"Actor: Dennis To"

• The Howling | DVD | (09/10/2017) from £9.70   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  An instant werewolf classic, The Howling was directed by Joe Dante, a graduate of Roger Corman's school of low-budget ingenuity who had gained enough momentum with 1978's Piranha to rise to this bigger challenge. He brought along Piranha screenwriter John Sayles, too, and recruited makeup wizard Rob Bottin to create what was then the wildest on-screen transformation ever seen. With Gary Brandner's novel The Howling as a starting point, Sayles and Dante conceived a werewolf colony on the California coast, posing as a self-help haven led by a seemingly benevolent doctor (Patrick Macnee), and populated by a variety of "patients", from sexy, leather-clad sirens (Elisabeth Brooks) to an old coot (John Carradine) who's quite literally long in the tooth. When a TV reporter (Dee Wallace) arrives at the colony to recover from a recent trauma, the resident lycanthropes prepare for a howlin' good time. Dante handles it all with equal measures of humour, sex, gore, and horror, pulling out all the stops when the ravenous Eddie (Dante favourite Robert Picardo, later known as The Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager) transforms into a towering , bloodthirsty werewolf. (Bottin's mentor Rick Baker would soon raise the make-up ante with An American Werewolf in London.) As usual in Dante's movies (qv. Gremlins), in-jokes abound, from characters named after werewolf movie directors, amusing cameos (Corman, Sayles, Forrest J Ackerman), and hammy inserts of wolfish cartoons and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl". It's best appreciated now as a quintessential example of early-80s horror, with low-budget limitations evident throughout, but The Howling remains a giddy genre milestone. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

• Two-Lane Blacktop (DVD) | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Their world is a two-lane blacktop... no beginning... no end... no speed limit! In this controversial and acclaimed story of drag-racing drifters the drivers of a Pontiac GTO and a '55 Chevy battle across the back roads of America for possession of each others 'pinks' and the affections of a mysterious young hitchhiker. Featuring top hits by The Doors and Kris Kristofferson the film roars across a landscape of unexpected turns and startling twists. Two-Lane Blacktop is directed by cult legend Monte Hellman (director of The Shooting and Cockfighter and Executive Producer of Reservoir Dogs) from a screenplay by Rudolph Wurlitzer (Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid) and features unforgettable performances by Warren Oates (The Wild Bunch) as well as singer/songwriter James Taylor and the Beach Boys Dennis Wilson in their first - and only - acting roles.

• D.O.A. | DVD | (20/05/2002) from £20.00   |  Saving you £-5.01 (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  A stylish piece of neo-noir, D.O.A. was directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel during their glory days as creators of Max Headroom. Sometimes mocked at the time for its extravagant visual imagery, this is a film which has aged better than might have been expected. Vastly reworked from the 40s original, D.O.A. stars Dennis Quaid as the burned-out campus novelist who discovers he has been fatally poisoned and sets out to find his killer in the short time left to him, along the way rediscovering his love for the life he is going to lose. Quaid is good enough both at chain-smoking cynicism and angry zest that this becomes emotionally credible; a worryingly young Meg Ryan is excellent as the hero-worshipping sophomore he co-opts into his search. With camerawork of sometimes hallucinatory vividness, rather too many shots of fans and Ferris wheels, and Charlotte Rampling playing a dragon-lady villainess to the hilt, this is a film which teeters on the brink of camp, but has the courage of its individuality. On the DVD: D.O.A. comes to disc with almost no special features whatever save for a Spanish soundtrack and subtitles in Spanish and the Scandinavian languages. Its widescreen visual aspect is 1.85:1 and the Dolby sound does full justice to a very loud score by bands like Timbuk 3.--Roz Kaveney

