"Actor: Byron"

• The Buster Keaton Collection | DVD | (08/10/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £39.99

  Buster Keaton's 1926 masterpiece The General shows the great stone-faced comedian at the height of his powers. Buster is a train driver from the South who's caught up in the American Civil War. The film is basically an extended chase, with trains pursuing each other up the track. The level of stuntwork (including a huge train wreck) has to be seen to be believed, but it's the deftness and elegance of Keaton's comedy that is ultimately most memorable. For many, Buster Keaton is the greatest comedian of the silent era rated even above Chaplin, and College (1927) is one of his finest films. A poor student who has to work his way through college, Buster is desperate to win the attention of a pretty girl so takes up sports. Through every disaster, the great "stone face" as he was nicknamed betrays not a flicker of emotion, enduring all humiliations with aplomb. College shows Keaton at the top of his form. Steamboat Bill Jr dates from 1928 and is the last great film Buster Keaton made before he gave up his independence. Buster is the rather fey son of an elderly steamboat owner who is being driven out of business by a wealthy competitor. More by accident than intention Buster turns things around and gets the girl as well. The last 15 minutes are truly astonishing: a storm sequence in which a whole town is blown apart, with Buster experiencing a series of amazing escapes as buildings fall down around his ears. Tragically, the following year he lost his independence when he signed for MGM. His career collapsed, his marriage broke up and he became an alcoholic, never to regain former glories. On the DVD: The organ music accompanying this silent feature is pleasantly unobtrusive, and apart from a short section in the middle where it deteriorates, the print quality is a reasonable 4.3. In addition there are five excellent Keaton shorts, One Week (1920), The Boat (1921) Cops (1922), The Blacksmith (1922) and The Balloonatic (1923). --Ed Buscombe

• Marie Galante | DVD | (01/09/2003) from £7.83   |  Saving you £-0.85 (N/A%)   |  RRP £3.99

• Lulu On The Bridge | DVD | (27/02/2006) from £44.99   |  Saving you £-32.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Outrunning the past to save the future... Izzy Maurer (Harvey Keitel) is a jazz saxophonist whose life is permanently changed when he is hit by a stray bullet. After his recovery Izzy stumbles across the body of a stranger and winds up with the murdered man's briefcase. Inside is a mysterious stone which leads himito Celia Burns (Mira Sorvino). Together they discover the power of the stone and the threat of those who want it as the story takes a dark and surprising turn into

• Steamboat Bill Jr | DVD | (18/06/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Steamboat Bill Jr dates from 1928 and is the last great film Buster Keaton made before he gave up his independence and signed for MGM. Buster is the rather fey son of an elderly steamboat owner who is being driven out of business by a wealthy competitor. More by accident than intention Buster turns things around and gets the girl as well. The last 15 minutes are truly astonishing: a storm sequence in which a whole town is blown apart, with Buster experiencing a series of amazing escapes as buildings fall down around his ears. On the DVD: The print is a good one, best seen in the 4:3 ration, with unobtrusive organ music added. As a nautical extra there's The Boat, a 1921 short (the print not in such a good state as the feature), in which in the course of launching his newly built craft Buster manages to wreck his house, tip his car into the river and sink the boat. And that's only the beginning. --Ed Buscombe

• Altered Paradise / Seduction Of Julia Ann | DVD | (10/02/2003) from £17.53   |  Saving you £-1.54 (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

• Snakes on a Plane/White Noise 1 and 2 | DVD | (22/10/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  This box set features the following films: Snakes On A Plane (Dir. David R. Ellis) (2006): On board a flight over the Pacific Ocean an assassin bent on killing a passenger who's a witness in protective custody lets loose a crate full of deadly snakes. The rookie pilot and frightened passengers must band together to try and apprehend the assassin before it's just not the witnesses' life in jeopardy... White Noise (Dir. Geoffrey Sax) (2005): People have always searched for a way to communicate with the other side - fascinated motivated driven to find a way to connect with loved ones who have passed on. Michael Keaton plays successful architect Jonathan Rivers whose peaceful existence is shattered by the unexplained disappearance and death of his wife Anna (Chandra West). Jonathan is eventually contacted by a man (Ian McNeice) who claims to be receiving messages from Anna through EVP. At first skeptical Jonathan then becomes convinced of the messages' validity and is soon obsessed with trying to contact her on his own. His further explorations into EVP and the accompanying supernatural messages unwittingly open a door to another world allowing something uninvited into his life. White Noise 2: The Light (Dir. Patrick Lussier) (2007): A man whose family is murdered tries to commit suicide but he is brought back from the brink of death. He soon discovers that he now has the ability to identify people who are about to die and begins saving them from their demises-only to discover the perils of interrupting death's plans.

