"Actor: Jon Read"

• Happiness | DVD | (22/05/2000) from £8.49   |  Saving you £11.50 (135.45%)   |  RRP £19.99

  At times brilliant and insightful, at times repellent and false, Happiness is director Todd Solondz's multi-story tale of sex, perversion and loneliness. Plumbing depths of Crumb-like angst and rejection, Solondz won the Cannes International Critics Prize in 1998 and the film was a staple of nearly every critic's Top 10 list. Admirable, shocking, and hilarious for its sarcastic yet strangely empathetic look at consenting adults' confusion between lust and love, the film stares unflinchingly until the audience blinks. But it doesn't stop there. A word of strong caution to parents: One of the main characters, a suburban super dad (played by Dylan Baker), is really a predatory paedophile and there is more than an attempt to paint him as a sympathetic character. Children are used in this film as running gags or, worse, the means to an end. Whether that end is a humorous scene for Solondz or sexual gratification for the rapist becomes largely irrelevant. Happiness is an intelligent, sad film, revelatory and exact at moments. It's also abuse in the guise of art. That's nothing to celebrate. --Keith Simanton

• The Ugly Duckling & Me | DVD | (16/07/2012) from £3.95   |  Saving you £2.04 (51.65%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Based on the much loved, timeless fairytale The Ugly Duckling by Hans Christian Andersen, The Ugly Duckling andMe tells the story of Ratso, a wheeler dealer city rat, and Ugly, a baby duckling with a striking appearance.But Ugly isn't your average duckling and Dollar signs flash before Ratso's eyes as he recognises Ugly as a potential source of income. However, as the pair embark on an unlikely adventure, Ratso comes to realise that there is more to life than making a quick buck and so begins a lifelong friendship. A must for fans of classic fairytales and more recent films such as Ratatouille and Happy Feet this offers pure delight for the whole family.

• Classic Horror - Vol. 2 | DVD | (09/01/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Includes: 1. Carnival Of Souls 2. The Ape Man 3. Mesa Of Lost Women 4. Creature From The Haunted Sea 5. The Devil Bat 6. Vampire Bat 7. Dementia 13 8. Shock 9. Black Dragon For more information on individual films please refer to the individual products.

• 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

• Skin Deep | DVD | (21/03/2005) from £13.48   |  Saving you £-3.49 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  In a world of love sex race and betrayal not all suspects are created equal. On the surface it appears the Anthony (Mailon Rivera) has the perfect life - a thriving career an impressive home a lovely wife and a beautiful mistress. Underneath it all though his wife (Kristen Shaw) has become increasingly distant his mistress (Debra Wilson) is becoming increasingly psychotic and his best friend Michael (Steve White) accuses him of being a sellout. When Michael and his sex