb", the featurette advertised on the sleeve and liner notes, does not appear on this disc. --Chris Campion