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Review Network / The Way To The Stars [1945]
Actors & Directors
  • Rosamund John
  • Michael Redgrave
  • John Mills
  • Douglas Montgomery
  • Anthony Asquith
  • Renee Asherson
Release date: 2007-08-20
Run time: 104 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £6.96

Review The Way To The Stars [1945] / Network:


Review 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment / The Ghost And Mrs Muir [1947]
Actors & Directors
  • Rex Harrison
  • Gene Tierney
  • Edna Best
  • Joseph L. Mankiewicz
  • George Sanders
  • Anna Lee
Release date: 2005-05-09
Run time: 100 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £2.99

Review The Ghost And Mrs Muir [1947] / 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment:


Review Paramount Home Entertainment / Rosemary's Baby [1968]
Actors & Directors
  • John Cassavetes
  • Roman Polanski
  • Mia Farrow
  • Sidney Blackmer
  • Maurice Evans
  • Ruth Gordon
Release date: 2001-11-05
Run time: 131 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £5.97

Review Rosemary's Baby [1968] / Paramount Home Entertainment:

For Rosemary's Baby, his modern horror tale about Satanic worship and a pregnant woman's decline into madness, Roman Polanski moves from the traditional monolithic mansions of Gothic flicks to an apartment building in New York City. Based on Ira Levin's novel, the story concerns Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy Woodhouse who find the apartment of their dreams in a luxurious complex in Manhattan. Soon after moving in and making friends with a group of elderly neighbours, Guy's career takes off and Rosemary discovers she is pregnant. Their happiness seems complete. But gradually Rosemary begins to sense that something is wrong with this baby, and slowly and surely her life begins to unravel. Polanski uses such subtle means to build up the sense of preternatural disquiet that initially you suspect Rosemary's prenatal paranoia to be a figment of her imagination. But the guilty parties and their demonic plan to make Rosemary the receptacle of their master's child are eventually revealed and, as Rosemary looses her grip on reality, she realises that no one can be trusted. The performances are excellent throughout; Farrow as the young wife is so fragile that you wonder how she made it unscathed to adulthood and John Cassavetes is horrifyingly duplicitous as her husband Guy. But the real star is Polanski's masterful direction. The mood is at the same time oppressive and hysterical with the mounting terror coming from the situation and gradually unravelling plot rather than any schlock horror moments. [+]
On the DVD: the Dolby 5. 1 soundtrack shows off Christopher Komeda's eerie "lullaby" score to it's haunting best. The film is presented in 1. 85:1 anamorphic widescreen and is relatively free of speckle and dust, some scenes filmed in low light are slightly grainier but this adds to the oppressive tension that Polanski is building up in the film. In terms of extras there is a 20-minute "making of" feature from 1968 and retrospective interviews with Polanski, production designer Richard Sylbert and producer Robert Evans. -Kristen Bowditch.

Review Uca Catalogue / It Happened One Night [1934]
Actors & Directors
  • Frank Capra
  • Alan Hale
  • Clark Gable
  • Ward Bond
  • Walter Connolly
  • Claudette Colbert
Release date: 2006-05-08
Run time: 101 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £4.15

Review It Happened One Night [1934] / Uca Catalogue:


Review Optimum Home Entertainment / Till Death Us Do Part [1969]
Actors & Directors
  • Warren Mitchell
  • Bill Maynard
  • Dandy Nichols
  • Anthony Booth
  • Una Stubbs
  • Norman Cohen
Release date: 2006-10-30
Run time: 96 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £4.25

Review Till Death Us Do Part [1969] / Optimum Home Entertainment:


Review Universal Pictures UK / The Birds [1963]
Actors & Directors
  • Rod Taylor
  • Alfred Hitchcock
  • Ethel Griffies
  • Jessica Tandy
  • Suzanne Pleshette
  • Tippi Hedren
Release date: 2005-10-17
Run time: 115 min.
RRP: £9.99
Price: £3.37

Review The Birds [1963] / Universal Pictures UK:

Vacationing in northern California, Alfred Hitchcock was struck by a story in a Santa Cruz newspaper: "Seabird Invasion Hits Coastal Homes". From this peculiar incident, and his memory of a short story by Daphne du Maurier, the master of suspense created one of his strangest and most terrifying films. The Birds follows a chic blonde, Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), as she travels to the coastal town of Bodega Bay to hook up with a rugged fellow (Rod Taylor) she's only just met. Before long the town is attacked by marauding birds, and Hitchcock's skill at staging action is brought to the fore. Beyond the superb effects, however, The Birds is also one of Hitchcock's most psychologically complicated scenarios, a tense study of violence, loneliness, and complacency. What really gets under your skin are not the bird skirmishes but the anxiety and the eerie quiet between attacks. The director elevated an unknown model, Tippi Hedren (mother of Melanie Griffith), to being his latest cool, blond leading lady, an experience that was not always easy on the much-pecked Ms. Hedren. Still, she returned for the next Hitchcock picture, the underrated Marnie. Treated with scant attention by serious critics in 1963, The Birds has grown into a classic and-despite the sci-fi trappings-one of Hitchcock's most serious films. [+]
-Robert Horton.

Review Warner Home Video / Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street [Blu-ray] [2007]
Actors & Directors
  • Timothy Spall
  • Helena Bonham-Carter
  • Sacha Baron Cohen
  • Alan Rickman
  • Tim Burton
  • Johnny Depp
Release date: 2008-05-19
Run time: 112 min.
RRP: £27.99
Price: £15.50

Review Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street [Blu-ray] [2007] / Warner Home Video:

After years of rumours, it turns out that Tim Burton was the perfect visionary to film Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Stephen Sondheim's Broadway masterpiece, and the result is a macabre and moving musical movie as enthralling as anything Burton has ever done. The show's mix of gothic horror, Grand Guignol, very dark humor, and witty and beautiful music never was the stuff of traditional musical comedy, but it's a powerful work, and perhaps the richest of the late 20th century. In the movie, Burton's frequent collaborator, Johnny Depp, plays Todd, a wronged man whose lust for revenge drives him to murder (an 19th-century legend who has been traced to a real-life barber). Helena Bonham Carter, another Burton mainstay, is Mrs. Lovett, the barber's partner-in-unspeakable-crime. It's no surprise that Depp is an excellent choice to convey Todd's brooding intensity and volcanic rage, but he can also sing a score that is so challenging it has often played in opera houses (though not with the same style as the Broadway original, Len Cariou, and he occasionally lapses into pop style). Bonham Carter is small of voice and lacks the humour of the original Broadway Lovett, Angela Lansbury, but she sings on pitch, in rhythm, and in character at the same time, which is no small feat for a Sondheim show. Aficionados will regret the loss of certain musical passages-"The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" is just an instrumental overture and the chorus is gone altogether, among others, but the reassuring presence of orchestrator Jonathan Tunick and conductor Paul Gemignani ensures that the music feels right and sounds great. And the film's depiction of a Victorian London hellhole, with cinematography by Dariusz Wolski and costumes by Colleen Atwood, also looks and feels right. The excellent cast is filled out by Alan Rickman as the villainous Judge Turpin, Timothy Spall as his seedy Beadle, Sacha Baron Cohen as a rival barber, Jamie Campbell Bower as the young lover Anthony, Jayne Wisener as his object of affection, and Ed Sanders as the young Toby. [+]
For fans of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp who don't think they like musicals, Sweeney Todd should be a revelation (though not for the squeamish, as the gore is intense and completely appropriate). For fans of Broadway and Sondheim, it's hard to imagine getting a better adaptation than this. The fact that there's no newly composed Oscar-bait song sung by a Josh Groban-type over the end credits only makes it better. -David Horiuchi Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter, Alan Rickman.

