"Actor: Carole Davis"

• Mannequin | DVD | (06/01/2003) from £5.48   |  Saving you £7.51 (137.04%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Made in 1987, Mannequin represents everything that was naff about late-80s Hollywood: from its bland, boxy, electro-rock soundtrack to its sub-Sarah Ferguson fashion sense to its tawdry sets, flimsy characterisation and cheap slapstick humour (including the mandatory amusing dog). It might be centuries before its radioactive awfulness dies down enough to make it watchable, even as kitsch. Mannequin is notionally a romantic comedy in which Andrew McCarthy plays a luckless department store employee and Kim (Sex and the City) Cattrall is an Egyptian Princess reincarnated as a shop window dummy, who comes to life when she encounters McCarthy, only to revert to mannequin status when anyone but McCarthy is watching her. With her encouragement, he becomes emboldened in his career as a window decorator as well as falling in love with the Princess. James Spader's oily, stammery executive is just one of the many examples of a film that tries way too hard to be funny, the sort of characterisation that would be barely adequate for a comic TV ad, let alone a 90-minute movie. Still, for fans of Sex and the City who might want to feast upon the spectacle of a younger Kim Cattrall, Mannequin might offer a measure of relief. On DVD: Mannequin on disc has just the original trailer as an extra, while no amount of DVD enhancement can conceal the tawdry feel of this movie. --David Stubbs

• Piranha 2: The Spawning | DVD | (21/07/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  James Cameron's debut feature is a thrill-a-minute terror ride where scuba divers investigating a sunken wreck at a plush Caribbean resort unwittingly unleash a shoal of mutated piranha which are as deadly in the air as under water!

• The Flamingo Kid | DVD | (08/04/2002) from £14.98   |  Saving you £-8.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  As The Flamingo Kid amply demonstrates, there's always room for one more rites of passage film if it's made with care and affection. Garry Marshall's 1984 study of a young Brooklyn poker player who thinks the grass is greener at a Long Island beach club, nails the bad guy, realises he got it wrong and returns to the bosom of his "humble" family certainly satisfies on both counts. It also has a strong cast: Matt Dillon as Jeffrey, whose niggling aspirations create the inevitable barrier between himself and his parents; Richard Crenna as his prospective role model who turns out to have feet of clay; and Hector Elizondo as his bemused father. But Jessica Walter (Clint Eastwood's stalker from hell in Play Misty for Me) almost steals the show as an acid-tongued beach-club wife. If the whole thing lacks the depth and warmth of, say, Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs, it succeeds on its own merits as an homage to a more innocent time when a young man didn't need to stray far from his own tenement block in order to find himself, with the help of a suitably nostalgic early-1960s soundtrack of course. On the DVD: As far as extras go, this is a budget offering. There are detailed actor biographies but precious little on the film itself, apart from the snippet that Richard Crenna earned a Golden Globe award nomination. There is an adequate scene index and, for those who want to study Dillon in detail, a reasonable stills gallery. The picture is presented in standard format, and hardly distinguishable from ordinary VHS or telecast quality, but the stereo audio certainly helps pump out the period soundtrack. --Piers Ford

• Piranha II - Flying Killers | DVD | (17/09/2001) from £20.00   |  Saving you £-14.01 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  James Cameron's debut feature is a thrill-a-minute terror ride where scuba divers investigating a sunken wreck at a plush Caribbean resort unwittingly unleash a shoal of mutated piranha which are as deadly in the air as under water!

• Snap | DVD | (27/08/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Beaver Bras hand a young executive a cheque for 100 000 dollars to sign up five famous and well-endowed women to model their lingerie... This raunchy adult comedy follows the adventures of this lucky young man as he peruses five very different but similarly endowed beautiful young ladies around the world to get them to sign on the dotted line.