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Review In2film / Stephen King's Riding The Bullet [2004]
Actors & Directors
  • Cliff Robertson
  • Erika Christensen
  • Mick Garris
  • David Arquette
  • Barbara Hershey
  • Matt Frewer
Release date: 2008-10-27
Price: £17.99

Review Stephen King's Riding The Bullet [2004] / In2film:


Review Warner Home Video / Dreamcatcher [2003]
Actors & Directors
  • Lawrence Kasdan
  • Morgan Freeman|Damian Lewis|Thomas Jane|Jason Lee
Release date: 2004-02-02
Run time: 128 min.
RRP: £13.99
Price: £1.29

Review Dreamcatcher [2003] / Warner Home Video:

One of Stephen King's most shapeless, all-but-the-kitchen-sink novels, Dreamcatcher is wrestled by overqualified director-writer Lawrence Kasdan and cowriter William Goldman into an equally shapeless, slightly more entertaining big-budget schlock movie. Mind-reading psychiatrist Thomas Jane, back-from-the-dead road accident victim Damian Lewis, slacker toothpick-chewer Jason Lee and psychic car salesman Timothy Olyphant are King-style thirtysomething buddies who might also evoke Kasdan's The Big Chill, bonded forever by a flashback psychic experience that logically took place in 1983 but with the Stand By Me haircuts, music and milieu of King's own childhood. On a weekend retreat in the snowy Maine woods, the quartet run into an alien incursion that begins ominously, with animals fleeing the forest but then throws in enough phenomena for a whole season of The X-Files with leftovers that could kit out a video nasty, notably toothy worm parasites memorably named "shit weasels" and a giant ET that turns to red powder and possesses Lewis. Mad militarist Morgan Freeman shows up and claustrophobic lost-in-the-woods business is diluted by a helicopter attack on a downed flying saucer and an internment camp for red-blotched infectees, while the plot boils down to something as simple as a race to prevent a worm from being dropped in a reservoir (which will end the world). On a scene-by-scene basis, it's entertaining and creepy so long as you don't think too hard about details, like why someone charged with trapping an alien by sitting clamped on the toilet lid would risk reaching down onto a bloody floor to get a toothpick or why the aliens didn't just land by the reservoir in the first place. -Kim Newman.

Review Optimum Home Entertainment / Henry - Portrait Of A Serial Killer [Uncut] [1986]
Actors & Directors
  • John McNaughton
Release date: 2003-05-26
Run time: 85 min.
RRP: £19.99
Price: £2.99

Review Henry - Portrait Of A Serial Killer [Uncut] [1986] / Optimum Home Entertainment:


Review Screen Entertainment / I Spit On Your Grave [1978]
Actors & Directors
  • Anthony Nichols
  • Meir Zarchi
  • Camille Keaton
  • Eron Tabor
  • Richard Pace
  • Gunter Kleemann
Release date: 2006-12-04
Run time: 96 min.
Creator: Joseph Zbeda
RRP: £9.99
Price: £4.18

Review I Spit On Your Grave [1978] / Screen Entertainment:

I Spit on Your Grave, writer-director Meir Zarchi's controversial story of rape and revenge, has lost none of its ability to shock viewers since it first gained notoriety in 1978. Camille Keaton (grand-niece of Buster Keaton and, later, Zarchi's wife) stars as a young woman who is terrorised and then brutally assaulted by four men while on vacation. After slowly pulling herself together, she methodically tracks down and butchers each of the perpetrators. Zarchi's film has been consistently accused of celebrating violence against women, and while the rape scenes are graphic, they also lack the voyeuristic qualities that earmark other similarly plotted exploitation films. If anything, Zarchi is guilty of awkward scripting; the dialogue is leaden, and Keaton's transformation from victim to avenger is too swift. But to label him a pornographer is wrong, and while the film is challenging-perhaps more than most audiences can bear-its depiction of the psychology of violence is undeniably powerful. -Paul Gaita.