Review Sony Pictures Home Entertainment / From Here To Eternity [1953]
Actors & Directors
  • Deborah Kerr
  • Burt Lancaster
  • Fred Zinnemann
  • Frank Sinatra
  • Donna Reed
  • Montgomery Clift
Release date: 2002-01-14
Run time: 114 min.
RRP: £19.99
Price: £3.89

Review From Here To Eternity [1953] / Sony Pictures Home Entertainment:

From Here to Eternity offers a much more heartfelt interpretation of the event that propelled the United States into World War II than any film made in recent years. Here there are no angst-ridden scenes where "true love" returns from the dead, no costly CGI and definitely no Hallmark happy ending. This is a film about illicit sex, military machismo and tragic loss of love, friendship and ultimately life. The filmmakers did, however, have to make some compromises when adapting James Jones's novel: Alma becomes a "hostess" rather than a prostitute and the very downbeat ending, where Captain Holmes is essentially rewarded for his brutality by the military, was replaced with the morally acceptable punishment of his actions by a more self-aware army. Although Private Robert E Lee Pruitt's story provides the meat of the film, there are other subplots woven into the narrative, including a couple of doomed love affairs, which explore themes of adultery and social acceptance. Sergeant Warden (Burt Lancaster) begins a torrid affair with the commander's wife Karen (Deborah Kerr) leading to one of the most famous moments in movie history-the "clinch in the surf". From then on everything is challenged. Love, honour and eventually whether you should conform or stand up for what you believe in. At the end the couples are left wondering about the future of their relationship, but fate decides for them as the Japanese launch their attack on Pearl Harbor, leaving us with one of the most dramatic and moving endings of any war film. On the DVD: The black and white film is not anamorphically enhanced but presented full frame in its original aspect ratio of 1. [+]
37:1, although the transfer is well done and the picture is pretty sharp. Sound is 2. 0 mono rather than the standard 5. 1 reworking of the audio track, and it works. The dialogue is clear without any noticeable hiss. There's a 22-minute "making of" documentary, which doesn't really do justice to the film and contains very little information of interest. Along with this is Fred Zinnemann's As I See It, an extract from the director's home video footage from the shoot. You also get the theatrical trailer, but the best feature is the audio commentary, by Fred Zinnemann's son Tim and screenwriter Alvin Sargent, which has some fantastic detail about the struggle between director and studio-head Harry Cohn over casting, along with the run-ins with the censor and US military over the "inflammatory nature" of the film. -Kristen Bowditch.

Review Warner Home Video / Camelot [1967]
Actors & Directors
  • Franco Nero
  • Richard Harris
  • David Hemmings
  • Vanessa Redgrave
  • Joshua Logan
  • Lionel Jeffries
Release date: 2006-06-01
Run time: 175 min.
RRP: £13.99
Price: £4.97

Review Camelot [1967] / Warner Home Video:

Joshua Logan's 1967 film of the hit Broadway musical about the love triangle between King Arthur (Richard Harris), Guenevere (Vanessa Redgrave), and Sir Lancelot (Franco Nero) is strong on star emphasis and weak on such fundamentals as story and sets. Except for a handful of solidly dramatic scenes-such as Guenevere grieving, late in the film, for the ruination she and Lancelot have caused-there's not a lot to get excited about. (The story's theme of a lost, great society, however, certainly struck a chord in the 1960s. )The Lerner-Loewe songs ("If Ever I Would Leave You", "Camelot") pretty much sell themselves, even if they are, at best, only proficiently performed in this movie. -Tom Keogh.

Review Warner Home Video / The Complete James Dean Collection : East Of Eden / Rebel Without A Cause / Giant [1955]
Actors & Directors
  • Rock Hudson
  • Nicholas Ray
  • Elia Kazan
  • James Dean
  • Raymond Massey
  • Elizabeth Taylor
  • Carroll Baker
  • George Stevens Jr.
Release date: 2005-06-06
Run time: 412 min.
RRP: £40.99
Price: £13.68

Review The Complete James Dean Collection : East Of Eden / Rebel Without A Cause / Giant [1955] / Warner Home Video:


Review Warner Home Video / Full Metal Jacket [HD DVD] [1987]
Actors & Directors
  • Matthew Modine
  • Stanley Kubrick
  • Adam Baldwin
  • Vincent D'Onofrio
Release date: 2008-03-24
Run time: 116 min.
RRP: £25.99
Price: £3.75

