"Actor: Az Abrahams"

• Kentucky Fried Movie | DVD | (22/03/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Twenty years before the Farrelly Brothers turned raunch into acceptable film comedy, the team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker exploited it first. The college threesome made it big with Airplane in 1980, but this 1977 cinematic version of their live theatre show was the ground zero for their talents. Kentucky Fried Movie is a mish-mash of sketches, fake commercials, and parodies with no central theme--except their crudeness and laugh-out-loud humour. Highlights include a commercial for "Scot Free", a board game based on the Kennedy assassination conspiracy; "The Wonderful World of Sex", in which a couple goes through foreplay with a self-help narrator instructing them step-by-step; and a 20-minute spoof of Bruce Lee films entitled "A Fistful of Yen". Brazen to a fault, the movie will reach for any punchline, no matter how crude (and those who flocked to the film's initial release looking for R-rated sex will remember the final sketch and the infamous trailer for "Catholic High School Girls in Trouble".) Directed by then-unknown John Landis (who went on to make The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London) on a shoestring budget, the film has aged. But crassness, when this funny, is forever. --Doug Thomas, Amazon.com

• Andy McNab's Bravo Two Zero | DVD | (06/11/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  A made-for-TV adaptation of Andy McNab's best-selling Bravo Two Zero--his account of a covert SAS mission in the Gulf War gone wrong. Sean Bean plays McNab, part of an eight-man team dropped behind enemy lines to sever communications lines. Things inevitably go wrong, however, and the team are captured and tortured, before making a variety of daring and amazing escapes. The story on which this film is based is certainly stirring, but it suffers from being generically at odds with the production values of a TV adaptation. The acting is wooden and the budget cannot provide the pyrotechnics or thrilling action sequences which action or war junkies may demand. At some points there are even unsuccessful attempts to blend parts of the staged drama with real documentary news footage. One might argue that the presentation of the SAS team as everyday, emotionally stunted lads, and their mission as gritty, downbeat and devoid of glamour is perhaps quite true to real-life events. It is also a huge novelty to see cinematic acknowledgement of British forces' participation in any conflict occurring in the last century. On the other hand, Bravo Two Zero undoubtedly appears quite dour when placed alongside a more flashy, Hollywood offering such as Three Kings. Nevertheless, SAS aficionados and fans of the novel will enjoy it immensely, if only to look at the way in which McNab's account presents Chris Ryan--author of a drastically different film and novel version of this incident, The One That Got Away--as a posturing, image-conscious coward. The video also includes an exclusive 22-minute interview with the author, Andy McNab. --Paul Philpott

• More Than Just A Game | DVD | (23/02/2009) from £8.07   |  Saving you £11.92 (59.60%)   |  RRP £19.99

  More Than Just a Game' is a movie that traces the lives of five men who came together to start a football association in exceptionally adverse circumstances - and the most unlikely of locations. The quintet Lizo Sitoto Sedick Isaacs Sipho Tshabalala Mark Skinners and Anthony Suze were all political prisoners along with Nelson Mandela at South Africa's infamous Robben Island. It was there that they started Makana FA named in honour of one of the first political prisoner on the island tribal leader Makana.