"Actor: Fernando Guillén"

• The Ages Of Lulu | DVD | (28/01/2013) from £7.79   |  Saving you £5.20 (66.75%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Submerged in the fears of a childhood devoid of affection fifteen-year old Lulu succumbs to the attraction of a young friend of the family Pablo. One night he takes her to a rock concert and after the show in the back of his car introduces Lulu to her first sexual experience. Years later when Pablo returns from teaching in the U.S. the two meet again and get married. He creates for her a world apart a private universe in which time has no meaning. But Lulu tires of living in an unreal world and leaves home. She begins to hang out in shady bars where she plunges helplessly but feverishly into the hell of dangerous apparently forbidden desires

• Institution | DVD | (08/08/2011) from £4.98   |  Saving you £13.00 (434.78%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Xavi Gimnez directs this Spanish drama about a rebellious teenager who ends up in a tough youth detention centre. Marcel Borrs stars as Fran, a troubled teen whose life is spinning out of control. In an attempt to curb his son's dangerously wayward behaviour, Fran's father, Luis (Adolfo Fernndez), has him admitted to a high-security rehabilitation centre, but the institution's brutal and psychologically questionable methods only serve to exacerbate Fran's problems.

• Killing Words | DVD | (29/01/2007) from £8.07   |  Saving you £6.92 (46.20%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Locked in a dark basement Laura a psychiatrist in her early thirties watches in horror as a video confession of a serial killer plays in front of her. Gagged and bound in a chair she realises that it's the same person who had just kidnapped her and who is now pacing the shadows a seemingly normal middle-aged man called Ramon. As he walks towards her Ramon takes off the gag and challenges Laura to play the 'Word Game'. If she wins she gets to go free but if she loses he'll start by poking out her eye...

• The Ages Of Lulu | DVD | (16/12/2002) from £9.32   |  Saving you £10.67 (114.48%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The Ages of Lulu is a gruelling sexual odyssey from Spanish director Bigas Luna, made immediately prior to his popular trilogy Jamón, jamón (1992), Golden Balls (1993) and The Tit and the Moon (1994). Starting as the somewhat queasy story of the young Lulu's affair with the manipulative Pablo (Oscar Ladoire), the movie takes a much darker turn once they are wed. It is conventional cinematic wisdom that there's no such thing as sex after marriage, but here Lulu's husband incomprehensibly leads her into blindfolded incest, then is heartbroken when she reacts with disgust. Soon Lulu (superbly played by Francesca Neri from ingénue to hardened 30-something), is paying gay men for group sex, eventually becoming an unwilling attraction in a commercial sado-machochistic orgy. The closest most UK audiences will have come to this before is in Ken Russell's The Devils (1971) and Crimes of Passion (1984), and it is surely one of the most gut-churningly nightmarish scenes ever passed for home viewing. While Ages of Lulu may function as a reactionary warning against the wilder shores of sex, Luna's intention remains unsatisfyingly enigmatic, since the script is under-written and psychologically unconvincing. The end result is pretentious, repellent pornography which degrades human beings of any sexual persuasion. On the DVD: The Ages of Lulu is transferred at an anamorphically enhanced 1.78:1 and image quality is very good, though in some scenes very slightly soft. The film can be watched with or without English subtitles, and the sound is unremarkable stereo. The main extras are a seven-page essay on Bigas Luna and five pages detailing the now restored 110 seconds of cuts made to the 1998 video release. The main title still contains 65 seconds of alternate footage to the cinema original for legal reasons. Also included are filmographies of Lunas and Oscar Ladoire, two trailers plus trailers for six other films. --Gary S Dalkin