Review Full Metal Jacket [HD DVD] [1987] / Warner Home Video:


Review 2 Entertain Video / Doctor Who - Resurrection Of The Daleks [1983]
Actors & Directors
  • Janet Fielding
  • Peter Davison
Release date: 2002-11-18
Run time: 98 min.
RRP: £19.99
Price: £5.99

Review Doctor Who - Resurrection Of The Daleks [1983] / 2 Entertain Video:

The Doctor Who adventure "Resurrection of the Daleks" marked the Doctor's first encounter with his most famous foe since 1979's "Destiny of the Daleks" five years earlier, and Peter Davison's only full-scale battle with the cybernetic aliens. Weakened by a Movellan virus the Daleks assault a space station prison where Davros is being held. The Daleks plan to use duplicates of the Doctor and his companions to assassinate leading Timelords, and further duplicates to take over the Earth. The action is split between the space station and abandoned London riverside warehouses, and is notable for its grim tone and high body count. The duplicate police-assassins recall the Autons from the Jon Pertwee "Spearhead from Space" (1970) and proved controversial on original broadcast. Also notable is that although the show was designed as a four-part adventure it was transmitted in two double-length episodes. This edition presents the story in the original four parts. Meanwhile there are more than the usual quota of name guest stars, including Rodney Bewes, Rula Lenska and Lesley Grantham. The tale also marks Janet Fielding's final appearance as Tegan. In every respect this is a key adventure in the history of Doctor Who, even if the tense, incident-packed story is ultimately weighed down by too many elements to resolve them all satisfactorily. [+]
On the DVD: Doctor Who: Resurrection of the Daleks is accompanied by a warm and highly jocular commentary from Peter Davison, Janet Fielding and director Mathew Robinson. A new 18-minute "On Location" documentary intriguingly revisits the now upmarket waterfront locations with interviews featuring producer John Nathan Turner, writer Eric Saward and Matthew Robinson. A seven-minute clip from Breakfast Time spotlights Janet Fielding and John Nathan-Turner, and composers Brian Hodgson and Malcolm Clarke. Also included are seven minutes of deleted and extended scenes, a BBC1 trailer and a photo gallery that plays automatically for three minutes, set to sound effects. There is optional on-screen information text and selectable subtitles for the programmes and commentary. The sound is available in broadcast mono, a remarkably effective Dolby Digital 5. 1 remix, and as a mono music only track. TARDIS Cam No. 4 is a very short new digital animation. -Gary S Dalkin.

Review Bfi Video / British Transport Films Collection - Vol. 2 - See Britain By Train [1952]
Release date: 2005-11-28
Run time: 261 min.
RRP: £19.99
Price: £8.98

Review British Transport Films Collection - Vol. 2 - See Britain By Train [1952] / Bfi Video:


Review Optimum Home Entertainment / No Limit (Digitally restored and remastered) [1935]
Actors & Directors
  • Wilfred Lawson
  • Naill MacGinnis
  • Dennis Shaw
  • George Formby
Release date: 2007-05-07
Run time: 90 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £5.38

Review No Limit (Digitally restored and remastered) [1935] / Optimum Home Entertainment:


Review Warner Home Video / Three Kings [2000]
Actors & Directors
  • Ice Cube
  • David O. Russell
  • George Clooney
  • Cliff Curtis
  • Spike Jonze
  • Mark Wahlberg
Release date: 2005-04-18
Run time: 114 min.
RRP: £13.99
Price: £1.73

Review Three Kings [2000] / Warner Home Video:

A confident hybrid of M*A*S*H, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Dr. Strangelove, Three Kings is one of the most seriously funny war movies ever made. Improving the premise of Kelly's Heroes with scathing intelligence, it explores the odd connection between war and consumerism in the age of Humvees and cellular phones. Writer-director David O. Russell's third film (after Spanking the Monkey and Flirting with Disaster) is a no-holds-barred portrait of personal conscience in the volatile arena of politics, played out by one of the most gifted filmmakers to emerge in the 1990s. George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube and Spike Jonze (director of Being John Malkovich) play a quartet of US soldiers who, disillusioned by Operation Desert Storm, decide to steal $23 million in gold hijacked from Kuwait by Saddam Hussein's army. Getting the bullion out of an Iraqi stronghold is easy; keeping it is a potentially lethal proposition. By the end of their mercenary mission, the Americans can no longer ignore war-time atrocities, and conscience demands their aid to Kuwaiti rebels abandoned by President George Bush's fickle war-time policy. This is serious stuff indeed, but Russell infuses Three Kings with a keen sense of the absurd, and the entire film is an exercise in breathtaking visual ingenuity. Despite a conventional ending that's mildly disappointing for such a brashly original film, Three Kings conveys the brutal madness of war while making you laugh out loud at the insanity. [+]
-Jeff Shannon.

Review Cinema Reserve (20th Century Fox) / The Day The Earth Stood Still (2 Disc Cinema Reserve Special Edition) [1951]
Actors & Directors
  • Tyler McVey
  • Hugh Marlowe
  • Michael Rennie
  • Robert Wise
  • Patricia Neal
  • Drew Pearson
Release date: 2006-02-27
Run time: 88 min.
RRP: £17.99
Price: £7.69

Review The Day The Earth Stood Still (2 Disc Cinema Reserve Special Edition) [1951] / Cinema Reserve (20th Century Fox):

A hallmark of the science fiction genre as well as a wry commentary on the political climate of the 1950s, The Day the Earth Stood Still is a sci-fi movie less concerned with special effects than with a social parable. A spacecraft lands in Washington, D. C. , carrying a humanoid messenger from another world (Michael Rennie) imparting a warning to the people of Earth to cease their violent behavior. But panic ensues as the messenger lands and is shot by a nervous soldier. His large robot companion destroys the Capitol as the messenger escapes the confines of the hospital. He moves in with a family as a boarder and blends into society to observe the full range of the human experience. Director Robert Wise (West Side Story) not only provides one of the most recognisable icons of the science fiction world in his depiction of the massive robot loyal to his master, but he avoids the obvious camp elements of the story to create a quiet and observant story highlighting both the good and the bad in human nature. -Robert Lane, Amazon. com.

Review Sony Pictures Home Entertainment / Major Dundee (Special Extended Edition) [1965]
Actors & Directors
  • Jim Hutton
  • Sam Peckinpah
  • James Coburn
  • Senta Berger
  • Charlton Heston
  • Richard Harris
Release date: 2008-06-02
Run time: 130 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £6.89

Review Major Dundee (Special Extended Edition) [1965] / Sony Pictures Home Entertainment:

This restoration of Sam Peckinpah's 1965 western Major Dundee is nothing short of magnificent, a noble attempt at restoring a famously wrecked masterpiece. When Peckinpah went over budget and over schedule during the Mexico shoot, unshot scenes were cancelled and the footage rudely cut by the studio. The director disowned the results. In 2005, surviving footage was patched back in, and a new musical soundtrack commissioned to replace the score Peckinpah hated. This raises some legitimate questions about interpreting a director's intentions, and about messing with film history, but Major Dundee-The Extended Version is such a rousing, mysterious experience, one feels grateful. Major Dundee (Charlton Heston) is a vainglorious officer busted to the decidedly inglorious job of overseeing prisoners in a fort in New Mexico. An abduction gives him the excuse to mount an expedition into Mexico, chasing the perpetrators and perhaps a shot at greatness. His ragtag posse includes Confederate POWs, notably one Captain Ben Tyreen (Richard Harris), whose intense former friendship with Dundee is tainted with a sense of betrayal on both sides. (Heston and Harris, two actors not known for subtlety, are splendid. ) Part Ahab, part Alexander the Great, Dundee leads the expedition away from its purpose and into a near-mythic kind of wandering. [+]
Peckinpah gets everything right-the landscapes, the sneaky humour, the code of men. He also takes time to distinguish the supporting characters, such as Jim Hutton's awkward young officer and Senta Berger's stranded widow. The Peckinpah stock company of amazing character actors is in place, too, including James Coburn, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, L. Q. Jones, and Slim Pickens. It will never be exactly what Peckinpah envisioned, but now Major Dundee rides suspiciously close to greatness. -Robert Horton.

