"Actor: Karl Schanzer"

• 3 Classic Horrors Of The Silver Screen - Vol. 6 - Dementia 13 / Shock / Black Dragons | DVD | (07/02/2005) from £6.79   |  Saving you £-1.80 (N/A%)   |  RRP £4.99

  Dementia 13: Dementia 13 will delight all fans who thrive on classics such as; Night Of The Living Dead and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The Plot revolves around a seemingly benign member of a family who is the mad axe-murderer and is steadily picking off the rest of the family. The location is used imaginatively the gothic atmosphere suitably potent and there is a magnificently sharp cameo from Patrick McGee as the family doctor. Dementia 13 is guaranteed to make you double loc

• Dementia 13 | DVD | (08/09/2003) from £3.99   |  Saving you £1.00 (20.00%)   |  RRP £4.99

  John Haloran dies from a heart attack leaving his wife Louise with something of a problem; she won't get to inherit any of the Haloran family money when Lady Haloran dies if John is already dead. So Louise forges a letter from John in order to convince the rest of his family that he has been called away urgently on business to New York whilst she journeys to the ghostly ancestral home in Ireland. It is her intention to ingratiate herself into the family and ensure a cut of the inheri

• Dementia 13 | DVD | (27/03/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Francis Ford Coppola's feature debut co-written with blaxploitation legend Jack Hill (Coffy) and produced by the grand-master of independent cinema Roger Corman. The Haloran family gather at a sinister Irish castle to memorialize the death of the youngest sister Kathleen. While various family members plot and connive an axe-murderer is terrorizing the grounds and Kathleen's body shows up at just the wrong time. Slowly the family members become increasingly suspicious o

• 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