• Vintage Classics Ealing Comedy Collection | DVD | (23/10/2017) from £23.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Collection of five classic British comedies. In 'Kind Hearts and Coronets' (1949) an embittered aristocrat sets out to murder the eight heirs that stand between him and succession to the family title. Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) holds no love for the family he counts as relations, the D'Ascoynes. The D'Ascoynes cast his mother out when she decided to marry a commoner, Louis's father, and on her death refused to allow her to be buried in the family vault. An outraged Louis vows revenge and begins working his way into the trust of the family to provide him with the opportunity to bump off the male heirs (all played by Alec Guinness) one by one. However, complications arise when he becomes romantically entangled with one of the widows of his victims, Edith D'Ascoyne (Valerie Hobson). Will Louis be able to stay the course and murder his way to a dukedom? In 'Passport to Pimlico' (1949) an unexploded bomb goes off in Pimlico, uncovering documents which reveal that this part of London in fact belongs to Burgundy in France. An autonomous state is set up in a spirit of optimism, but the petty squabbles of everyday life soon shatter the utopian vision of a non-restrictive nation. In 'Whisky Galore!' (1949), set during the Second World War, the inhabitants of a small Hebridean island are wilting under a chronic shortage of whisky. When a ship is wrecked on the shore, it is discovered to contain 50,000 cases of malt, which are promptly appropriated by the men of the island. All is well until an English Home Guard commander - determined to see the whisky restored to its rightful owners - calls in Her Majesty's Customs, and the islanders make frantic attempts to hide their treasured alcoholic booty! In 'The Man in the White Suite' (1951) Sidney Stratton (Guinness) is a laboratory cleaner in a textile factory who invents a material that will neither wear out nor become dirty. Initially hailed as a great discovery, Sidney's astonishing invention is suffocated by the management when they realise that if it never wears out, people will only ever have to purchase one suit of clothing. Finally, in 'The Ladykillers' (1955) a group of bank robbers struggle to silence the eccentric old lady who discovers their crime. Mrs Wilberforce (Katie Johnson) lives alone in King's Cross with her parrots. She has been led to believe that the group of men renting rooms from her, Professor Marcus (Guinness), the Major (Cecil Parker), Louis (Herbert Lom), Harry (Peter Sellers) and One-Round (Danny Green), are classical musicians. However, when one of the group's cases gets caught in the door and opens to reveal, not a musical instrument, but a plethora of banknotes, the virtuous Mrs Wilberforce vows to go to the police with the identities of the men. The criminals agree that the old lady has to be killed to silence her, but will this be as straightforward as it sounds?

• True Romance : Special Edition | DVD | (24/02/2003) from £10.98   |  Saving you £3.01 (27.41%)   |  RRP £13.99

  Written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott, True Romance is hilarious, violent and strangely moving. It's part homage to Terence Malick's Badlands, part autobiography, part nerdy male fantasy--and it's Tarantino's first and, some say, finest work. Although it fared poorly at the box office at the time it soon became an established cult classic, with a supporting cast that beggars belief: Brad Pitt, Christopher Walken, James Gandolfini, Val Kilmer, Dennis Hopper, Samuel L Jackson and Gary Oldman all play minor roles, all to devastating effect. Christian Slater stars as Clarence, the video-store clerk who's set up with Patricia Arquette's hooker Alabama on his birthday. They fall in love for real but have to hit the road when Clarence, egged on by the ghost of Elvis, kills Alabama's pimp Drexl (Oldman) and makes off with a consignment of neat cocaine, mistaking it for a suitcase of Alabama's clothes. Now both the police and the mafia are after them. Two among many great sequences stand out. The first is when cop Dennis Hopper, refusing to give up son Clarence to Christopher Walken's mafiosi, makes his famous "The Sicilians were spawned by niggers" speech. In context, it's actually not racist--it's a gesture of great courage and love from dad to son, while also calculated to mock the uptight racial sensibilities of the mafia. The second is when Alabama turns the tables on James Gandolfini's mafia henchman at the motel in a prolonged and brutal sequence which nonetheless emphasises the glowing, pink heart-shaped message at the centre of the film--that true love conquers all, albeit here in a hail of bullets that leaves practically everyone dead. On the DVD: True Romance is excellently reproduced on disc and there is an abundance of extras for this Special Edition. These include a number of mostly superfluous deleted and extended scenes, though the one in which Samuel L Jackson offers his views on the merits of "pussy-eating" is worth catching, as is the "alternate ending", which Tarantino had intended in his script. There is also access to the director's storyboards as well as commentaries from many of the cast, director Scott and from Tarantino himself, who, given his usual reluctance to provide such commentaries, is informative and chatty here. This is a superb package, although this "director's cut" is identical to the previous DVD edition. --David Stubbs

