"Actor: Joe Peters"

• Department S: The Complete Series | Blu Ray | (02/10/2017) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  All 28 episodes of the crimefighting drama series about an elite branch of Interpol agents who take on the cases no-one else can solve. A trio of ace investigators led by suavely assured novelist Jason King (Peter Wyngarde), hard-nosed professional Stewart Sullivan (Joel Fabiani) and coolly efficient computer expert Annabelle Hurst (Rosemary Nichols) try to outdo each other as they seek to solve the cases baffling police forces throughout Europe. Episodes comprise: 'Six Days', 'The Trojan Tanker', 'A Cellar Full of Silence', 'The Pied Piper of Hambletown', 'One of Our Aircraft Is Empty', 'The Man in the Elegant Room', 'Handicap Dead', 'Black Out', 'Who Plays the Dummy', 'The Treasure of the Costa Del Sol', 'The Man Who Got a New Face', 'Les Fleurs Du Mal', 'The Shift That Never Was', 'The Man from 'X', 'Dead Men Die Twice', 'The Perfect Operation', 'The Duplicated Man', 'The Mysterious Man in the Flying Machine', 'Death On Reflection', 'The Last Train to Redbridge', 'A Small War of Nerves', 'The Bones of Byrom Blain', 'Spencer Bodily Is Sixty Years Old', 'The Ghost of Mary Burnham', 'A Fish Out of Water', 'The Soup of the Day', 'A Ticket to Nowhere' and 'The Double Death of Charlie Crippen'.

• Carmen Jones | DVD | (17/04/2019) from £5.32   |  Saving you £14.67 (275.75%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Few actresses have dominated the camera as powerfully as Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones. Her polished beauty plays in irresistible contrast to her title character's leonine sexuality and fluid emotions; a man can't decide from moment to moment if he wants to save her from doom, build her a castle, or never let her out of bed. Of course, that's the problem with the boys in this semi-experimental adaptation of Bizet's opera, Carmen. Straight-arrow Joe (a strapping Harry Belafonte), an obedient corporal on a southern military base during World War II, is all set to go to flight school and marry his hometown sweetie, Cindy Lou (Olga James), when his troublemaking sergeant orders him to accompany Carmen to a civilian court. In short order, Joe is swept up in Carmen's carnal anarchy and her craving for release from lousy options in life. An impulsive act of violence ensures that Joe's future is gone forever, putting Carmen in the difficult position of destroying their relationship to save him. Oscar Hammerstein II took Bizet's music in 1943 and rewrote the book and lyrics. The result is largely a smashing success with a few missteps (the bullfighter in Bizet's piece becomes a heavyweight boxer here, which breaks up a certain grace in the story) and a couple of perfect stretches (the long prelude to Carmen and Joe's first embrace, set on Carmen's hoodoo-ish home turf). Despite the fact that both Dandridge and Belafonte were singers, their vocal performances were dubbed by LeVern Hutcherson and Marilyn Horne. (Yes, it is a little disconcerting to hear another voice coming out of the more familiar Belafonte's mouth.) Otto Preminger directed with his usual eye on economy of action and production, as the numerous musical numbers tend to be shot in lengthy, single, carefully choreographed takes. The result can be a little visually static at times, but the passion behind the singing pulls everything through.--Tom Keogh

• Death Collector | DVD | (22/08/2005) from £17.53   |  Saving you £-0.54 (N/A%)   |  RRP £16.99

  He's a collector for the mob...and he doesn't take no for an answer. It's all in the family for a young streetwise hood as he quickly becomes a collector for the mob. He quickly rises rung by rung up the ladder of the underworld in this violent crime sage.

