Review of Allo Allo: Series 5 Vol.2 (Review)
Introduction The fifth season of `Allo `Allo was a huge departure for BBC television comedy. The first four seasons of the wartime spoof had been produced as standard sitcom runs of between six and eight half-hour episodes. Season Five was an attempt at a US-style season of twenty-six 25min episodes (four times the usual), to break into the American market. Originally transmitted between 3rd...

Review of All Creatures Great And Small: Series 3 (Review)
Introduction Apocryphally known within the BBC by the nickname "All Creatures Grunt and Smell", ACGS was based on the best-selling memoirs of Yorkshire vet James Herriott recalling his years in practice during the 1940s. The series ran for twelve years, producing seven seasons of shows and 91 episodes. It was the show that revealed to a stunned public that a veterinarian appears to spend most...

Review of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (With Original Theatrical Version) (Review)
Introduction I`ve never been thrilled with this "Episode IV: A New Hope" thing. I always felt that the sequels were just cashing in and that George Lucas had achieved a pretty much perfect piece of filmmaking with the 1977 original. It pained me that with the exception of the first videotape I ever owned (long lost) and the forty minutes or so of 8mm digest of the film were the only times I...

Review of Old Dark House, The (Review)
Introduction Are you sitting uncomfortably? Then we`ll begin. This is the original 1932 Universal horror, camp as a row of tents version of JB Priestley`s novel "Benighted". Out (ahem) for the first time on DVD, this unsung classic of the Universal Horror era is considered by aficionadoes one of the most subversive horror pictures of the 1930s. Gloria Stuart (luminously lovely aged 22,...

Review of V For Vendetta (Review)
Introduction I wasn`t familiar with the graphic novel V For Vendetta when I first heard of the movie based on it. I thought it sounded like a reading primer for Mob kids - A is for Assassin, B is for Beatin` to within an inch of your life, C is for Concrete (as in overcoat). I really wish I`d done my homework before I watched the movie, because it`s a picture you really need to know some...

Review of Magnum PI: The Complete Fourth Season (Review)
Introduction Thomas Magnum, the Hawaii-based private eye, was a product of the Burt Reynolds era. Created by Donald P Bellisario and Glen A Larson in 1980, it was lighter in tone than the usual noirish, thick-ear type of private investigator show. Tom Selleck played the affable Magnum, a Vietnam vet who had a network of old service buddies he could rely on to help him with cases. Selleck,...

Review of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (reissue) (Review)
Introduction Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid was the highest profile entry in a movement of the mid-to-late 1960s aimed at revitalising what had become a tired genre - The Western. Once a staple of the silver screen and still beloved by generations of wannabe gunslingers and cowpokes (oo-er), Westerns had fallen into a Monument Valley deep and dusty rut of cowboy and indian potboilers only...

Review of Most Unromantic Man in the World, The (Review)
Introduction Gratian Dimech and James Heath`s mockumentary comedy has all the hallmarks of truly independent movie-making. Officially selected for the Toronto Film Festival, it is a twisted, modern romantic comedy in the fly-on-the-wall documentary style of The Office. Unfortunately, it is also a five-minute sketch dragged out to 81 minutes. The box illustration of the leading man in his...

Review of Gwendoline (Review)
Introduction Originally released in the US with the much more unwieldy title "The Perils Of Gwendoline In The Land Of The Yik-Yak", this 1984 ultra-softcore fantasy adventure is described as one of the ultimate guilty pleasure movies. DVDWorld put their finger on the pulse of the movie (and are quoted on the box art) when they said the movie was "Barbarella Meets Indiana Jones". I`d go further...

Review of Chigley: The Complete Collection (Review)
Introduction Chigley was the third and final instalment of Gordon Murray`s Trumptonshire trilogy and added a new cast of characters to the familiar roll-call from the previous shows. Premiering in 1969, the show is probably not as fondly remembered as its predecessors although it is full of memorable characters and adventures. Camberwick Green had been character driven - each episode centred...

