"Actor: Margot Steinberg"

• In Love And War | DVD | (20/03/2000) from £8.73   |  Saving you £7.26 (83.16%)   |  RRP £15.99

  This disastrous 1996 film by Sir Richard Attenborough was meant to be part of his informal series of movies about great men, including Gandhi, Chaplin, Cry Freedom (the Steven Biko story) and Shadowlands (CS Lewis). In Love and War is a recounting of young Ernest Hemingway's World War I love affair with Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, who was eight years older than he and who became the basis for the Catherine Barkley character in A Farewell to Arms. O'Donnell is terrible, in a word, and Bullock mostly seems out of sorts when playing someone real. Except for the scene in which Hemingway is introduced, fearlessly making his way to a trench under heavy bombardment, you have no idea that this person O'Donnell "portrays" will eventually change the direction of American literature. For a much better experience, look toward Attenborough's previous works. --Tom Keogh

• Proteus | DVD | (07/10/2002) from £17.82   |  Saving you £-14.83 (N/A%)   |  RRP £2.99

  A conventional but spirited monster-at-loose quickie, Proteus stars British hulk Craig Fairbrass (Beyond Bedlam) as an undercover cop marooned with a gang of panicky drug dealers (played by Americans no one has heard from since 1995) on an oilrig-cum-unethical-genetics research station where a shape-shifting creature is on the prowl, mostly impersonating human beings but occasionally appearing as a giant shark-person. The Thing-like creature absorbs personality traits from the victims it absorbs, so--in a gag reminiscent of the cancerous liver gambit from Forbidden World (1983)--it is finally defeated because it becomes a heroin addict. There is a neat joke about the way the towering hero is constantly beaten up by people far shorter than he is, and Fairbrass's fed-up mockney patter sometimes wrings a few laughs from lines like "f***ing typical--you can never find a mutated monster when you want one!" The sick humour and weird science that were the strengths of the original novel (Slimer, written by screenwriter John Brosnan and Leroy Kettle under the significantly initialled pseudonym Harry Adam Knight) is hammered out in favour of rubbery goop effects and familiar running-around waterlogged corridors being pursued by a red-filtered subjective camera. Doug ("Pinhead") Bradley shows up in old-age make-up as the evil industrialist behind the monster-making programme in the last reel, and effects man director Bob Keen stages an especially gross death scene for the villain as he chokes on a huge scaly tentacle in what looks like an outtake from a gay porn film. On the DVD: An extras-free package, full-screen transfer, and a lot of strange colour distortions that make some dark scenes look like photographic negatives. --Kim Newman

• Boy Meets Girl | DVD | (27/05/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  'Boy Meets Girl' is a scary thought provoking and excrucuatingly relevant. It's bleak tone chills you to the bone and sketches a portrait of a serial killer in the fine 'Henry' tradition. A man meets a woman in a bar the two go back to her flat and begin watching porno films the man passes out and wakes to find himself strapped in a dentist chair. The woman along with her accomplice begin to torture the man eventually killing him. What in effect becomes a movie monologue for