"Actor: Don Hicks"

• Child's Play | DVD | (27/12/2004) from £6.29   |  Saving you £9.70 (154.21%)   |  RRP £15.99

  The Fear of the Year is Here! From Tom Holland creator of 'Fright Night' and 'Psycho 2' a new dimension in chilling terror. They thought they'd given Andy the perfect birthday present. He had wanted a 'Good Guy' doll ever since it was advertised. But why is Andy saying 'Chucky' is alive? And why has he appeared at the scene of two shocking murders? The horrific answers will lead his frightened parents through the warped mind of a psychotic maniac into a nightmare maze of powerful

• Dick Tracy | DVD | (12/02/2001) from £8.25   |  Saving you £6.74 (81.70%)   |  RRP £14.99

  A flawed but stylish adaptation of the Chester Gould comic strip by director Warren Beatty, who also stars in the title role. The minimalist plot involves a battalion of baddies who confront the intrepid detective in a series of strung-together vignettes. Al Pacino is a comedic if overblown standout as Big Boy Caprice and Madonna simply smoulders as aggressive blonde bombshell Breathless Mahoney. It matters not that the plot is Spartan, as this dazzling eye candy is much enhanced by Stephen Sondheim's songs, including the Academy Award-winning ditty, "Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)". Beatty took his cue from the source material and concentrated on the relationships between these people, whether strained, romantic or hateful. The performances are subtle and more amusing than you would expect from such a visually bold picture. Shot in bright, primary colours, this also won Oscars for Best Art/Set Direction and Makeup (for those inventively hideous criminals). Watch for well-known names, such as Dustin Hoffman and Dick Van Dyke, in cameo appearances and supporting roles. --Rochelle O'Gorman

• Sebastiane | DVD | (18/06/2001) from £20.00   |  Saving you £-0.01 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The first and only film shot entirely in subtitled Latin, Sebastiane is Derek Jarman's first work as a director (though he shared the job with the less well-known Paul Humfress) and is a strange combination of gay nudie movie, pocket-sized Ancient Roman epic and meditation upon the image of Saint Sebastian. It opens with the Lindsay Kemp dance troupe romping around with huge fake phalluses to represent the Ken Russell-style decadence of the court of the Emperor Diocletian in AD 303, then decamps to Tuscany as Diocletian's favourite guard Sebastian (Leonardo Treviglio) is demoted to ordinary soldier and dispatched to a backwater barracks because the Emperor (Robert Medley) suspects him of being a covert Christian. The bulk of the film consists of athletic youths in minimal thongs romping around the countryside, soaking themselves down between bouts of manly horseplay or sylvan frolic. It all comes to a bad end as the lecherous but guilt-ridden commanding officer Severus (Barney James) fails to cop off with Sebastian and instead visits floggings and tortures upon his naked torso, finally ordering his men to riddle the future saint with arrows, thus securing him a place in cultural history. The public schoolboy cleverness of scripting dialogue in Latin--a popular soldier's insult is represented by the Greek "Oedipus"--works surprisingly well, with the cast reeling off profane Roman dialogue as if it were passionate Italian declarations rather than marbled classical sentences. The film suffers from the not-uncommon failing that the best-looking actor is given the largest role but delivers the weakest performance: Treviglio's Sebastian is a handsome cipher, far less interesting than the rest of the troubled, bullying, awkward or horny soldiers in the platoon. Peter Hinwood, famous for the title role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, can be glimpsed in the palace orgy. The countryside looks as good as the cast, and Brian Eno delivers an evocative, ambient-style score. --Kim Newman

• The Dog Who Saved Easter | DVD | (31/03/2014) from £5.38   |  Saving you £4.61 (85.69%)   |  RRP £9.99

  It's Easter and everyone's favourite canine is back! The Bannisters are heading out on a family cruise and sending Zeus (voiced by Mario Lopez) to doggie day care. Everything is going according to plan until the day care's crosstown rival hires a trio of crooks to sabotage the fledgling business. Zeus will make some new friends and new enemies as he uses all his tricks to save the day care and Easter!

• The Halls Of Montezuma | DVD | (03/05/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Once again returning to the genre to which he was perhaps best-suited, director Lewis Milestone traces the fate of a Marine platoon during WWII. The film stars Richard Widmark as the no-nonsense Lt. Carl Anderson, an officer charged with the responibility of leading his unit on a scouting mission to capture prisoners from an experimental rocket-launching facility and bring them back for interrogation. Among his platoon are veterans Pidgeon Lane (Jack Palance), Doc (Karl Malden), and Sgt. Zelenko (Neville Brand), as well as raw recruits Coffman (Robert Wagner) and Cpl. Stuart Conroy (Richard Hylton). Anderson is skilled at subtly motivating the varied group of characters, while suffering himself from crushing headaches. The platoon attacks the island, taking losses on the heavily defended beach. When they try to take a strategic ridge, they're pinned down by rocket fire whose source is impossible to locate. In desperation, Anderson is ordered to take a hand-picked patrol behind enemy lines to bring back prisoners. After some painful losses, they finally return with prisoners. Despite occasional war movie cliches, this is a solid, exceptionally well acted effort, which gives full weight to the terrible human cost of war. The film is also notable for great performances by Malden, Palance, Widmark, Webb, and the very young Wagner.

• Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit | DVD | (24/03/2003) from £24.82   |  Saving you £-4.83 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Jeanette Winterson's semi-autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit transfers wonderfully to the screen in this BBC adaptation (with a screenplay by Winterson). Jess is the adopted daughter of evangelical Christians living in the northwest of England in the 1960s. Her mother wants Jess to be a missionary, but when she falls in love with Melanie, Jess begins to realise that there is more to life than church. When Jess' mother begins to suspect the girls of "unnatural passions" she tries to destroy their relationship with the help of Pastor Finch (Kenneth Cranham) and his congregation. But their efforts--including a terrifying attempt at exorcism--only push Jess further away. Jess eventually understands that the only way to survive is to escape, and she sets her sights on a place at Oxford. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is both a broad comedy and a moving coming-of-age story. Charlotte Coleman is perfect as the teenage Jess, attempting to reconcile her religious devotion and her adolescent passion, but the film belongs to Geraldine McEwan as Jess' mother. McEwan obviously relishes Winterson's script, and she creates a character both monstrous, ridiculous and surprisingly sympathetic. It's a difficult role to carry off, but McEwan succeeds. Her performance is the high-point of this award-winning, provocative film. --Simon Leake, Amazon.com

• To The Shores Of Tripoli | DVD | (03/05/2004) from £5.84   |  Saving you £7.15 (122.43%)   |  RRP £12.99

  When a carefree playboy (John Payne) joins the Marine Corps he tests the skill and patience of the tough veteran sergeant (Randolph Scott) who tries to whip him into a real Marine. But as his training proceeds the recruit's cocky selfishness is replaced by selfless valour and he eventually earns the love of a beautiful Navy nurse (Maureen O'Hara)...

• Childs Play - Limited Edition Steelbook | Blu Ray | (29/09/2014) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £22.99

  The chills come thick and fast as voodoo and terror meet within an innocent-looking doll inhabited by the soul of a serial killer who isn't ready to die. From the director of Fright Night comes a clever playful and stylish thriller with excellent special effects and heart pounding suspense guaranteed to scare! After 6-year-old Andy Barclay's (Alex Vincent) babysitter is violently pushed out of a window to her death nobody believes him when he says that 'Chucky ' his new birthday doll did it! Until things start going terribly wrong... dead wrong. And when an ensuing rampage of gruesome murders lead a detective (Chris Sarandon) back to the same toy he discovers that the real terror has just begun... the deranged doll has plans to transfer his evil spirit into a living human being - young Andy!

• Halls Of Montezuma | Blu Ray | (31/12/2019) from £14.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Although Lewis Milestone had been American cinema's premier maker of war films for three decades, 1951's The Halls of Montezuma is one of his more marginal pictures. Milestone had already won an Academy Award for the single most honoured film about WWI, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), and made one of the most distinctive contemporaneous films of WWII, A Walk in the Sun (1945)--a notable influence on Saving Private Ryan, by the way--but by the time of Montezuma the hallmarks of his directorial style--such as his syncopated tracking shots--were becoming mannerisms, and the screenplay's rhythms of personal crises set against the bigger picture of the military campaign are pretty mechanical. That still leaves room to accord the picture a marginal recommendation: it's well-cast, competently made, and free of "Hollywood heroics". Richard Widmark stars as a Marine platoon leader who, having brought only seven of his men through Guadalcanal, is determined to see them safely through the next island conquest. The lieutenant was a schoolteacher in civilian life--as we see in flashbacks--and one member of his command is a former student (Richard Hylton) he helped overcome fear. Other platoon members include ex-boxer Jack Palance, trigger-happy bad boy Skip Homeier, hardcase veterans Neville Brand and Bert Freed, and Karl Malden as a philosophical corpsman. However, the most arresting performance is given by Milestone discovery Richard Boone, making his screen debut as a sympathetic colonel stuck with fighting the Japanese and fighting off a miserable cold at the same time. --Richard T Jameson, Amazon.com

• The Halls Of Montezuma | DVD | (09/05/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Once again returning to the genre to which he was perhaps best-suited director Lewis Milestone traces the fate of a Marine platoon in the Pacific theater during WWII. The film stars Richard Widmark as the no-nonsense Lt. Carl Anderson an officer charged with the responibility of leading his unit on a scouting mission to capture prisoners from an experimental rocket-launching facility and bring them back for interrogation. Among his platoon are veterans Pidgeon Lane (Jack Palance) D

• 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

• Chucky: Complete 7-Movie Collection | DVD | (23/10/2017) from £20.00   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Chucky returns after the events of Curse of Chucky to continue terrorizing his wheelchair-prone human victim, Nica. Meanwhile, the killer doll has some scores to settle with his old enemies, with the help of his former wife.