Review of King Kong (Special Edition) (Review)
Introduction Peter Jackson`s remake of the world`s most influential monster movie had a tough act to follow. The 1933 original is so well known and loved that any remake faces passing a gauntlet of fans and aficionadoes ready to tear apart any director with the temerity to tamper with their precious movie. Peter Jackson had the added handicap that he was a huge Kong fan himself - Kong was the...

Review of Rien Ne Va Plus (Review)
Introduction The French take their movies very seriously. Most of the buzzwords you`d come across on a Media Studies degree (stuff like cineaste, auteur and mise-en-scene) are terms coined by influential French movie critics of the 1950s and 1960s who wrote for Cahiers du Cinema. Hell, they rate Jerry Lewis as a serious comic genius while his countrymen think of him as an aging charity telethon...

Review of And The Ship Sails On (Review)
Introduction Fellini`s 1983 dose of Italian weirdness is set in the summer of 1914 when a fat lady has sung her last. Ghost of Motley Hall Freddie Jones stars in this peculiar movie alongside a startling number of British character actors including Jonathan Cecil and Peter Cellier. A luxury liner sailing with a full compliment of exotic characters leaves Italy with the ashes of opera singer...

Review of Barney: Can You Sing That Song? (Review)
Introduction Possibly the scariest of the Tyrannosaurid dinosaurs of the Cretaceous era is Tyrannosaurus Purpura Barneii, or Barney the Dinosaur – seven foot of purple plush with a penchant for singing "If You`re Happy And You Know It". Sing That Song is sixty minutes of the Goofy-voiced puce lizard and his primary-coloured pals keeping a studio audience of American preschoolers and Mums...

Review of Jesus Of Montreal (Special Edition) (Review)
Introduction I reviewed this movie before and I called it a "Blow-your-brains-out depressing Franco-Canadian arthouse melodrama about a group of actors staging a passion play that stirs up Catholic opposition," and this Special Edition hasn`t changed my opinion. About the content of the movie, that is. While, as special editions go, this isn`t that special (boasting only an interview with Denys...

Review of Domino (Review)
Introduction I Am A Bounty Hunter, the lady introduces herself as. Well, I am a DVD Reviewer, so there. Tony Scott (Ridley`s Little Brother) has made a baffling biopic of the model-turned-bounty-hunter daughter of sixties movie star Laurence Harvey that overdoses on style while paying no attention to narrative. The movie is dedicated to the memory of Domino Harvey, who died while the movie...

Review of It Happened Here (Review)
Introduction At first glance, this DVD release looks like one of those Hitler-porn programmes beloved of the History Channel and Discovery. It Happened Here is the powerful feature drama-documentary debut of Film Historian Kevin Brownlow, who would go on to make Winstanley, the ground-breaking tv documentary series Hollywood (soon out on DVD), Universal Horror and important documentaries on...

Review of War Of The Worlds (Special Edition) (Two Discs) (Review)
Introduction Let me start this review with an apology. I`m one of those sad souls for whom HG Wells`s War Of The Worlds immediately conjures up Richard Burton doing his fruitiest narration and that dum-da-dum-dum theme. That album overrides both Orson Welles panicking the Eastern Seaboard with his Halloween radio broadcast and George Pal`s manta-ray flying saucers going shicka-shicka-shick...

Review of Sound Of Music, The (Special Edition) (Two Discs) (Review)
Introduction The Sound of Music. The hills are alive with it. Apparently. The movie is the signature picture of the 1960s, a family-friendly romp through annexed Austria in the late 1930s. Sound of Music has everything - songs, adorable children, a slightly whacky heroine, nuns and hissable Nazi villains. While many commentators at the time regarded the movie as saccharine and corny, it...

Review of Hi 5: Come On and Party & Hi Energy (Review)
Introduction If you prop your pre-schoolers in front of channel Five`s Milkshake at five to seven of a morning, then crawl back into bed to finish your interrupted night`s kip, you probably don`t know about Hi-5, but your rugrats will. For anybody else out of the loop, Hi-5 is an Australian pre-school edutainment show made by Channel 9 that channels the spirit of the long-gone and much-missed...