Review Sony Pictures Home Entertainment / Bewitched - Series 3 - Complete [1966]
Actors & Directors
  • Agnes Moorehead
  • Elizabeth Montgomery
  • Dick York
Release date: 2006-07-24
Run time: 785 min.
RRP: £34.99
Price: £11.01

Review Bewitched - Series 3 - Complete [1966] / Sony Pictures Home Entertainment:

The introduction of colour takes a bit of the magic out of Bewitched, but adorable toddler Tabitha brings her own special enchantment to this third season, which earned Emmy nominations for Outstanding Comedy Series. Also nominated were Elizabeth Montgomery as sophisticated, albeit domesticated, witch Samantha, Agnes Morehead as her disapproving mother Endora, and Marion Lorne as addled Aunt Clara, whose mis-spellings wreak havoc in the Stephens household, as when she unwittingly conjures up Ben Franklin in "My Friend Ben. " As the season begins, "typical average baby" Tabitha reveals her heretofore dormant supernatural powers. In the next episode, "The Moment of Truth," Darrin (Dick York) is distressed to find out about his daughter. "Remember 'normal'?" he wails to his wife. "We were going to have a normal married life" Though one laments that Serena is missing in action, the return of Bernard Fox as Dr. Bombay (in "There's Gold in Them Thar Pills") and Paul Lynde's practical joker Uncle Arthur are always welcome, even if Arthur's feud with Endora in "Endora Moves in for a Spell" never reaches the comic heights of season 2's "The Joker Is a Card" (the Yagazuzie Zim episode). Other venerable character actors cast their distinctive spells, including Estelle Winwood ("Hold Me, Touch Me" in the original The Producers) and Reta Shaw (Mary Poppins) as Endora's sisters in "Witches and Warlocks Are My Favorite Things; Marty Ingalls as a rival ad agency spy in "Dangerous Diaper Dan"; Norman "Mr. Roper" Fell as Sigmund Freud(!) in "I'd Rather Twitch Than Fight"; and, in a bizarre cameo, Willie Mays as one of Endora's Halloween party guests in "Twitch or Treat. " ("You mean he's a. [+]
," Darrin stammers. "The way he hits home runs?" Samantha replies, "What else?"). Sandra Gould, replacing Alice Pearce, joins the cast as busybody neighbor Gladys Kravitz. One of the season's most enjoyable episodes is "A Most Unusual Wood Nymph," which allowed York to break out of his confounded husband character to portray the lusty Darrin the Bold, a cursed 14th-century ancestor. And with the sight of the ravishing Montgomery in a castle-maid costume, who needs extras in this otherwise charmed four-disc set? -Donald Liebenson.

Review Nouveaux Pictures / La Dolce Vita [1960]
Actors & Directors
  • Magali Noël
  • Anita Ekberg
  • Yvonne Furneaux
  • Federico Fellini
  • Marcello Mastroianni
  • Anouk Aimée
Release date: 2004-09-27
Run time: 174 min.
RRP: £19.99
Price: £6.32

Review La Dolce Vita [1960] / Nouveaux Pictures:

At three brief hours, Fellini's cynical, engrossing social commentary, La Dolce Vita, stands as his timeless masterpiece. A rich, detailed panorama of Rome's modern decadence and sophisticated immorality, the film is episodic in structure but held tightly in focus by the wandering protagonist through whom we witness the sordid action. Marcello Rubini is a tabloid reporter trapped in a shallow high-society existence, as extraordinarily played by Marcello Mastroianni, a man of paradoxical, emotional juxtapositions: cool but tortured, sexy but impotent. He dreams about writing something important but remains seduced by the money and prestige that accompany his shallow position. He romanticises about finding true love but acts unfazed upon finding that his girlfriend has taken an overdose of sleeping pills. Instead, he engages in a ménage à trois, then frolics in a fountain with a giggling American starlet (bombshell Anita Ekberg), and in the film's unforgettably inspired finale, attends a wild orgy that ends, symbolically with its participants finding a rotting sea animal while wandering the beach at dawn. Fellini saw his film as life affirming (thus its title, "The Sweet Life"), but it's impossible to take him seriously. While Mastroianni drifts from one worldly pleasure to another, be it sex, drink, glamorous parties or rich foods, they are presented, through his detached eyes, as merely momentary distractions. His existence, an endless series of wild evenings and lonely mornings, is ultimately soulless and facile. Because he lacks the courage to change, Mastroianni is left with no alternative but to wearily accept and enjoy this "sweet" life. [+]
-Dave McCoy, Amazon. com.

