"Actor: Doug Weiser"

• Midnight Crossing | DVD | (24/09/2007) from £6.99   |  Saving you £9.00 (56.30%)   |  RRP £15.99

  In a storm of desire deception and murder... four people are about to be swept away. There's no turning back tonight. Academy Award-winner Faye Dunaway Daniel J. Travanti John Laughlin (Crimes Of Passion) Kim Cattrall (Mannequin) and Ned Beatty (The Fourth Protocol) star in a twisted suspense thriller of murder lust and greed. For Jeff Schubb inheriting his father's sloop and charter business in the Florida Keys was a dream come true. When his wife's employer Morely Barton suggests the two couples cruise to the Bahamas Jeff sees his financial worries drift away. Once at sea Morely provides a new destination an island off Cuba where he stashed his fortune before Castro's regime. He offers Jeff half to help retrieve his treasure. But all is not smooth sailing as the past encroaches on the present and too many deceits connect the foursome in a deadly game of intrigue.

• Midnight Crossing | DVD | (14/06/2004) from £6.98   |  Saving you £-0.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  With a pounding, synthesised sound track, big-haired babes in bikinis and succession of increasingly incredible fight scenes and returns from the dead, Midnight Crossing takes some beating as an eminently watchable slab of 1980s schlock. Honesty is a premium in this torrid tale of a buried fortune, hot sex, deceit on the high seas and much extended suspense. Jeff Shub (John Laughlin), a six-packed hunk in tight shorts, lives for his yacht, inherited from his father. When his wife's boss Morley (married to a blind woman and played by Daniel J Travanti) charters the yacht for a birthday celebration, the two couples head off for the Bahamas. Then, Morley reveals his real agenda--the recovery of treasure he buried on a Cuban island in the pre-Castro years--and it soon becomes clear that nothing and nobody are what they seem. Kim Cattrall, years before her emergence as a stylish television star in Sex and the City, pops up in a in a wet t-shirt. And at the film's centre is a knockout, beyond self-parody performance from Faye Dunaway. Here she plays Joan Crawford playing a blind woman who might not, in fact, be blind at all. Dunaway confirms the suspicion that she was an actress born 30 years too late for the kind of scripts that would have best served her unique brand of throbbing melodrama. The rest of the cast, particularly the usually reliable Travanti, soon follow her over the top. The result is a compulsive 90 minutes of hammy and thoroughly enjoyable action. On the DVD: Presented in letterbox widescreen (1.85:1) format for maximum effect Midnight Crossing surfaces pretty much as it did in the cinema. Picture quality is fine. The daylight scenes on board the yacht certainly benefit but the interminable night-time struggles are less convincing. Were they shot in a tank? Probably, if the dull stereo sound quality at this point is anything to go by. Extras are limited to the original cinema trailer and filmographies of the leading players.--Piers Ford