"Actor: Brian Peck"

• A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies | DVD | (05/06/2000) from £4.99   |  Saving you £15.00 (300.60%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Scorsese's invigorating history of American movies avoids the straitjacket of chronology. Although he makes dutiful nods in the direction of Edwin S. Porter, D.W. Griffith and Orson Welles, he is equally interested in figures working at the margins, film-makers such as Andre De Toth, Ida Lupino, Sam Fuller and Edgar Ulmer, "who circumvented the system to get their vision onto the screen". He describes them as "illusionists", "smugglers", con artists who managed to hoodwink the money men into allowing them to make the films they wanted. Some worked in B-movies ("less money, more freedom") others (like Scorsese himself) struck their own Faustian bargains with the studios, making "one movie for them, one for yourself"His heroes are the outsiders, the film-makers who chafe against the assurances of the American dream. He offers a vivid, guilty vignette of himself as a four-year-old child, sitting in a darkened auditorium watching in amazement as Gregory Peck overpowers Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun, one of the first films his mother took him to. "The savage intensity of the music, the burning sun, the overt sexuality ... it seems that the two could only consummate their passion by killing each other". There's a certain irony in Scorsese, who once seriously considered becoming a priest, succumbing to a David O. Selznick Technicolor extravaganza which had already been condemned by the church.While often sounding like a serious-minded apprentice who watches old movies to pick up tips which will help him in his own work ("study the old masters, enrich your palette, expand the canvas-there's always so much more to learn") he never overlooks the illicit pleasure that cinema can bring. "I don't really see a conflict between the church and the movies, the sacred and the profane". --Geoffrey Macnab

• The Return of the Living Dead (Collector's Edition) | Blu Ray | (18/10/2022) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Rising Damp: The Works | DVD | (14/06/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £29.99

  Featuring all the episodes from Series 1 to 4 including: 'Rooksby' 'Black Magic' 'Charisma' 'Night Out' 'All Our Yesterdays' 'The Prowler' 'Permissive Society' 'Food Glorious Food' 'A Body Like Mine' 'The Perfect Gentleman' 'The Last Of The Big Spenders' 'Things That Go Bump In The Night' and 'Moonlight And Roses'. Includes the unreleased episode 'Stand Up And Be Counted'.

• Polish Wedding | DVD | (06/10/2003) from £7.99   |  Saving you £-2.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  An all-star cast stars in this beautiful telling of the Polish-American experience. Hala (Claire Danes) lives with her large family in the suburbs of Detroit and is desperately looking for her own place in the world. Flirty like her mother (Lena Olin) and introspective like her father (Gabriel Byrne) Hala searches for and finds love but at what price?

• Apex | DVD | (19/06/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  A robot is sent to an alternate dimension via a time-travel experiment gone wrong and wreaks havoc in the new world in which it finds itself. A scientist is sent to investigate and attempts to stop the disaster from happening in the first place.

• Return Of The Living Dead | DVD | (21/10/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  A sudden storm brings a shower of polluted rain and in a downtown cemetery something stirs six feet under the earth. The bad news is the living dead are back. The worse news is that they haven't had a decent meal in years... and as anybody will tell you there's nothing as greedy as a ghoul with a taste for human brains. 'Return Of The Living Dead' is a special effects masterpiece and has its rotting tongue firmly in its ghoulish green cheek.

• Atm | DVD | (14/10/2013) from £5.57   |  Saving you £10.42 (187.07%)   |  RRP £15.99

  What should be a routine stop off turns into a desperate struggle for survival when an unknown man appears outside. Realising they are trapped and with the wintry temperatures dipping below freezing and sunrise still hours away they have no choice but to play the man's deadly game of cat-and-mouse... Written by Chris Sparling (Buried) this tense and gripping thriller is sure to give you nightmares!

• Mine Games | DVD | (12/08/2013) from £9.99   |  Saving you £6.00 (60.06%)   |  RRP £15.99

  A group of young friends make an incomprehensible discovery in an abandoned mine, but the more they try to change the future, the more they seal their fate... A strong, entertaining, horror-thriller, not dissimilar to last year's hit, Cabin in the Woods.

• Atm | Blu Ray | (14/10/2013) from £10.78   |  Saving you £9.21 (85.44%)   |  RRP £19.99

  What should be a routine stop off turns into a desperate struggle for survival when an unknown man appears outside. Realising they are trapped and with the wintry temperatures dipping below freezing and sunrise still hours away they have no choice but to play the man's deadly game of cat-and-mouse... Written by Chris Sparling (Buried) this tense and gripping thriller is sure to give you nightmares!

• Return Of The Living Dead | DVD | (19/03/2001) from £25.00   |  Saving you £-10.01 (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Return of the Living Dead is a parody-cum-sequel spin-off from George Romero's superior Night of the Living Dead films. A corpse-containing canister gets breached and releases an oily, loose-limbed, brain-eating zombie tatterdemalion and a gas that revives anything dead in the vicinity, even a bisected dog preserved as a vet's teaching specimen and a case of pinned butterflies. The dim-bulb leading characters--earnest Clu Gulager, goofy James Karen and Thom Matthews--burn up a mess of surplus living body parts, but the rains wash the ashes into the earth of a nearby cemetery and a whole crowd of brain-eating zombies claw their way out to terrorise a group of teens who sport the kind of 1985 fashions, hairdos, slang preferences and musical tastes that will never feature in a TV nostalgia programme. There are plenty of in-jokes at the expense of the Living Dead films (learning that shooting 'em in the brain doesn't work, the appalled Matthews gasps, "You mean the movie lied?"), and director Dan O'Bannon, the writer of Dark Star and Alien, hurries things along through some gruesome action and terror-by-zombie bits until the surprisingly cynical anti-government conclusion. It's not as wittily outrageous as Re-Animator or Braindead, but it has an amiable, drive-in-cum-home video grunge about it. Frequently naked exploitation regular Linnea Quigley makes an impression as the punkette zombie who goes on the rampage wearing nothing but leg-warmers and body make-up. The frill-free DVD is full-screen (boo hiss!) except for the titles, offers only the trailer and inadequate cast and crew notes as extras, but it looks okay. --Kim Newman