• Enemy Mine | DVD | (03/06/2002) from £17.98   |  Saving you £2.01 (11.18%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Enemy Mine is, in essence, a sci-fi remake of John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific (1969), only instead of a US pilot and a Japanese naval officer stranded on a Pacific island during WWII, here we have a lizard-like Draconian (Louis Gossett Jr.) and his mortal enemy, Earthling Dennis Quaid, both having crash-landed on a hostile planet during a brutal space battle. Forced to rely on one another for survival, they overcome their differences and become fast friends. (You can almost hear them break into an off-key version of "It's a Small World".) German director Wolfgang Petersen, so brutally honest with his film Das Boot, turns warm and cuddly on us with this intergalactic buddy movie. Although the script sets us up for an intriguing encounter, it ultimately settles for a simple and sentimental resolution. Noteworthy set design and strong performances, especially by Gossett, push this beyond mere mediocrity. His performance is fascinating, as he must speak in an alien tongue, which he maintains with artistry and consistency.--Rochelle O'Gorman, Amazon.com On the DVD: Enemy Mine on disc is presented anamorphically in its original 2.35:1 theatrical ratio with a vivid Dolby 4.0 soundtrack. Thankfully picture and sound are excellent, since the extra features are lamentably poor, consisting merely of the theatrical trailer and three (yes, three) "behind the scenes" still pictures. The disc is also equipped with multiple language and subtitle options.--Mark Walker

• Dinner With Friends | DVD | (24/02/2003) from £5.84   |  Saving you £8.15 (139.55%)   |  RRP £13.99

  Four Friends. Two Marriages. One Divorce. From the director of Moonstruck comes a movie about food fun and infidelity. Gabe and Karen Beth and Tom. Four close friends two close couples. Married for 12 years they planned on eating drinking and parenting their way into old age together. But when Gabe and Karen host a dinner to try out some new recipes on their best friends only one arrives bearing news that will test their friendship and even test their marriage. When a close

• Blue Velvet | DVD | (23/10/2000) from £10.47   |  Saving you £-4.48 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Possibly the most influential American film of the 1980's Lynch's bizarre erotic mystery spawned a whole raft of imitations with its portrayal of the dark underside of American small-town life. Critics and audiences responded to Lynch's original and startling images of sex and violence and made the film a box-office smash. Blue Velvet is renowned for creating in Dennis Hopper's Frank one of the greatest screen villains of all time.

• Big Trouble in Little China -- Two-Disc Special Edition | DVD | (06/05/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £22.99