Review of Vicar Of Dibley, The Complete First Series (Review)
Introduction I was a late convert to Dibleyism on account of I`ve always found Dawn French such a tiresome smartarse, and Richard Curtis`s writing is a taste I haven`t quite acquired. I still feel the same way, but I`ve overcome my urge to switch over because of the marvellous supporting ensemble of grotesques put together in this series. Dawn French`s character of Geraldine, the eponymous...

Review of Bridget Jones`s Diary / The Edge Of Reason (Box Set) (Review)
Introduction If one thing strikes you about the Bridget Jones saga, it`s that she`s too good for either of the two morons she moons after throughout the saga. This box set is a release of the two movies along with an extra disc of "missing bits". There`s not an enormous amount one can say about a disc of extras, which is all that Universal`s PR folk sent us, and if I say it here it`ll leave a...

Review of Journey To The Centre Of The Earth (Review)
Introduction The writings of Jules Verne have always been a rich source for Hollywood to plunder. Verne and the cinema have gone hand in hand since its invention around the same time that Verne was writing his romances. Some of the earliest movies with a proper storyline are based on Verne`s ideas such as Georges Melies` Voyage dans la Lune (1908). Disney have visited the works of Verne on more...

Review of Doris Day (Box Set) (Review)
Introduction Okay, I`ll admit it. I`m a closet Doris Day fan. Born Doris Kappelhoff in 1924, Doris Day became one of the most popular movie stars of the 1950s and early 1960s. Her wholesome movie image famously elicited the Groucho Marx quip "I`ve been around so long, I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin". Marvin Kitman once memorably said "My doctor won`t let me watch Doris Day. I have a...

Review of Dead Babies (Review)
Introduction One of the drawbacks of being a DVD Reviewer is that occasionally you wind up with a title you normally wouldn`t touch with a remotely-controlled wheelbarrow robot. Dead Babies is one such film. I thought I`d plumbed the depths with gore-fest Nightmares Of A Damaged Brain, but this movie maxes-out my crapometer and it hasn`t even got the saving grace of lashings of gore. Scarily,...

Review of Preston Sturges (Box Set) (Review)
Introduction Who he? Box sets celebrating the lives of great Hollywood stars of the past are becoming commonplace. Laurel and Hardy, Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, the Marx Brothers, Spencer Tracy, Basil Rathbone – the Studios, and especially Universal are treating us to affordable film collections of magnificent old movies starring some of the screen`s greatest legends. Most of...

Review of Caroline In The City (Review)
Introduction Like a great many good American tv shows in the 1990s, this series never got much of a high profile on British television, compared with shows like Frasier and Friends. The premise of the show was pretty typical thirty-something fodder of the time – much angst-ridden dating, complicated on-off romances between the (likeable) characters and a fair smattering of oddly surreal...

Review of James Stewart Collection (Box Set) (Review)
Introduction Of the truly great Hollywood legends, one stands head and shoulders above pretty much all else, and not just because he was a tall lad (6`3"). James Stewart, known to one and all as "Jimmy", was the first and greatest of the Everyman character actors – believable as a ordinary slob like the rest of us while still being a movie star – in an era when being a movie star put you in the...

Review of Terry And June: The Complete First Series (Review)
Introduction During the 1980s, this show was the archetype of the British sitcom and was attacked on every front by trendy tv critics and even trendier tv producers who wanted to cash in on The Young Ones alternative outlook. If the show had a fault, it was its cosiness. Set squarely in middle-class suburbia about a middle-class, middle-management family called the Medfords (Terry and June of...

Review of Dirty Love Two: The Love Games (Review)
Introduction This is the only movie directed by Alex Damiano and listed in the IMDb (under its original title "Casa di Piacere". This 1988 specimen of Italian erotica stars Valentine Demy who has previously appeared in Tinto Brass`s "Paprika", "11 Days, 11 Nights 3" and the original "Dirty Love". The movie has been previously available in cut form, but Argent Films are trumpeting this release...