• Shaolin Warrior - Shaolin Qigong For Upper Body | DVD | (16/05/2011) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

• Storm Chasers 2009 Season | DVD | (14/06/2010) from £14.83   |  Saving you £15.16 (50.60%)   |  RRP £29.99

  Reed Timmer and his team return with their newly armoured chase vehicle The Dominator racing to be first on the storm scene ahead of IMAX filmmaker Sean Casey and his monster tank-like TIV (Tornado Intercept Vehicle). New this season is veteran researcher and storm chaser Tim Samaras whose even keel steady leadership is in marked contrast to the frenzied atmosphere and roller coaster of emotions inside Timmer and Casey's teams.

• The Twilight Zone - Vol. 3 | DVD | (29/05/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  In 1959 screenwriter Rod Serling first opened the door to the "dimension of imagination" that is The Twilight Zone, a show quite unlike anything that had gone before, and better than much that has followed in its wake. This original and daring television series ran for a magnificent five seasons from 1959 to 1964 and still looks as fresh as ever, particularly on DVD. What distinguished the series (and still does) is the quality of the scripts, many of which were penned by Serling, but with significant contributions from veteran sci-fi authors and screenwriters such as Richard Matheson. Actors of the calibre of Robert Redford, Burgess Meredith, Lee Marvin and William Shatner gave some of their best small-screen performances, while an unforgettable main title theme by Bernard Herrmann and musical contributions from young turks such as Jerry Goldsmith underlined the show's attraction for great creative talent both behind and in front of the cameras. Volume 3 contains another selection of four episodes from across the series. "Steel" (episode 122) stars Lee Marvin in a futuristic Richard Matheson story concerning a penniless boxing manager who is forced into the ring when his robot boxer breaks down. Matheson is concerned to illustrate the lengths to which people are forced to go when desperate, but his moral is undermined a little by setting the story in the far future of 1974; Marvin, however, is a magnetic presence. In the tense and tautly written "A Game of Pool" (episode 70), Jack Klugman (The Odd Couple, Quincy) is a boastful pool player who challenges champion "Fats" Brown (Jonathan Winters) to a match in which the stakes are his life. "Walking Distance" is a slice of wistful, semi-autobiographical nostalgia from Serling in which a burned-out media exec returns to the town of his childhood (watch out for a very young Ron Howard as one of the kids). Bernard Herrmann's masterful score for this episode was composed not long after his music for Hitchcock's Vertigo, and has a similar tragi-romantic streak. Finally, "Kick the Can" (episode 86) is the story of the residents of a retirement home who discover (or rediscover) Peter Pan's secret for staying permanently young: it's easy to see why Steven Spielberg decided to adapt this episode for the 1983 movie. On the DVD: A neat animated menu with a winking eye guides the viewer "Inside the Twilight Zone", which consists of digests of background information on the individual episodes, as well as a general history of the show, season-by-season breakdown and a potted biography of Serling. --Mark Walker

• Blood Money | DVD | (02/06/2014) from £4.99   |  Saving you £5.00 (100.20%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Zheng Zhou is the most feared warrior from the Shaolin Dynasty in China. His fighting and weapons skills are legendary. But when his parents are killed and sister kidnapped, he turns to a life of drugs and crime that will almost kill him. With the help of Hong Kong's notorious Dragon Triad syndicate, Colombia's biggest drugs cartel hatches an elaborate plan to traffic two tonnes of crack cocaine through the Port of Miami in America and ultimately into Australia and China. But when the partner.

• Jandek on Corwood | DVD | (06/12/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  25 years 35 albums and not a single live show or public appearance. The documentary film Jandek on Corwood definitively explores the most intriguing mystery in modern music. Featuring revealing interviews evocative imagery and one of the most bizarre and compelling soundtracks in film history Jandek on Corwood will challenge the viewer's conception of music Art and the nature of celebrity.