Review Lions Gate Home Ent. UK Ltd / An American Haunting [2006]
Actors & Directors
  • Courtney Solomon
  • Sam Alexander
  • Sissy Spacek
  • Donald Sutherland
  • Miguel Brown
  • Rachel Hurd Wood
Release date: 2007-09-10
Run time: 87 min.
RRP: £15.99
Price: £2.45

Review An American Haunting [2006] / Lions Gate Home Ent. UK Ltd:


Review Severin Films / Devil Hunter [1980]
Actors & Directors
  • Al Cliver
  • Gisela Hahn
  • Robert Foster
  • Burt Altman
  • Jess Franco
  • Ursula Fellner
Release date: 2008-11-17
Run time: 102 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £9.01

Review Devil Hunter [1980] / Severin Films:


Review Optimum Home Entertainment / The Plague Of The Zombies [1966]
Actors & Directors
  • Andre Morell
  • John Carson
  • John Gilling
  • Brook Williams
  • Alexander Davion
  • Diane Clare
Release date: 2007-01-01
Run time: 86 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £3.86

Review The Plague Of The Zombies [1966] / Optimum Home Entertainment:


Review Pathe Distribution / Jason Goes To Hell - The Final Friday [1993]
Actors & Directors
  • Kane Hodder
  • Adam Marcus
  • Steven Culp
  • John D. LeMay
  • Kari Keegan
  • Steven Williams
Release date: 2003-06-30
Run time: 84 min.
Creator: Jay Huguely
RRP: £5.99
Price: £26.01

Review Jason Goes To Hell - The Final Friday [1993] / Pathe Distribution:


Review Optimum Home Entertainment / Doctor Crippen [1962]
Actors & Directors
  • Robert Lynn
  • Donald Pleasence
  • Carol Browne
  • Samantha Eggar
Release date: 2007-06-25
Run time: 94 min.
RRP: £9.99
Price: £3.87

Review Doctor Crippen [1962] / Optimum Home Entertainment:


Review Warner Home Video / The Beast From 20000 Fathoms [1953]
Actors & Directors
  • Cecil Kellaway
  • Paul Hubschmid
  • Eugene Lourie
  • Donald Woods
  • Ken Tobey
  • Paula Raymond
Release date: 2004-01-26
Run time: 76 min.
RRP: £13.99
Price: £1.44

Review The Beast From 20000 Fathoms [1953] / Warner Home Video:


Review Paramount Home Entertainment / Event Horizon (1997)
Actors & Directors
  • Richard T. Jones
  • Sam Neill
  • Laurence Fishburne
  • Kathleen Quinlan
  • Paul W.S. Anderson
  • Joely Richardson
Release date: 2001-06-04
Run time: 92 min.
Creator: Philip Eisner
RRP: £15.99
Price: £3.38

Review Event Horizon (1997) / Paramount Home Entertainment:

Drawing from Andrei Tarkovsky's heady science fiction meditation Solaris by way of Alien and Hellraiser, this visually splendid but pulpy piece of science fiction schlock concerns a mission in the year 2047 to investigate the experimental American spaceship Event Horizon, which disappeared seven years previously and suddenly, out of nowhere, reappeared in the orbit of Neptune. Laurence Fishburne stars as mission commander Captain Miller and Sam Neill is Dr Weir, the scientist who designed the mystery ship. Miller's T-shirt-and army-green-clad crew of smart-talking pros finds a ship dead and deserted, but further investigations turn up blood, corpses, dismembered body parts, and a decidedly unearthly presence. It turns out that the ship is really a space-age haunted house where spooky (and obviously impossible) visions lure each of the crew members into situations they should know better than to enter. The ship is gorgeously designed, borrowing from the dark, organic look of Alien and adding the menacing touch of teeth sprouting from bulwark doors and clawlike spikes inexplicably shooting out of the engine room floor. Unfortunately the film is not nearly as inventive as the production design-it turns into a woefully inconsistent psychic monster movie that sacrifices mood for tepid shocks-but the special effects are topnotch, and ultimately the movie has a trashy B movie charm about it. -Sean Axmaker.

Review Network / The Pleasure Garden [1925]
Actors & Directors
  • Miles Mander
  • Virginia Valli
  • John Stuart
  • Alfred Hitchcock
  • Carmelita Geraghty
Release date: 2008-08-18
Run time: 60 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £3.98

Review The Pleasure Garden [1925] / Network:


Review Sony Pictures Home Entertainment / Hannibal (2 Disc Special Edition) [2001]
Actors & Directors
  • Anthony Hopkins
  • Gary Oldman
  • Ray Liotta
  • Julianne Moore
  • Ridley Scott
  • Frankie Faison
Release date: 2001-08-20
Run time: 126 min.
Creator: Thomas Harris
RRP: £24.99
Price: £5.99

Review Hannibal (2 Disc Special Edition) [2001] / Sony Pictures Home Entertainment:

Yes, he's back. and he's still hungry. Hannibal is set 10 years after The Silence of the Lambs, as Dr Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter (Anthony Hopkins, reprising his Oscar-winning role) is living the good life in Italy, studying art and sipping espresso. FBI agent Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore, replacing Jodie Foster), on the other hand, hasn't had it so good-an outsider from the start, she's now a quiet, moody loner who doesn't play bureaucratic games and suffers for it. A botched drug raid results in her demotion-and a request from Lecter's only living victim, Mason Verger (Gary Oldman, uncredited), for a little Q and A. Little does Clarice realise that the hideously deformed Verger-who, upon suggestion from Dr Lecter, peeled off his own face-is using her as bait to lure Dr Lecter out of hiding, quite certain he'll capture the good doctor. Taking the basic plot contraptions from Thomas Harris's baroque novel, Hannibal is so stylistically different from its predecessor that it forces you to take it on its own terms. Director Ridley Scott gives the film a sleek, almost European look that lets you know that, unlike the first film (which was about the quintessentially American Clarice), this movie is all Hannibal. [+]
Does it work? Yes-but only up to a point. Scott adeptly sets up an atmosphere of foreboding, but it's all a build-up to the anticlimax, as Verger's plot for abducting Hannibal (and feeding him to man-eating wild boars) doesn't really deliver the requisite visceral thrills, and the much-ballyhooed climatic dinner sequence between Clarice, Dr Lecter and a third, unlucky guest wobbles between parody and horror. Hopkins and Moore are both first-rate, but the film contrives to keep them as far apart as possible, when what made Silence of the Lambs so amazing was their interaction. When they do connect it's quite thrilling but it's unfortunately too little too late. -Mark Englehart, Amazon. com On the DVD: The good-looking widescreen (1. 85:1) anamorphic print is accompanied by a directorial commentary on the first disc. Ridley Scott is no stranger to DVD commentaries by now, and keeps up a pretty constant flow of enjoyable story exposition, although provides few specifics about the actual filmmaking process. He's obviously more than happy to talk about this movie, since on the second disc there are also "Ridleygram" interviews with Scott about the process of storyboarding and a huge chunk of deleted or alternate scenes (including the alternate ending) with optional directorial commentary. There's a wealth of other extras to dip into, including five "making-of" featurettes (73 minutes in all), plus two multi-angle "vignettes" of the film's opening sequences (the fish-market shoot-out and opening titles), and a marketing gallery of trailers, stills and artwork. Surround-sound enthusiasts can select either Dolby 5. 1 or DTS soundtracks for the main feature. -Mark Walker.

Review Contender Entertainment Group / Maniac Cop 2 [1990]
Actors & Directors
  • Robert Z'Dar
  • Bruce Campbell
  • William Lustig
  • Robert Davi
  • Claudia Christian
  • Laurene Landon
Release date: 2006-06-26
Run time: 84 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £3.97

Review Maniac Cop 2 [1990] / Contender Entertainment Group:


Review Warner Home Video / Blade Runner (The Director's Cut) [1982]
Actors & Directors
  • Edward James Olmos
  • Harrison Ford
  • Sean Young
  • Ridley Scott
  • M. Emmet Walsh
  • Rutger Hauer
Release date: 1999-11-01
Run time: 111 min.
Creator: Roland Kibbee
RRP: £15.99
Price: £8.49

Review Blade Runner (The Director's Cut) [1982] / Warner Home Video:

When Ridley Scott's cut of Blade Runner was finally released in 1993, one had to wonder why the studio hadn't done it right the first time-11 years earlier. This version is so much better, mostly because of what's been eliminated (the ludicrous and redundant voice-over narration and the phoney happy ending) rather than what's been added (a bit more character development and a brief unicorn dream). Star Harrison Ford originally recorded the narration under duress at the insistence of Warner Bros. executives who thought the story needed further "explanation"; he later confessed that he thought if he did it badly they wouldn't use it. (Moral: never overestimate the taste of movie executives. ) The movie's spectacular futuristic vision of Los Angeles-a perpetually dark and rainy metropolis that's the nightmare antithesis of "Sunny Southern California"-is still its most seductive feature, another worldly atmosphere in which you can immerse yourself. The movie's shadowy visual style, along with its classic private-detective/murder-mystery plot line (with Ford on the trail of a murderous android, or "replicant"), makes Blade Runner one of the few science fiction pictures to legitimately claim a place in the film noir tradition. And, as in the best noir, the sleuth discovers a whole lot more (about himself and the people he encounters) than he anticipates. The cast also includes Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, Daryl Hannah Rutger Hauer and M Emmet Walsh. -Jim Emerson.