  Trying to explain the cult appeal of John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China to the uninitiated is no easy task. The plot in a nutshell follows lorry driver Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) into San Francisco's Chinatown, where he's embroiled in street gang warfare over the mythical/magical intentions of would-be god David Lo Pan. There are wire-fu fight scenes, a floating eyeball and monsters from other dimensions. Quite simply it belongs to a genre of its own. Carpenter was drawing on years of chop-socky Eastern cinema tradition, which, at the time of the film's first release in 1986, was regrettably lost on a general audience. Predictably, it bombed. But now that Jackie Chan and Jet Li have made it big in the West, and Hong Kong cinema has spread its influence across Hollywood, it's much, much easier to enjoy this film's happy-go-lucky cocktail of influences. Russell's cocky anti-hero is easy to cheer on as he "experiences some very unreasonable things" blundering from one fight to another, and lusts after the gorgeously green-eyed Kim Cattrall. The script is peppered with countless memorable lines, too ("It's all in the reflexes"). Originally outlined as a sequel to the equally obscure Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, Big Trouble is a bona fide cult cinema delight. Jack sums up the day's reactions perfectly, "China is here? I don't even know what the Hell that means!". On the DVD: Big Trouble in Little China is released as a special edition two-disc set in its full unedited form. Some real effort has been put into both discs' animated menus, and the film itself is terrific in 2.35:1 and 5.1 (or DTS). The commentary by Carpenter and Russell may not be as fresh as their chat on The Thing, but clearly they both retain an enormous affection for the film. There are eight deleted scenes (some of which are expansions of existing scenes), plus a separate extended ending which was edited out for the right reasons. You'll also find a seven-minute featurette from the time of release, a 13-minute interview with FX guru Richard Edlund, a gallery of 200 photos, 25 pages of production notes and magazine articles from American Cinematographer and Cinefex. Best of all for real entertainment value is a music video with Carpenter and crew (the Coupe de Villes) coping with video FX and 80s hair-dos.--Paul Tonks

• The Thirteenth Floor | DVD | (03/07/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £3.99

  Computer scientist Hannon Fuller (Armin Mueller-Stahl) finds something extremely important. Knowing that he's marked for assassination, he leaves a message in the virtual reality world he's designed, hoping it will be found by colleague Douglas Hall (Craig Bierko). Hall is a suspect in Fuller's murder and indeed finds a bloody shirt in his house, with no recollection of what he did the night before. Hall plunges headlong into Fuller's world (a re-creation of l937 Los Angeles) to try to unravel the slaying and is soon knee-deep in confusion and trouble. What this film lacks in character depth and plot cohesiveness it makes up for in special effects and high concept. Fans of films like Blade Runner, Dark City, eXistenZ, and even the game Sim City should find this appealing. Of course, there's the question of letting the computers do all the heavy lifting in films while the humans walk through the plot (an all-too-familiar scenario in 1999), but the re-creation of 30s Los Angeles is certainly something to see, pallid script and acting or not. The Thirteenth Floor is a stylish modern-day noir that raises questions about technology vs. reality, all the while wrapped up in a murder-mystery story line. --Jerry Renshaw

• That Cold Day in the Park Blu-ray | Blu Ray | (24/03/2025) from £9.97   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Dead And Buried | DVD | (26/07/2004) from £27.99   |  Saving you £-11.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £16.99

  Something very strange is happening in the quiet coastal village of Potters Bluff where tourists and transients are warmly welcomed then brutally murdered! Even more shocking is when these slain strangers suddenly reappear as normal friendly citizens around town... Now the local sheriff and an eccentric mortician must uncover the horrific secret of a community where some terrifying traditions are alive and well: no one is ever truly dead and buried!

• The Piano Player | DVD | (27/07/2009) from £5.38   |  Saving you £4.61 (85.69%)   |  RRP £9.99

  As a child Alex Laney (Christopher Lambert) stands helpless by the family piano as his parents are brutally gunned down by a hired hit-man. He has lived with these demons all his life and has himself become a clinical professional killer. When notorious crime lord Christo Nichol is released from a South African prison Alex is dispatched there to protect corrupt lawyer Robert Nile (Dennis Hopper) who has a violent history with Christo. After an attempt on Nile's life they are forced to run for the only safe haven left to them the remote mining village near Cape Town where Robert grew up. There they await the showdown with the assassin and Alex must face his past and its terrible connection to Nile.