• Marie Galante / Spencer Tracy On Film | DVD | (25/03/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £3.99

  Marie Galante: (1934 88 min. B&W) Movie newcomer Ketti Gallian plays Marie Galante kidnapped by a drunken sea captain and left stranded in the Yucatan. While working as a cafe singer hoping to pay for her ticket out of the Panama Canal she meets American detective Crawbett (Spencer Tracy) the only person who believes her abduction story. In a series of twists and turns the two find themselves caught in the middle of an unexpected adventure including espionage and a plan

• GOG - Spacestation USA - Limited Edition (3D und 2D Fassung auf einer Disc) - Deutsche Blu-Ray Premiere - Sci-Fi von 1954 | Blu Ray | (25/03/2022) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Uriah Heep - Demons And Wizards | DVD | (11/06/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The official history of Uriah Heep

• The Stranger | DVD | (18/03/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £4.99

  The Stranger, according to Orson Welles, "is the worst of my films. There is nothing of me in that picture. I did it to prove that I could put out a movie as well as anyone else." True, set beside Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, or even The Trial, The Stranger is as close to production-line stuff as the great Orson ever came. But even on autopilot Welles still leaves most filmmakers standing. The shadow of the Second World War hangs heavy over the plot. A war crimes investigator, played by Edward G Robinson, tracks down a senior Nazi, Franz Kindler, to a sleepy New England town where he's living in concealment as a respected college professor. The script, credited to Anthony Veiller but with uncredited input from Welles and John Huston, is riddled with implausibilities: we're asked to believe, for a start, that there'd be no extant photos of a top Nazi leader. The casting's badly skewed, too. Welles wanted Agnes Moorehead as the investigator and Robinson as Kindler, but his producer, Sam Spiegel, wouldn't wear it. So Welles himself plays the supposedly cautious and self-effacing fugitive--and if there was one thing Welles could never play, it was unobtrusive. What's more, Spiegel chopped out most of the two opening reels set in South America, in Welles' view, "the best stuff in the picture". Still, the film's far from a write-off. Welles' eye for stunning visuals rarely deserted him and, aided by Russell Metty's skewed, shadowy photography, The Stranger builds to a doomy grand guignol climax in a clock tower that Hitchcock must surely have recalled when he made Vertigo. And Robinson, dogged in pursuit, is as quietly excellent as ever. On the DVD: not much in the way of extras, except a waffly full-length commentary from Russell Cawthorne that tells us about the history of clock-making and where Edward G was buried, but precious little about the making of the film. Print and sound are acceptable, but though remastering is claimed, there's little evidence of it. --Philip Kemp

• Without Rhyme Or Reason | DVD | (01/11/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A neurotic director in charge of creating voice-overs for B-level television shows Orlando lives with Sonia a 'new age' personality in search of inner peace. Feeling suffocated by Sonia's love and tempted by the appearance of a new woman Orlando moves from woman to woman incapable of being alone. Then there is Mauricio Rene who have a rollercoaster relationship - constantly breaking up yet enjoying the making up. These tangled love stories unfold against the backdrop of the

• Cult Action Extravaganza | DVD | (21/04/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  The Cult Action Extravaganza three-disc set offers three very different movies that have nothing in common bar residency in Siren's film archive. They are: The Most Dangerous Game (1932), Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953) and Get Christie Love! (1974). The Most Dangerous Game is a classic, one of the first talkies to get pictures moving after five very static years following the birth of sound. The plot finds resourceful hero Joel McCrea and heroine Fay Wray being hunted on the island of the insane Zaroff (Leslie Banks). One of the grandfathers of the summer blockbuster, the film's setup has been reworked many times since, notably in John Woo's Hard Target (1993). By modern standards it's technically primitive, though still gripping stuff, complete with the jungle set built as a test run for King Kong (1933) and graced by Max Steiner's prototype of all Hollywood action scores. Beneath the 12-Mile Reef is another landmark or rather watermark. The third-ever CinemaScope production, this was a prestige release with Technicolor location filming at Key West, Florida of never-before-achieved underwater cinematography and four-channel stereo recording of a superlative Bernard Herrmann score. Even a still-impressive underwater battle with an octopus pre-dates the more famous giant squid of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). The humans aren't bad either, with a young Robert Wagner making a charismatic if ethnically unconvincing Greek lead as sponge fisherman Tony and Terry Moore playing Juliet to his Romeo with real vivacity. Starring Theresa Graves, Get Christie Love! is a tame TV movie imitation of early 1970s female blaxploitation films such Pam Grier's Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974). Running a standard TVM 73 minutes and with a low budget and content sanitised to US network standards, this is lightweight stuff about an undercover cop determined to smash a drugs ring. Nevertheless the movie was popular enough to spawn a short-lived TV show and is significant for being the first time a black woman took the title role in any American network production. Tarantino completists may be interested, as before he paid homage to Christie Love in the dialogue of Reservoir Dogs (1991). On the DVD: Cult Action Extravaganza presents the films in their original aspect ratio and sound format; The Most Dangerous Game and Get Christie Love! are 4:3, mono. The former is faded b/w with reasonably sturdy sound, though the transfer suffers from compression artefacting. No one would expect great quality from a 1974 TV movie, but Get Christie Love! suffers from both a poor print and a mediocre DVD transfer. Beneath the 12-Mile Reef is presented in the extra wide 2.55:1 of early CinemaScope and though sadly not anamorphic both the seascapes and underwater cinematography are still impressive. The four-channel stereo sound is revelatory, clear, detailed and years ahead of what we have come to expect early 1950s films to sound like. --Gary S Dalkin

