"Actor: Marcus Thomas"

• Big Brother - Uncut 2 | DVD | (10/09/2001) from £5.55   |  Saving you £7.44 (134.05%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Hitting back with a second series, the Big Brother phenomenon looks set to continue into the foreseeable future. Many critics of the show predicted that the concept had run out of steam by the end of its first series, and the nonchalance of the new contestants in the Big Brother house--who all seemed rather insipid compared to the likes of Nasty Nick--appeared to confirm their worst fears. However, the unashamedly voyeuristic nature of the show made the sequel almost as much of a success as the first one, topping Channel 4's ratings for weeks on end, and fuelling pub conversations across the country over the summer of 2001. With national papers backing their favourite candidates and the final public vote for the winner beating the turn out for the 2001 General Election, the series' formula appears to have plenty of mileage in it yet. This compilation brings you the best and worst of the household's antics: from Brian's comedy moments to Paul and Helen's will--they-won't-they audience grabber. --Nikki Disney

• Noel | DVD | (05/12/2005) from £5.35   |  Saving you £10.64 (198.88%)   |  RRP £15.99

• Tales Of The City | DVD | (05/09/2005) from £5.98   |  Saving you £14.01 (234.28%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Armistead Maupin's riveting bestseller comes to life in this brilliant adaptation of the hilarious and affectionate chronicle of colourful San Francisco life in the 1970s. The highly acclaimed and double Emmy nominated series based on the first volume in Maupin's six volume Tales Of The City series generated a large and devoted following.

• Big Brother - Uncut 3 | DVD | (09/09/2002) from £12.39   |  Saving you £0.60 (4.84%)   |  RRP £12.99

  With more walkers than your average Gary Lineker advert Big Brother 3 got off to a rocky start in losing Sunita (she said she wasn't having fun, but she'd probably realised she would be voted out in the first few weeks) and having Sandy offer us his re-enactment of The Great Escape. At this point the series seemed doomed: the remaining housemates hardly looked like the most entertaining of suspects. Then the media stepped in and turned Jade into Jabba the Hut's sister and Tim into "Nice but Dim". There were also a few hints of romance and some fumbling under the sheets, but all amounted to nothing with confessions of love only occurring after the contestants had left the house. You can choose to succumb to voyeurism or attempt to hide from it, but love it or hate it, no-one can escape the media juggernaut that is Channel 4's favourite reality TV show. On the DVD: Big Brother Uncut 3 offers the best and worst of the households antics in Dolby Digital 2.0 and 4:3 picture ratio--but come on, would you really want to listen to Jade in full surround-sound glory? The DVD extras are pretty standard fare for the BB releases, with multiple angle viewings of the "Word Game" and "Aqua Fun", which basically means you get to see the girls naked from any angle. Along with this you get the embarrassing audition tapes, which make you wonder just why this lot were picked in the first place. But then no sane person would want to enter the Big Brother House, would they? To prove this, comic character Avid Merrion offers his own audition tapes with their bizarre mix of Euro Trash and psycho-stalker extraordinaire--more of which can be seen in Channel 4's comedy Bo' Selecta. --Nikki Disney

• Apex | DVD | (19/06/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  A robot is sent to an alternate dimension via a time-travel experiment gone wrong and wreaks havoc in the new world in which it finds itself. A scientist is sent to investigate and attempts to stop the disaster from happening in the first place.

• Army of Darkness - The Evil Dead 3 | DVD | (11/11/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  It's hard not to feel there's something wrong when Army of Darkness, the third entry in Sam Raimi's lively Evil Dead series, opens with a 15 certificate. And indeed, this is not quite the non-stop rollercoaster of splat we're entitled to expect. Like Evil Dead II, it opens with a digest-cum-remake of the original movie, taking geeky Ash (Bruce Campbell) back out to that cabin in the woods where he is beset by demons who do away with his girlfriend (blink and you'll miss Bridget Fonda). Blasted back in time to 12th century England, Ash finds himself still battling the Deadites and his own ineptitude in a quest to save the day and get back home. Though it starts zippily, with Campbell's grimly funny clod of a hero commanding the screen, a sort of monotony sets in as magical events pile up. Ash is attacked by Lilliputian versions of himself, one of whom incubates in his stomach and grows out of his shoulder to be his evil twin. After being dismembered and buried, Evil Ash rises from the dead to command a zombie army and at least half the film is a big battle scene in which rotted warriors (nine mouldy extras in masks for every one Harryhausen-style impressive animated skeleton) besiege a cardboard castle. There are lots of action jokes, MAD Magazine-like marginal doodles and a few funny lines, but it lacks the authentic scares of The Evil Dead and the authentic sick comedy of Evil Dead II. On the DVD: Army of Darkness may be the least of the trilogy, but Anchor Bay's super two-disc set is worthy of shelving beside their outstanding editions of the earlier films. Disc 1 contains the 81-minute US theatrical version in widescreen or fullscreen, plus the original "Planet of the Apes" ending, the trailer and a making-of featurette. Disc 2 has the 96-minute director's cut, with extra slapstick and a lively, irreverent commentary track from Raimi, Campbell and co-writer Ivan Raimi, plus yet more deleted scenes and some storyboards. The fact that the film exists in so many versions suggests that none of them satisfied everybody, but fans will want every scrap of Army in this one package. --Kim Newman

