"Actor: Betti O"

• The Canterbury Tales (I Racconti di Canterbury) | DVD | (18/06/2001) from £8.97   |  Saving you £11.02 (122.85%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini's film of The Canterbury Tales was one of a trilogy from the early 1970s that, like its companions The Decameron and the Arabian Nights, was an international box-office hit playing for long runs in mainstream cinemas. All of them adapt a masterpiece of literature where man becomes the moral catalyst for his own destiny. Chaucer's ribald sense of humour was a natural outlet for Pasolini's own desire to throw caution to the wind on screen, causing controversy at the time by displaying all facets of the male and female body unadorned. (Although it all looks pretty tame now, the Italian authorities were a threatening presence to Pasolini at the time.) Produced by Alberto Grimaldi with a large budget, the location scenes were filmed in many historic sites in England, notably Wells Cathedral, its crypt, and the surrounding flatlands leading toward Glastonbury, captured in early spring by Tonino Delli Colli's cinematography. The cast with Italian and English actors dubbed into Italian with English subtitles is a mixed blessing. Hugh Griffith as Sir January is one Anglo-Saxon recognisable from his role as the lecherous squire in Tom Jones, and overacts like the rest of the cast. Pasolini himself appears briefly as Chaucer in a non-speaking role that one regrets he didn't enlarge for himself in this sprawling tableaux of pilgrim's tales (Ken Russell's excesses from the same period come to mind). The musical score, an adaptation by Ennio Morricone of some traditional indigenous melodies, prefigures the early music revival by a few years and provides a stimulating soundtrack. --Adrian Edwards

• Salo Or The 120 Days Of Sodom | DVD | (02/04/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (known in Italian as Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma) provoked howls of outrage and execration on its original release in 1975, and the controversy rages to this day. Until the British Board of Film Classification finally ventured a certificate in 2000, the movie could only be shown at private cinema clubs, and even then in severely mutilated form. The relaxation of the censors' shears allows you to see for yourself what the fuss was about, but be warned--Salò will test the very limits of your endurance. Updating the Marquis de Sade's phantasmagorical novel of the same title from 18th-century France to fascist Italy at the end of World War II, writer-director Pasolini relates a bloodthirsty fable about how absolute power corrupts absolutely. Four upper-class libertines gather in an elegant palazzo to inflict the extremes of sexual perversion and cruelty upon a hand-picked collection of young men and women. Meanwhile, three ageing courtesans enflame the proceedings further by spinning tales of monstrous depravity. The most upsetting aspect of the film is the way Pasolini's coldly voyeuristic camera dehumanises the victims into lumps of random flesh. Though you may feel revulsion at the grisly details, you aren't expected to care much about what happens to either master or slave. In one notorious episode, the subjugated youths are forced to eat their own excrement--a scene almost impossible to watch, even if you know the meal was actually composed of chocolate and orange marmalade. (Pasolini mischievously claimed to be satirising our modern culture of junk food.) Salò is the ultimate vision of apocalypse--and as if in confirmation, the director was himself brutally murdered just before its premiere. You can reject the movie as the work of an evil-minded pornographer, but you won't easily forget it. --Peter Matthews

• A Ma Soeur! | DVD | (24/06/2002) from £18.75   |  Saving you £1.24 (6.61%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Catherine Breillat's A Ma Soeur! is a touchingly honest but also highly disturbing account of two French middle-class teenage sisters' family holiday. As sexually explicit as Breillat's earlier picture, Romance, this film focuses on the travails of flabby 12-year-old Anais Pingot (Anais Reboux), who is the bane and the opposite of her glamorous elder sister Elena (Roxane Mesquida). Constantly having to live in the shadow of Elena and being nagged by her workaholic father (Romain Goupil), lonely Anais resorts to eating and her imagination for pleasure. Her 15-year-old sister, in contrast, is desperate to find romantic love. Their differences are harshly exposed when Elena starts a frantic affair with Italian law student Fernando (Libero De Rienzo). To minimise the risk of being discovered by their parents, Anais accompanies Fernando and Elena throughout their clumsy encounters. She's even present during the pair's sexual experimentation. Anais Reboux's depiction of an introverted young woman is both shocking and true to life, particularly the scene when she swims around a swimming pool kissing and conversing with the pool's diving board and steps as if they were imaginary lovers. The film actually thrives on very little, a simple plot, a 25-minute bedroom scene, and the monotony of the fatal motorway trip home. Like violence itself, the violent ending is a particularly pointless and baffling finale for an otherwise thought-provoking film. On the DVD: A Ma Soeur! on DVD can be viewed with or without English subtitles. The bonus material includes biographies of the leading actors and the director, a theatrical trailer and promotional images from the film. Tom Dawson's excellent notes booklet provide an informed insight into the production of the movie. The anamorphic picture is good, as is the Dolby Stereo soundtrack. --John Galilee