• Department S - Vol. 1 - Episodes 1 And 2 - Six Days / The Trojan Tanker | DVD | (10/07/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  The hit of the 1969-1970 season, Department S was an attempt on the part of television company ITC to create a "with-it" follow-up to the The Saint and Man in a Suitcase series which were starting to look staid by then. The department of the title is notionally part of Interpol, a group managed by the first of many black TV top cops (here Denis Albana Peters), and assigned all the bizarre cases The Avengers hadn't handled. Often they would come up against modern variations on the classic "locked-room" or "paradox" mysteries so favoured in crime fiction, mysteries which verge on the sort of phenomena The X Files would later specialise in (except no aliens appear in Department S). The supposed leads are Action-Man-type Stewart Sullivan (Joel Fabiani) and English-rose computer whiz Annabelle Hurst (Rosemary Nichols), but the break-out character is the flamboyant Jason King (Peter Wyngarde), a mystery writer and puzzle-solver notable for his Fu Manchu facial hair and an enormous wardrobe of safari suits, ruffled shirts, flared trousers and velvet jackets. King was the only male character on TV to be as fashion-conscious as the Avengers girls, and his preening peacock attitudes--along with the scripts' above-average mysteries--made this essential viewing for the Age of Aquarius. Volume One includes the following episodes: "Six Days", in which a missing airliner turns up but the passengers have no idea that they've lost six days, with Peter Bowles; and "The Trojan Tanker", in which a mystery woman is found in a luxury suite concealed inside an oil tanker, with Simon (Doomwatch) Oates. --Kim Newman

• The Rat Pack | DVD | (14/10/2002) from £17.66   |  Saving you £-7.67 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  An irresistible melange of showbiz and politics, The Rat Pack is a sprawling HBO TV movie about the late-50s axis between Frank Sinatra's cool-talking cronies and the White House-bound Kennedy clan. Ray Liotta, William L Petersen and Joe Mantegna manage to give real performances as opposed to impersonations as Frankie, JFK and Dean Martin, and there's a stand-out turn from Don Cheadle as Sammy Davis Jr, who fantasises a blazing, gunslinging rendition of "I've Got You Under My Skin" as delivered to the cross-burning Nazi pickets outside his hotel campaigning against his marriage to a white Swedish starlet. Naturally the story goes over a lot of familiar ground (Marilyn Monroe, and so on,) but the Hollywood-Vegas angle, with the obvious criminal tie-ins, lends it a freshness. Angus McFadyen remains typecast as real-life actors, following up his Orson Welles (Cradle Will Rock) and Richard Burton (Liz, the Elizabeth Taylor biopic) by doing a squirming, but funny take on Peter Lawford, caught between the White House and Sinatra's vast, demanding ego. Its general style is somewhere between a Scorsese gangland epic and made-for-TV muckraking biopic and a lot of material from Shawn Levy's fine book Rat Pack Confidential is worked into the weave. On the DVD: The Rat Pack is a no-frills disc presented in a good-looking 16:9 anamorphic transfer, though as it's a TV movie this means trimming the top and the bottom of the image. --Kim Newman

• Late Bloomers | DVD | (06/11/2006) from £19.75   |  Saving you £0.24 (1.22%)   |  RRP £19.99

  At a suburban Texas high school Dinah (Connie Nelson) a geometry teacher who coaches the girls' basketball team and Carly (Dee Hennigan) a principal's assistant who is also the wife of an algebra teacher kiss during a basketball lesson and find themselves embarking on an affair. When word gets out they find themselves in the middle of a scandal that rocks the foundations of their pious community. Winner of the 1996 Sundance Film Festival.

• New Blood | DVD | (28/10/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Small time gang...big time problems. Danny White (Nick Moran: Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) and his crew of wannabe gangsters find themselves pitted against the local mafia headed by Leigh and Hellman (Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano: The Matrix) when they accidentally kill a local business man they were hired to kidnap. With nowhere else to turn and bleeding from a fatal gunshot wound Danny visits his estranged father Alan (John Hurt: Contact) looking for help. When Alan sees Danny's condition he only has one thought: Danny may be the organ donor he's been desperately searching for to save Danny's mortally sick sister. But Danny is not prepared to die for nothing. There is a price to be paid and a deal is struck between father and son. And so begins the most terrifying and bizarre night of their lives.

• Gus Van Sant Double Pack | DVD | (09/11/2009) from £10.95   |  Saving you £9.04 (82.56%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Gus Van Sant Double Pack (2 Discs)