"Actor: Dave Shelley"

• Starsky And Hutch - The Complete First Season | DVD | (15/03/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £34.99

  In the rough-and-tumble, wildly entertaining world of Starsky & Hutch, impatient cops--anxious to join a foot race in pursuit of a villain--throw themselves out of moving vehicles and roll to a bruising stop. Undercover detectives Dave Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser) and Ken "Hutch" Hutchinson (David Soul), hardly imbued with the powers of Spider-Man, routinely scale walls, hop from rooftop to rooftop, and fling themselves down steep hillsides to stop bad guys from doing what bad guys do. Years later Hill Street Blues would redefine the cop genre as a mesh of overlapping storylines and workaday frustrations, but Aaron Spelling's iconic 70s show portrays LA's finest as madly heroic creatures of reckless determination and physicality. This first season is also startlingly brutal for a primetime US show—it was later significantly toned down, much to the regret of fans—while maintaining a delightful, often incongruous, self-deprecating humour. From the series pilot on, partners and best pals Starsky and Hutch work a fine line between predator and prey, relentlessly pursuing suspects while also snared by crime chieftains or short-sighted superiors. In "The Fix", Hutch's secret romance with the former girlfriend of a mafia boss (Robert Loggia) results in the lawman's kidnapping and forced addiction to heroin. Similarly, in "A Coffin for Starsky", a mad chemist injects the wisecracking cop with a slow-acting but lethal poison. "Jo-Jo", written by Michael Mann, finds our guys at loggerheads with federal officers over a dumb deal the G-Men make with a serial rapist. The 23 episodes in this set are all fun, if sometimes shocking, viewing. Expect each character to take as much abuse as he dishes out. Still, the comic sight of Starsky and Hutch (in "Death Notice") trying to conduct business amid busy strippers is well worth the surrounding violence. --Tom Keogh

• And God Created Woman | DVD | (24/09/2001) from £14.08   |  Saving you £5.91 (29.60%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Despite being directed by Roger Vadim, this And God Created Woman is not the 1956 classic but a loose remake from some 30 years later (1987) which attempts to update the original's themes. Rebecca De Mornay takes the central role, this time as Robin, a woman released from jail on parole due to her recent marriage to Billy (Vincent Spano). Once on the outside, she pursues her dreams of rock stardom and enters into a love triangle with state governor elect, James Tiernan (Frank Langella). Whereas Vadim's own original film may have exuded unspoken sexual tension (in no small part due to its star, Brigette Bardot), any pretence of subtlety here is lost as De Mornay sheds her clothes at every possible opportunity in the film's series of soft porn sex scenes, all accompanied--as indeed is virtually every moment of the film--by an appalling 80s rock soundtrack. The acting is uniformly awful, with De Mornay taking the prize for the worst performance of all, fighting a losing battle for the viewer's attention with her seemingly ever-growing hair. Indeed, And God Created Woman is best recommended to those who gleefully indulge in the worst that the cinematic arts have to offer and it would easily feature in a top ten of most awful films of recent years.On the DVD: Alongside the chapter selection facility, the various filmographies point to what a waste of potential talent this film is. With the picture quality unable to improve on the TV-movie feel of the whole project, the audio presents the horrible American rock backing in all its glory--despite that fact the music sequences are amongst the most laughingly unconvincing ever committed to celluloid. --Phil Udell