"Actor: Boris Karloff"

• TERROR | Blu Ray | (31/05/2016) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Isle of the Dead | DVD | (06/06/2011) from £17.53   |  Saving you £-4.54 (-34.90%)   |  RRP £12.99

  It's 1912 and Greece is beset by war and pestilence. As his troops bury their dead after another bloody battle stern General Pherides (Boris Karloff) goes to visit the grave of his wife buried on an island nearby. He's horrified to see her tomb has been looted and learns grave robbers are to blame for the desecration but there is worse news to come: plague has come to the island. The doctors are powerless but perhaps the sickness has another cause. Could it be that a 'Vorvolaka' - a vampiric demon - is at large on the island? And is there anything that can stop it?

• Scarface | DVD | (09/10/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Scarface (Dir. Howard Hawks 1932): Generally regarded to be the best - and most brutal - of the classic gangster films the original Scarface tells the story of orginised crime's pinch on the city of Chicago during prohibition. Paul Muni plays Tony Carmonte an ambitious hood with a Napoleonic urge to fight his way to number one gang boss. When the last of the old-style crime bosses is brutally slain down the finger is pointed at Tony and Johnny Loro a rival gangster. However Tony's desire to move up the ladder is about to put him in the firing line of his peers and the police. Produced and directed by the mercurial Howard Hawks Scarface is the movie which established both Paul Muri and his coin flipping aide George Raft as major Hollywood stars. Scarface (Dir. Brian De Palma 1983): Al Pacino gives an unforgettable performance as Tony Montana one of the most ruthless gangsters ever depicted on film in this gripping cult crime epic inspired by the 1932 classic of the same title. Scarface follows the violent career of a small-time Cuban refugee hoodlum who guns his way to the top of Miami's cocaine empire and makes some ruthless friends and enemies on the way to oblivion...

• Mondo Balordo | Blu Ray | (28/07/2020) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Lured | DVD | (14/08/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  A serial killer in London lures young women into his clutches by posting ads in the personal columns of newspapers. After each murder he informs the police by means of a cryptic poem earning himself the tag the 'Poet Killer'. But when the poet killer murders a dancer her best friend decides to assist the police by answering one of his ads...

• Boris Karloff Collection,The (3DVD) | DVD | (20/09/2010) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £3.99

  Much like Bela Lugosi and Dracula so Boris Karloff is forever remembered for the role of Frankenstein. Unlike Lugosi Karloff was able to put the character behind him and find success with other roles most notably Imhotep in The Mummy. Titles Comprise: Doomed To Die (1940): Boris Karloff plays Chinese detective James Lee Wong in this classic crime thriller. When a wealthy shipping magnate dies in a conflagration aboard his flagship suspicion falls on the son of a rival industrialist who is in love with the dead man's daughter. Recruited by a cub reporter convinced of his friend's innocence Wong begins to investigate around the waterfronts and uncovers evidence that will lead to the mysterious killer. The Ape (1940): Dr. Bernard Adrian is a kindly mad scientist who seeks to cure a young woman's polio. He needs spinal fluid from a human to complete the formula for his experimental serum. Meanwhile a vicious circus ape has broken out of its cage and is terrorising towns people. The Fatal Hour (1940): The master detective Mr Wong the suave Boris Karloff solves another puzzling murder when Captain Street's best friend detective Dan O'Grady is mysteriously killed. Street enlists the help of Chinese detective James Lee Wong who uncovers smuggling ring on the waterfront of San Francisco and unmasks the killer though not until several more vicious murders occur.

• Watching The Detectives | DVD | (04/07/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A four disc DVD set of classic detective films. With Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes; Peter Lorre as Mr Moto; Boris Karloff as Mr Wong and Ralph Byrd as Dick Tracy. Mr. Moto's Last Warning (Dir. Norman Foster 1939): A Japanese man claiming to be Mr Moto of the International Police is abducted and murdered soon after disembarking from a ship at Port Said in Egypt. The real Mr Moto is already in Port Said investigating a conspiracy against the British and French government

• The Terror | DVD | (16/11/2009) from £8.98   |  Saving you £3.00 (42.92%)   |  RRP £9.99

  The Terror - Cult Classic Horror Movie DVD

• Bedlam | DVD | (24/01/2011) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  An eighteenth century lunatic asylum whose very name arouses dread and fear. Its malevolent director Master George Sims (Boris Karloff) owes his position to the unpleasant local landowner (Billy House) and takes a keen pleasure in cruelly abusing his inmates. Lord Mortimer keeps an actress Nell Bowen (Anna Lee) on his retinue because she is pretty and entertaining but when Nell visits Bedlam and sees its barbarity she asks her Quaker friend Hannay (Richard Fraser) to try and initiate reforms. Her attempts at reform are thwarted by the evil Sims who has her committed to his 'care' in Bedlam to take her place amongst the insane...