• Edward G. Robinson - Scarlet Street / The Stranger | DVD | (18/03/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  In a way, Scarlet Street is a remake. It's taken from a French novel, La Chienne (literally, "The Bitch") that was first filmed by Jean Renoir in 1931. Renoir brought to the sordid tale all the colour and vitality of Montmartre; Fritz Lang's version shows us a far harsher and bleaker world. The film replays the triangle set-up from Lang's previous picture, The Woman in the Window, with the same three actors. Once again, Edward G Robinson plays a respectable middle-aged citizen snared by the charms of Joan Bennett's streetwalker, with Dan Duryea as her low-life pimp. The plot closes around the three of them like a steel trap. This is Lang at his most dispassionate. Scarlet Street is a tour de force of noir filmmaking, brilliant but ice-cold. The Stranger, according to Orson Welles, "is the worst of my films. There is nothing of me in that picture". But even on autopilot Welles still leaves most filmmakers standing. A war crimes investigator, played by Edward G Robinson, tracks down a senior Nazi to a sleepy New England town where he's living in concealment as a respected college professor. Welles wanted Agnes Moorehead as the investigator and Robinson as the Nazi Franz Kindler, but his producer, Sam Spiegel, wouldn't wear it. So Welles himself plays the supposedly cautious and self-effacing fugitive--and if there was one thing Welles could never play, it was unobtrusive. Still, the film's far from a write-off. Welles' eye for stunning visuals rarely deserted him and, aided by Russell Metty's skewed, shadowy photography, The Stranger builds to a doomy grand guignol climax in a clocktower that Hitchcock must surely have recalled when he made Vertigo. And Robinson, dogged in pursuit, is as quietly excellent as ever. On the DVD: sparse pickings. Both films have a full-length commentary by Russell Cawthorne which adds the occasional insight, but is repetitive and not always reliable. The box claims both print have been "fully restored and digitally remastered", but you'd never guess. --Philip Kemp

• Home Town Story | DVD | (12/01/2004) from £3.45   |  Saving you £1.54 (44.64%)   |  RRP £4.99

  One of Marilyn Monroe's earliest starring roles (of her ten previous films she had been uncredited in four of them) finds her playing the newspaper office receptionist Iris. The paper is run by Blake Washburn who has just been defeated in a bid for re-election to the state senate and uses the paper to ruffle big business.

• Stranger, The / Orson Welles On Film | DVD | (01/11/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £3.99

  The Stranger, according to Orson Welles, "is the worst of my films. There is nothing of me in that picture. I did it to prove that I could put out a movie as well as anyone else." True, set beside Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, or even The Trial, The Stranger is as close to production-line stuff as the great Orson ever came. But even on autopilot Welles still leaves most filmmakers standing. The shadow of the Second World War hangs heavy over the plot. A war crimes investigator, played by Edward G Robinson, tracks down a senior Nazi, Franz Kindler, to a sleepy New England town where he's living in concealment as a respected college professor. The script, credited to Anthony Veiller but with uncredited input from Welles and John Huston, is riddled with implausibilities: we're asked to believe, for a start, that there'd be no extant photos of a top Nazi leader. The casting's badly skewed, too. Welles wanted Agnes Moorehead as the investigator and Robinson as Kindler, but his producer, Sam Spiegel, wouldn't wear it. So Welles himself plays the supposedly cautious and self-effacing fugitive--and if there was one thing Welles could never play, it was unobtrusive. What's more, Spiegel chopped out most of the two opening reels set in South America, in Welles' view, "the best stuff in the picture". Still, the film's far from a write-off. Welles' eye for stunning visuals rarely deserted him and, aided by Russell Metty's skewed, shadowy photography, The Stranger builds to a doomy grand guignol climax in a clock tower that Hitchcock must surely have recalled when he made Vertigo. And Robinson, dogged in pursuit, is as quietly excellent as ever. On the DVD: not much in the way of extras, except a waffly full-length commentary from Russell Cawthorne that tells us about the history of clock-making and where Edward G was buried, but precious little about the making of the film. Print and sound are acceptable, but though remastering is claimed, there's little evidence of it. --Philip Kemp