Review 2 Entertain Video / Doctor Who - The Three Doctors [1972] [1963]
Actors & Directors
  • Patrick Troughton
  • Jon Pertwee
  • William Hartnell
  • Katy Manning
Release date: 2003-11-24
Run time: 98 min.
RRP: £19.99
Price: £5.67

Review Doctor Who - The Three Doctors [1972] [1963] / 2 Entertain Video:

Made to mark the series' tenth anniversary, Doctor Who: The Three Doctors finds Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor teaming-up with the Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell incarnations to battle a universe-threatening foe. Omega (played by an excellent Stephen Thorne) is the Timelord who gave his race the power necessary for time travel. Long presumed dead he is actually trapped in an anti-matter universe inside a black hole, and is scheming an epic revenge. Set in UNIT HQ, Omega's domain and a chalk pit, Bob Baker and David Martin's yarn is both nonsensical and more wildly ambitious than the BBC effects unit could possibly visualise. This is so much the case that the best moments come with the metaphysically chilling scene in which Omega is unmasked, and in the bickering rivalry between Pertwee and Troughton. Sadly Hartnell was seriously ill with arteriosclerosis, so his brief scenes were all taped in a day and played on a monitor in the TARDIS, the reason given that the First Doctor is trapped in a "time eddy". If hardly a classic this is still a meatier tale than The Two Doctors (1985), which starred Troughton and Colin Baker, and it features ever-dependable support from Katy Manning as Jo Grant and Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier. On the DVD: Doctor Who: The Three Doctors is presented in the original 4:3 ratio with good mono sound. The introductory 16-mm film footage is very grainy and lined, but later exteriors are good and the interior video-shot material in fine. The commentary by Katy Manning, Nicholas Courtney and producer Barry Letts is informative and funny. [+]
Extras include excerpts from a highly entertaining 1973 Pebble Mill at One with Patrick Troughton and BBC props designer Bernard Wilkie (20 min) and a 1973 retrospective on the show from Blue Peter featuring Pertwee with the then new Whomobile, all presented by ex-Who companion Peter Purves. There are highlights from a BSkyB Doctor Who weekend from 1990, with brief interviews with Courtney, David Martin, Bob Baker, Pertwee, producer John Nathan Turner and writer Terrance Dicks (10 min). Rather more exciting is the appearances of the warm and witty Pertwee, Manning, and a very late Courtney at the 1993 Panopticon SF convention (29 min). There are also two trailers, info text and a scored photo gallery. -Gary S Dalkin.

Browse Classics:

Models & Brands:
The Way To The Stars [1945], The Ghost And Mrs Muir [1947], Rosemary's Baby [1968], It Happened One Night [1934], Till Death Us Do Part [1969], The Birds [1963], Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street [Blu-ray] [2007], From Here To Eternity [1953], Camelot [1967], The Complete James Dean Collection : East Of Eden / Rebel Without A Cause / Giant [1955], Full Metal Jacket [HD DVD] [1987], Doctor Who - Resurrection Of The Daleks [1983], British Transport Films Collection - Vol. 2 - See Britain By Train [1952], No Limit (Digitally restored and remastered) [1935], Three Kings [2000], The Day The Earth Stood Still (2 Disc Cinema Reserve Special Edition) [1951], Major Dundee (Special Extended Edition) [1965], Bewitched - Series 3 - Complete [1966], La Dolce Vita [1960], Doctor Who - The Three Doctors [1972] [1963]

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