• The Canterbury Tales (DVD + Blu-ray) | Blu Ray | (05/12/2011) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The second part of Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life is based on the fourteenth-century stories of Geoffrey Chaucer. Plunging with gusto into some of the blackest and bawdiest of the tales, Pasolini celebrates almost every conceivable form of sexual act with a rich, earthy humour. The film’s visual magic is complimented by this new high-definition restoration.Special features Alternative English-language version presented with English-version inserts Original Italian trailer Exclusive new documentary exploring Pasolini’s significance on the Italian genre film Fully illustrated booklet including essays, reviews and biography A particular delight is the use of a largely British cast, including Hugh Griffith, Jenny Runacre and Tom Baker, which Pasolini himself takes the part of Chaucer.

• RoGoPaG (Masters of Cinema) (DVD) | DVD | (27/08/2012) from £10.99   |  Saving you £6.00 (54.60%)   |  RRP £16.99

  Conceived by the legendary Italian producer Alfredo Bini, the multi-director portmanteau film Let's Wash Our Brains: RoGoPaG (Laviamoci il cervello: RoGoPaG) brought together four esteemed directors of European cinema to contribute comic episodes reflective of the swinging post-boom era. The resulting omnibus collectively examines social anxieties around sex, nuclear war, religion, urbanisation - and the promise of a modern cinema.Roberto Rossellini's Illibatezza (Virginity) follows an airline stewardess plagued by an obsessed American tourist whose 8mm camera enables the indulgence of a personal, and solipsistic, vision of the Ideal. Jean-Luc Godard's Il nuovo mondo (The New World) takes place in an Italian-dubbed Paris beset by nuclear fallout, and wittily chronicles the changes that take place in the lives - and medicine cabinet - of a handsome young couple. Pier Paolo Pasolini's scandalous La ricotta (Ricotta, as in the curded cheese) presents the goings-on around a film shoot devoted to the Crucifixion and presided over by none other than Orson Welles (playing a kind of stand-in for Pasolini himself); it is this episode that landed Pasolini with a suspended four-month prison sentence. Lastly, Ugo Gregoretti's Il pollo ruspante (Free-Range Chicken) depicts a middle-class Milanese family flirting with the purchase of real-estate and engaging catastrophically with an antagonistic consumerist infrastructure.

• Bay Of Blood | DVD | (22/07/2002) from £8.08   |  Saving you £-2.09 (-34.90%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Highly influential Italian slasher flick has people brutally murdered in an isolated house. Extremely violent semi-incoherent but visually impressive offering from cult director Bava. Essential for cult horror fans.

• Hatchet For A Honeymoon | DVD | (26/07/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Another darkly comic effort from the master of the Macabre Mario Bava. Every time John Harrington hacks up a bride on her wedding night with a meat cleaver the face of his mother's killer (who died similarly) becomes a bit clearer. Compelled to discover the killer's identity he kills again and again even killing his own wife who returns to haunt him as a ghost that everybody can see...but him!

• I've Been Watching You 2: Prom Night | DVD | (10/06/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Cherry isn't like the other girls but she still wants to be the prom queen the trouble is she has not been nominated. Bitter and confused by her absence from the list of finalists she embarks on a mission of murder and mayhem in her quest for celebrity status.