"Actor: Melody Thomas"

• Piranha | DVD | (21/10/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  As a producer, Roger Corman has always loved to make low-budget rip-offs of hit movies, and Piranha is his typically cheeky take on Jaws--and, as so often with Corman, in many ways it's funnier and more entertaining than the original. Directed with gusto by schlock-horror specialist Joe Dante and sharply scripted by John Sayles, it replaces one huge underwater toothy monster with dozens of little ones and ups the body count by a factor of 10 or so. Two hapless teenagers, hiking in a remote mountain region, stumble on a secret US military research lab. They don't last long, but their intrusion leads to the release into the local river system of a huge shoal of super-intelligent piranha, originally specially bred for use in Vietnam. Downstream from the virulent little munchers lie a kiddies' holiday camp and a tacky new waterfront theme park. Lunch time, fellas! Sayles, with his staunch left-wing credentials, slips in some mordant political satire at the expense of the military-industrial complex, and authority figures of any kind come off pretty badly, but the satire never gets in the way of the gleeful black humour. The two leads, Bradford Dillman and Heather Menzies, are fairly pallid, but there are ripe cameos from such cult horror-movie icons as Kevin McCarthy, Dick Miller and Barbara Steele. Pino Donaggio's score impudently borrows aspects of John Williams' famous Jaws theme while never quite infringing copyright. The movie was successful enough to spawn a much-inferior sequel, Piranha II: The Spawning (1982), which marked the inauspicious directing debut of one James Cameron. On the DVD: Piranha on disc comes with just the theatrical trailer as an extra. The transfer is a respectable job, reproducing the original's full-screen ratio. --Philip Kemp

• The Beguiled (Special Edition) | Blu Ray | (10/11/2020) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• The Beguiled | DVD | (02/01/2006) from £9.97   |  Saving you £0.02 (0.20%)   |  RRP £9.99

  One man... seven women... in a strange house! Set in the Deep South during the Civil War The Beguiled stars Eastwood as John McBurney a severely wounded soldier who is near death when discovered by a teenage girl. She takes him to the mansion that serves as her boarding school where he slowly begins to regain his health under the care of headmistress Martha Farnsworth (Geraldine Page) and the dozen or so girls who live there. As McBurney gets better he begins to charm the girls all of whom are starved for affection because of the war's claim on their men. At length powerful undercurrents of jealousy saturate the atmosphere as the girls and even the headmistress begin to vie for McBurney's attention. He first becomes involved with one of the oldest of the girls Edwina Dabney (Elizabeth Hartman) but ultimately finds it difficult to resist the charms of some of her schoolmates. His promiscuity becomes his undoing.