Review Universal Pictures UK / The Bride Of Frankenstein [1935]
Actors & Directors
  • James Whale
  • Boris Karloff
  • Elsa Lanchester
  • Ernest Thesiger
  • Valerie Hobson
  • Colin Clive
Release date: 2005-11-01
Run time: 75 min.
Creator: Philip MacDonald
RRP: £9.99
Price: £3.05

Review The Bride Of Frankenstein [1935] / Universal Pictures UK:

It appeared, at the end of the epochal 1931 horror movie Frankenstein, that the monster had perished in a burning windmill. But that was before the runaway success of the movie dictated a sequel. In Bride of Frankenstein, we see that the monster (once again played by Boris Karloff) survived the conflagration, as did his half-mad creator (Colin Clive). This remarkable sequel, universally considered superior to the original, reunites other key players from the first film: director James Whale (whose life would later be chronicled in Gods and Monsters) and, of course, the inimitable Dwight Frye, as Frankenstein's bent-over assistant. Whale brought campy humour to the project, yet Bride is also somehow haunting, due in part to Karloff's nuanced performance. The monster, on the loose in the European countryside, learns to talk and his encounter with a blind hermit is both comic and touching. (The episode was later spoofed in Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein. ) A prologue depicts the author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, being urged to produce a sequel by her husband Percy and Lord Byron. She's played by Elsa Lanchester, who reappears in the climactic scene as the man-made bride of the monster. Her lightning-bolt hair and reptilian movements put her into the horror-movie pantheon, despite being onscreen for only a few moments. [+]
But in many ways the film is stolen by Ernest Thesiger, as the fey Dr. Pretorious, who toasts the darker possibilities of science: "To a new world of gods and monsters!" -Robert Horton.

Review MGM Entertainment / Piranha [1978]
Actors & Directors
  • Bradford Dillman
  • Joe Dante
  • Keenan Wynn
  • Heather Menzies
  • Dick Miller
  • Kevin McCarthy
Release date: 2002-10-21
Run time: 92 min.
Creator: Richard Robinson
RRP: £12.99
Price: £2.97

Review Piranha [1978] / MGM Entertainment:

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.

Review Optimum Home Entertainment / The Witches [1966]
Actors & Directors
  • Joan Fontaine
  • Kay Walsh
  • Cyril Frankel
Release date: 2007-01-08
Run time: 87 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £4.23

Review The Witches [1966] / Optimum Home Entertainment:


Review Starz Home Entertainment / Masters Of Horror - Series 1 - Vol.2 [2005]
Actors & Directors
  • William Malone
  • Takashi Miike
  • Tobe Hooper
  • John McNaughton
  • Larry Cohen
Release date: 2007-01-29
Run time: 340 min.
RRP: £24.99
Price: £8.94

Review Masters Of Horror - Series 1 - Vol.2 [2005] / Starz Home Entertainment:


Review 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment / The Descent/Dog Soldiers/28 Days Later
Actors & Directors
  • Danny Boyle
  • Megan Burns
  • Natalie Jackson Mendoza
  • Kevin McKidd
  • Neil Marshall
  • Christopher Eccleston
  • Cillian Murphy
Release date: 2006-10-16
Run time: 304 min.
RRP: £19.99
Price: £6.98

Review The Descent/Dog Soldiers/28 Days Later / 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment:


Browse Horror:

Models & Brands:
Stephen King's Riding The Bullet [2004], Dreamcatcher [2003], Henry - Portrait Of A Serial Killer [Uncut] [1986], I Spit On Your Grave [1978], An American Haunting [2006], Devil Hunter [1980], The Plague Of The Zombies [1966], Jason Goes To Hell - The Final Friday [1993], Doctor Crippen [1962], The Beast From 20000 Fathoms [1953], Event Horizon (1997), The Pleasure Garden [1925], Hannibal (2 Disc Special Edition) [2001], Maniac Cop 2 [1990], Blade Runner (The Director's Cut) [1982], The Bride Of Frankenstein [1935], Piranha [1978], The Witches [1966], Masters Of Horror - Series 1 - Vol.2 [2005], The Descent/Dog Soldiers/28 Days Later

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