• Big Brother - Uncut - The Official Video | DVD | (11/12/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Big Brother was the TV event of 2000. The set-up--put 10 members of the public in a specially constructed house, keep them under 24-hour surveillance and watch them sweat out the weekly evictions of one of their number, voted by us, the public--was derived from a hugely successful Dutch programme, and gripping, unmissable stuff it proved to be over here, too. Because you already know the outcome--and if you don't, where were you last summer--the game-show aspect of the programme doesn't really work on DVD or video. But that was never really the point. It was the personalities involved that made the show such compulsive viewing, and they remain as lively as ever.On Big Brother--Uncut and the DVD To add some spice, Channel 4 have included scenes that were "too hot" for television: when Nicola decides to do some nude body painting, we see a bit more flesh now; some of the conversations between the contestants are a bit saucier than the original broadcast versions; and there are some hilarious close-ups of a few of the housemates picking their nose. But the best thing about Big Brother: Uncut is what made the whole show such big news in the first place: Nasty Nick's downfall, here played out in all its excruciating detail.Given what we know about him, it's fun to see Nick try his hand at some team-building exercises the producers designed to select the 10 contestants before the programme aired. This scene is also included on "Inside Big Brother", a making-of documentary accompanying "Big Brother: Uncut". Made while the Big Brother show was still being broadcast, there's an agreeable urgency to this programme. The Channel 4 producers interviewed here seem a little bewildered by the show's success. John Del Mol, the co-creator of the Dutch show, hazards a guess that the British show was such a hit because it was so well cast, and there's a fascinating look into the design of the house--"penal chic" was the effect they were after. Also included in this package are profiles of the various contestants, but these feel a little redundant, if only because, over the course of the show, we learn a lot more about the housemates than what's on these skimpy resumes. The profiles do, however, tell us that most of the contestants harbour show-biz ambitions. Now, why is that not a surprise? --Edward Lawrenson

• Scorched | DVD | (15/05/2006) from £5.74   |  Saving you £7.25 (126.31%)   |  RRP £12.99

  In this fun crime caper movie, a small-town bank robbery is botched in the most ironic of ways.

• Roll Bounce | DVD | (06/03/2006) from £5.24   |  Saving you £10.75 (205.15%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Full of the humour mild humiliation and bittersweet lessons of growing up this coming-of-age comedy from Malcolm D. Lee unfolds on the South Side of 1970's Chicago. Xavier (Bow Wow) and his wisecracking crew of friends rule the local roller skating rink but when it closes their summer looks to be an empty one. Reluctantly they head over to Sweetwater the glitzy rink across town where the rich kids skate and where the cocky Sweetness (Wesley Jonathan) presides over all as the

• The Grave Dancers | DVD | (15/09/2008) from £7.99   |  Saving you £5.00 (62.58%)   |  RRP £12.99

  After the death of a close friend Harris Kira and Sid reunite at the graveyard for a final farewell. However after reading a mysterious message on a gravestone and dancing on the nearby graves they find themselves the victims of dangerous hauntings by the angered ghosts. Harris and his wife Allison find themselves haunted by a deranged female pianist who was ax-murdered. Sid gets haunted by a child pyromaniac and Kira haunted by a sadistic rapist. They turn to a paranormal investigator to try to help them break the curse they imposed on themselves before the next full moon when they will be killed by the ghosts' wrath.

• Drowning Mona | DVD | (29/04/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £3.99

  Small quirky comedy thrillers such as Drowning Mona are one of the things that American cinema does best and far too rarely. Peter Steinfeld's appealing script attracted a solid cast of stars under the direction of newcomer Nick Gomez (whose previous work includes episodes of The Sopranos). It seems that someone has cut Mona's brake cables and she drove to her death by drowning. Bette Midler's Mona manages to make it entirely plausible that almost everyone might have wanted to kill her: from her son's business partner Eddie (Casey Affleck) to her husband's mistress Rona (Jamie Lee Curtis). The local police chief (Danny DeVito), already burdened with subordinates who refer to running away from danger as "securing the perimeter" and the impending marriage of his daughter (Neve Campbell) to the sweet but unreliable Eddie, has to make sense of the farrago of lies and half-truths which is all anyone will tell him. This is an ingenious tightly plotted film which is never too busy to scatter odd little gags at its margins; it's a tall tale, whose complicated telling is half the fun. On the DVD The DVD comes with the theatrical trailer, a director's commentary, interviews with the stars and four deleted scenes. The picture is 1.85:1 anamorphic and the sound is Dolby Surround. --Roz Kaveney

• Bigger Than The Sky | DVD | (07/08/2006) from £6.27   |  Saving you £13.72 (218.82%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Life has a role for everyone. Mike (Corbett) only wants to perform in great productions. So when a clueless amateur (Marcus Thomas) is given the lead in Cyrano de Bergerac Mike decides he must personally train him. But when real life begins to mimic the play's love triangle and his protg falls for the girl Mike loves but can't commit to (Smart) suddenly it's Mike's turn to learn - not how to act but how to live!