• Day After Tomorrow, The / Independence Day | DVD | (31/05/2005) from £8.47   |  Saving you £7.52 (88.78%)   |  RRP £15.99

  The Day After Tomorrow: Extremely concerned by the Earth's extremely rapid rate of climate change paleoclimatologist Adrian Hall (Quaid) races northward to a freezing New York to rescue his son as the rest of humanity streams south to escape the impending ice age... Independence Day: One of the biggest box office hits of all time delivers the ultimate encounter when mysterious and powerful aliens launch an all-out invasion against the human race. The spectacle begins when massive spaceships appear in Earth's skies. But wonder turns to terror as the ships blast destructive beams of fire down on cities all over the planet. Now the world's only hope lies with a determined band of survivors uniting for one last strike against the invaders - before it's the end of mankind.

• Murder At 1600 | DVD | (01/10/1999) from £16.69   |  Saving you £-2.70 (N/A%)   |  RRP £13.99

  The discovery of a dead female staffer in a White House restroom galvanizes a D.C. homicide cop (Wesley Snipes), but the results aren't hard to predict: the crime implicates the Oval Office, the presidential bureaucracy impedes the investigation, and so on. What isn't so predictable is that the whole thing leads to an improbable climax involving secret tunnels created by Abraham Lincoln. (Snipes's character, by the way, is a Civil War buff.) The creaky mystery feels a little anachronistic from the get-go, with some particularly corny and laughable dialogue. --Tom Keogh

• Easy Rider | Blu Ray | (09/05/2016) from £22.98   |  Saving you £7.00 (33.35%)   |  RRP £27.99

  This box-office hit from 1969 is an important pioneer of the American independent cinema movement, and a generational touchstone to boot. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper play hippie motorcyclists crossing the Southwest and encountering a crazy quilt of good and bad people. Jack Nicholson turns up in a significant role as an attorney who joins their quest for awhile and articulates society's problem with freedom as Fonda's and Hopper's characters embody it. Hopper directed, essentially bringing the no-frills filmmaking methods of legendary, drive-in movie producer Roger Corman (The Little Shop of Horrors) to a serious feature for the mainstream. The film can't help but look a bit dated now (a psychedelic sequence toward the end particularly doesn't hold up well) but it retains its original power, sense of daring and epochal impact. -- Tom Keogh, Amazon.com

• Fortitude - Season 2 | Blu Ray | (01/05/2017) from £8.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  We return to Fortitude in the aftermath of the horrific events which have changed the town forever. The wasp contamination has been eliminated, but the effects are still fresh and life isn't the same for the once close knit community. Dan is missing and is now presumed dead despite Eric's desperate attempts to find him, and Governor Odegard is desperately fighting to save her job and a town in disrepute. Out in the stunning wilderness, nature is growing ever more dangerous and Fortitude is faced with unpredictable new threats. The sky has turned red with a Blood Aurora, and a mysterious new stranger arrives at the isolated town with an unsettling agenda. When another murder brings terror the already fragile community, we soon realise that in Fortitude nothing, and no-one, is ever how they seem.

• Paparazzi | DVD | (05/09/2005) from £5.98   |  Saving you £13.01 (217.56%)   |  RRP £18.99

  When a bunch of photographers almost kill him and his family, a Hollywood star sets out to exact revenge.

• Keanu Reeves - Speed / Point Break / Johnny Mnemonic / Chain Reaction / A Walk In The Clouds | DVD | (13/03/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £34.99

  Speed (1994): Hold on tight for a rush of pulse-pounding thrills breathtaking stunts and unexpected romance in a film you'll want to see again and again. Keanu Reeves stars as Jack Traven an LAPD Swat team specialist who is sent to defuse a bomb that a revenge-driven extortionist (Dennis Hopper) has planted on a bus. But until he does Jack and passenger Sandra Bullock must keep the bus speeding through the streets of Los Angeles at more than 50 miles an hour - or the bomb wi

• Kojak - Vol. 2 | DVD | (01/10/2001) from £10.03   |  Saving you £-0.04 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Three episodes of the acclaimed crime series starry Telly Savalas: ""Death is Not a Passing Grade"" ""Last Rites for a Dead Priest"" and ""Deliver Us From Evil"".