• The Terror | DVD | (19/05/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  A lieutentant in Napoleon's army (a young Jack Nicholson) traces a mysterious woman to a castle on the Baltic coast and finds himself trapped by a mad baron (Boris Karloff). This highly enjoyable atmopsheric slice of low-budget horror from the great Roger Corman was also reportedly directed at points by future talents Francis Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich.

• The Roger Corman Horror Collection | DVD | (03/02/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Siren DVD's three-disc Roger Corman Collection contains The Little Shop of Horrors and The Terror, which Corman directed, as well as Dementia 13, which he produced. Though he has a reputation as one of the craftiest businessmen in Hollywood, Corman was too cheapskate in the 1960s to bother copyrighting a bunch of his films and so the same titles have been showing up on video and now DVD from many different distributors. All these films were thrown together in odd circumstances to take advantage of leftover sets, contracted performers or tied-up production funds. Little Shop of Horrors (a disguised remake of A Bucket of Blood) was famously made over a three-day weekend "because it was raining and we couldn't play tennis". The Terror exists because Boris Karloff owed a few days' work after completing The Raven and castle sets were still standing. Dementia 13 was written and directed by a young Francis Coppola in Ireland to take advantage of a European trip made for Corman's The Young Racers. All the films are interesting, in themselves and as footnotes to distinguished filmographies. Little Shop of Horrors has a lasting cult reputation for its blackly comic tale of codependency between a skid-row botanist (Jonathan Haze, relying a bit too much on a Jerry Lewis impersonation) and a blood-drinking, flesh-hungry mutant plant voiced by screenwriter Chuck Griffith ("feed meeee!"), with a creepy cameo from a young Jack Nicholson as a masochist who loves to visit the dentist. The Terror, which has Nicholson as the bewildered lead, is a wilfully incomprehensible Gothic picture made up on the spot by Corman and a handful of other directors (including Coppola and Monte Hellman), climaxing with Karloff's bogus baron and a decaying spectre woman swept away by a flood in the dungeons. Dementia 13, a saga of axe murders and mad sculptors, is brisk grand guignol with a lot of creepy imagery to do with drowned children and family rituals. On the DVD: The Roger Corman Collection limply claims the films are "digitally mastered" (note, not "remastered") as they are simply copies of low-quality video onto disc. Because these titles are public domain no one seems willing to take any care with transfers, and all three films are in terrible state. The Terror, the only colour film, looks especially atrocious (Vistascope cropped to full-frame) but the black-and-white films also suffer all manner of damage. The packaging is classy, but it's a shame more work wasn't done on the films themselves.--Kim Newman

• The Raven | DVD | (29/10/2007) from £7.96   |  Saving you £8.03 (100.88%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Bela Lugosi is the brilliant but deranged surgeon who becomes obssessed with a beautiful dancer after saving her life. He must have her but first must deal with her fiance and father and plans to take care of them in his chamber of Edgar Allen Poe-inspired torture devices. To do the dirty work he enlists the aid of a wanted criminal (Karloff) whom he disfigures with the promise of restoring his features when the job is done.

