"Actor: Charles Walters"

• Dracula, Prince Of Darkness | DVD | (23/10/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Ignoring a strange warning a young party travelling to the Carpathian Mountains are abandoned by their coachman. Their luck changes however when another mysterious coach appears and delivers them to the hospitality of Count Dracula...

• Dracula Prince Of Darkness | DVD | (29/10/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  As the third in what became a series of eight, Prince of Darkness was distinguished among the Hammer Dracula movies for several reasons. It was the third and last directed by Terence Fisher and his familiarity with the mythos and studio practices meant the rushed production still came out looking spectacular in places. Moving into the tail end of the 1960s, Hammer looked for ways of cost cutting: the film's dramatic finale on a frozen river takes place on a two-for-one set being used simultaneously for another shoot. This was also the series entry that included a substitute for the Renfield character missing from the first movie. Thorley Walters as Ludwig is a colourful cameo and that's also all that can be said of Christopher Lee. Despite top billing, the mute monster occupies but a fraction of the overall on-screen time. The real frights come from gaunt butler Klove who scares the life (literally) out of hapless travellers Alan, Charles, Helen and Diana. Surely their fate would ensure no-one else took the mountain pass to Carlsbad? But only two years later, audiences discovered Dracula Has Risen from the Grave. On the DVD: apart from scene access there's nothing making use of the DVD format here. The 2.55:1 presentation is certainly welcome, and the mono audio somehow feels appropriate. --Paul Tonks

• Girl Crazy | Blu Ray | (21/07/2020) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Black Samurai | DVD | (04/08/2008) from £2.68   |  Saving you £-0.69 (N/A%)   |  RRP £1.99

  Jim Kelly, the star of Black Samurai, was a multi-talented martial artist perhaps best remembered for his role in Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon. Black Samurai is essentially a vehicle for his fighting skills in which he plays a secret agent out to retrieve his Japanese sweetheart from the drug-dealing Satanist who has abducted her to blackmail her father. His investigative skills are almost non-existent--much of the plot consists of his arriving at the villains' houses and hitting people. At the same time, the character's utter ruthlessness and the extravagant evil of the villains, the chief of whom, Jannicot, is in the habit of sicking a vulture on his enemies, are entertaining enough and the 1970s styling unselfconsciously entertaining. The director, Al Adamson, was mostly famous for his horror films, and there is a Gothic extravagance to the sets and gimmicks here: Kelly's jet-pack sequence has to be seen to be believed. On the DVD: The DVD comes with a wonderful period trailer for The Green Hornet, the usual chapter selection, biographies of Kelly and Adamson (who was murdered in 1995) and a feature which enables you to look at the fight scenes in isolation. --Roz Kaveney