"Actor: Mary Jo Keenen"

• Danielle Steel's Kaleidoscope | DVD | (29/09/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  After the shocking death of her parents Hilary (Jaclyn Smith) and her two younger sisters are torn apart and separated for over 30 years. Loving families take in the youngest girls but Hilary is left behind to endure a terrible childhood of cruel abuse and desperate poverty. Yet with iron determination Hilary achieves her dream of success... but erases all trace of her traumatic past. Then approaching death an old friend of their parents hires private detective John Chapman to trace the three women and unite them again. Hilary fights desperately to keep her painful memories buried and as Chapman probes beneath the hardened shell of her life he discovers an anguished and vulnerable woman.

• Thumbtanic | DVD | (10/03/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  At the beginning of Thumbtanic, thumb-puppet/animation maestro Steve Oedekerk's superb parody of Titanic, the camera pans over the wreckage of the, err, Thumbtanic, revealing a quantity of unopened crates marked HULL PATCH KIT, SURPLUS BINOCULARS, ICEBERG RADAR and 1200 INFLATABLE RAFTS. From there on it just gets funnier. Oedekerk specialises in bizarre "filmettes", as he terms them, in which the characters are played by real human thumbs with faces grafted onto them via computer wizardry. Quite apart from the startling realisation that Leonardo DiCaprio actually does look like a thumb wearing a wig, the laughs don't stop from beginning to end. We see the passengers lining up, talent-contest fashion, so they can all have a turn at doing or saying something memorable at the sharp end of the ship. There's a topless scene involving the thumb-incarnation of Kate Winslet. As the ship goes down, one enterprising thumb sells male passengers babies and sex-changes, while the brief love affair between Jake and Geranium is finally eclipsed by the realisation that all the passengers survive and there are "plenty of snacks" for everyone! The perfect antidote to all those unfunny film parodies, Thumbtanic elevates post-pub, kebab-in-hand viewing to the status of an art form. --Roger Thomas