• The Sorcerers | DVD | (01/09/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  The Sorcerers, the second film directed by the lost "wunderkind" of British cinema Michael Reeves, may not have the scope and visceral impact of his masterpiece, Witchfinder General (1968), but there's enough fierce originality here to show what a tragic loss it was when he died from a drugs overdose aged only 24. The film also shows the effective use he made of minimal resources, working here on a derisory budget of less than £50,000--of which £11,000 went to the film's sole "named" star, Boris Karloff. Karloff plays an elderly scientist living with his devoted wife in shabby poverty in London, dreaming of the brilliant breakthrough in hypnotic technique that will restore him to fame and fortune. Seeking a guinea-pig, he hits on Mike, a disaffected young man-about-town (Ian Ogilvy, who starred in all three of Reeves' films). But the technique has an unlooked-for side effect--not only can he and his wife make Mike do their bidding, they can vicariously experience everything that he feels. At which point, it turns out that the wife has urges and desires that her husband never suspected. Karloff, then almost at the end of his long career, brings a melancholy dignity to his role; but the revelation is the veteran actress Catherine Lacey as the seemingly sweet old lady, turning terrifyingly avid and venomous as she realises her power. The portrayal of Swinging London, with its mini-skirted dollybirds thronging nightclubs where the strongest stimulant seems to be Coke rather than coke, has an almost touching innocence, but Reeves invests it with a dream-like quality, extending it into scenes of violent death in labyrinthine dark alleys. By this stage, some ten years after it started, the British horror cycle was winding down in lazy self-parody. Reeves had the exceptional talent and vision to revive it, had he only lived. On the DVD: The Sorcerers DVD has original trailers for both this film and Witchfinder General (both woefully clumsy); filmographies for Reeves, Karloff and Ogilvy; an "image gallery" (a grab-bag of posters, stills and lobby cards); detailed written production notes by horror-movie expert Kim Newman; and an excellent 25-minute documentary on Reeves, "Blood Beast", dating from 1999. The transfer is letterboxed full-width, with acceptable sound. --Philip Kemp

• The Pirates Of The Silver Screen Collection | DVD | (10/07/2006) from £11.71   |  Saving you £1.28 (9.90%)   |  RRP £12.99

  A bounty of five swash buckling adventures comprises this cracking boxed set. Contains: Disc 1 - The Black Pirate (1926) and Captain Kidd (1945) Disc 2 - Treasure Island (1960 TV) The Dancing Pirate (1936) and Shanghaied (1915) Disc 3 - Long John Silver's Return To Treasure Island (1954) and The Love Nest (1923) Disc 4 - The Adventures Of Long John Silver -TV series with Robert Newton:The Necklace Ship O'The Dead Sword of Vengeance Miss Purity's Birthday Dead Reckoning Th

• Black Sabbath | DVD | (25/06/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Experience Mario Bava's horror classic Black Sabbath A beautiful woman is terrorized by call from an ex-lover who has escaped from prison for the pleasure of killing her... A family becomes a feeding ground when their father returns home wounded after ridding the countryside of a hideous vampire... A nurse is haunted by reproaches from the Beyond after stealing a ring from the finger of a dead medium! Join Boris Karloff as he hosts (and stars in) this trilogy of terror tales

• The Fatal Hour | DVD | (12/10/2009) from £5.38   |  Saving you £-3.39 (-170.40%)   |  RRP £1.99

  The Fatal Hour

• How the Grinch Stole Christmas | Blu Ray | (20/10/2015) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Cauldron Of Blood / Colonel March Of Scotland Yard | DVD | (03/09/2001) from £13.98   |  Saving you £4.00 (36.40%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Screen legend Boris Karloff plays a blind sculptor who uses skeletons as the basis for his unorthodox works of art. Unbeknownst to him his wife Tania (Viveca Lindfors) and her lover provide the skeletons by murdering people and dumping them in an acid bath they keep in the basement laboratory. A journalist played by Jean Pierre Aumont and his girlfriend are the straight couple who trigger the climax after their friend Helga has been given the acid treatment. 'Colonel March of Sc

• The Monster Legacy | DVD | (25/10/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £84.99

  The Dracula Legacy 1. Dracula (1931) 2. Son Of Dracula (1943) and House Of Dracula (1945) 3. Dracula (Spanish language version) (1931) and Dracula's Daughter (1936) plus bonus footage The Frankenstein Legacy 1. Frankenstein (1931) 2. The Bride Of Frankenstein (1935) 3. Son Of Frankenstein (1939) and Ghost Of Frankenstein (1942) 4. House Of Frankenstein (1944) plus bonus footage The Wolf Man Legacy 1. The Wolf Man (1941) 2. Werewolf Of London

• The Ghoul | DVD | (25/03/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £3.99

  Boris Karloff's first British film. The story of Professor Morlant an eccentric Egyptologist who becomes obsessed with the mystical powers of the ancient Egyptian gods. On his deathbed he orders his servant to bind a sacred jewel called 'The Eternal Light' to his hand. He warns that if the jewel is stolen he will return from the grave looking for revenge. Please note: This is a NTSC disc.