• Scorcher | DVD | (01/07/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Colonel Ryan Beckett (Mark Dascascos) and his team of misfit tactical mavericks are called away from leave on orders from President Nelson (Rutger Hauer) only to be informed that the gravest threat to all humanity has become their ultimate challenge. Man's quest for harnessing the power of nuclear weapons has wreaked havoc on the earth. The Pacific plates are shifting. The world is hotting up. Earthquakes. Volcanic eruptions. An apocalypse of biblical proportions. They have just three days left to deflect the plates successfully with the power of another thermo-nuclear bomb - ground zero: Los Angeles. As both heat and panic flare through the cities of the world and with the help of a group of the US's top scientists Beckett must battle to save the planet and fight for the life of his daughter caught between marauding gangs taking the lawless streets hostage before the raging fire of hell on earth consumes them all!

• Family Collection 2 - Like Mike/Johnson Family Vacation/Roll Bounce | DVD | (09/04/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Johnson Family Vacation (Dir. Christopher Erskin 2004): Wrong turn in Arizona. No brakes in Colorado. Arrested in Kansas. It's the ultimate family trip! Johnson Family Vacation is reminiscent of the National Lampoon's Vacation films which introduced Chevy Chase (Fletch) to an international audience. Nate Johnson (Cedric The Entertainer) and his family drive cross-country to the annual family reunion. However there are some very reluctant passengers... We have Nates wife Dorothy who's only going for the kids; D.J. (Bow Wow) their son a pint-sized rapstar to be; Nikki (Solange Knowles - younger sister of Beyonc) a prospective lolita ; and their youngest Destiny whose imaginary dog causes all manner of mischief. It's going to be a tough journey! Like Mike (Dir. John Schultz 2002): One day when a box of used clothes arrives orphanage inhabitant Calvin discovers a pair of trainers inscribed with the initials of his all time basketball hero Michael Jordan. These magical shoes transform him into a NBA superstar and with them he finds he can shoot hoops like a pro. He is quickly signed to struggling NBA team The Knights whose boss Frank Bernard believes a kid on the bench will boost much needed ticket sales. Calvin finds himself staying with star player Tracey Reynolds who reluctantly takes the new team member under his wing. As the team struggles to win Knights' coach Wagner decides to give Calvin a shot in a game and finds to his surprise that Calvin and Tracey make a winning team. With his boundless enthusiasm and team spirit Calvin proves to be just what The Knights need to give them a chance at the playoffs. Despite his newfound stardom Calvin still has to cope with the scheming owner of the orphanage Stan Bittleman who is determined to stop Calvin being adopted and cash in on his success... Will Calvin be able to keep hold of the magic shoes? Can The Knights win the playoff? Will he and his friends finally find parents? Roll Bounce (Dir. Malcolm D. Lee 2005): Full of the humour mild humiliation and bittersweet lessons of growing up this coming-of-age comedy from Malcolm D. Lee unfolds on the South Side of 1970's Chicago. Xavier (Bow Wow) and his wisecracking crew of friends rule the local roller skating rink but when it closes their summer looks to be an empty one. Reluctantly they head over to Sweetwater the glitzy rink across town where the rich kids skate and where the cocky Sweetness (Wesley Jonathan) presides over all as the unchallenged king of the floor. The boys are ridiculed upon their arrival and soon vow revenge at the upcoming competition for which they begin to hone their skills. Meanwhile X deals with his troubles at home as his mother has recently died and his dad Curtis (Chi McBride) struggles to make ends meet. The two attempt to understand each others' grief and help one another to move beyond it. X also makes the acquaintance of new kid Tori (Jurnee Smollett) a gawky girl with braces and a sharp tongue who tags along with the boys as an ugly duckling later to emerge a swan. Tori's rather attractive mum (Kellita Smith) attracts a great deal of attention on the block notably from two quick-talking garbage men (Mike Epps and Charles Q. Murphy in a hilarious bit part) and X tries to navigate his budding relationship with the seemingly-unattainable Naomi (Meagan Good).

• Scorched/Meaning Of Life | DVD | (18/09/2006) from £9.99   |  Saving you £15.00 (150.15%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Scorched (Dir. Gavin Grazer 2003): Three bank tellers. One goal: knock the place over. Each has their own idea. Sheila (Silverstone) wants to break into the ATM. Stuart plans to ""borrow"" some money for the weekend and head to Vegas. And Woods (Harrelson) has a scheme involving a duck a dog and a safety deposit box. The ultimate inside jobs plotted by three people with nothing to lose. If only they were aware of each others plans! Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life (Dir. Terry Jones 1983): Those six pandemonium-mad Pythons are back with their craziest adventure ever! These naughty lads offer the usual tasteful sketches involving favorite bodily parts and functions the wonders of war the miracle of birth and a special preview of what's waiting for us in Heaven. Nothing is too sacred for the probing Python crew. After seeing them in action you'll never look at life in quite the same way again. It's far-out frank and jolly good fun!

• Apex | DVD | (02/04/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £3.99

  Apex