"Actor: Marshall Thompson"

• The Long Good Friday | DVD | (10/06/2002) from £7.30   |  Saving you £12.69 (173.84%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Intricately plotted and smartly paced, this gangster saga clicks as whodunit, social satire and explosive thriller. The piece is crowned by Bob Hoskins' career-making turn as a London mobster courting respectability and Helen Mirren's subtly detailed performance as his upper-crust mistress. Cockney wiseguy Harold Shand is a would-be burgher whose domination of the city's underworld stems from his shrewdness as a mediator and his skill at harnessing political and economic clout. As Easter approaches, he's poised to launch an aggressive real estate development scheme along the depressed Thames waterfront when all hell breaks loose: a trusted lieutenant is brutally murdered, Shand's mother is nearly killed in a car bombing, one of his pubs is blown apart and the visiting American don crucial to the pending deal is quickly growing wary.Barrie Keeffe's original screenplay keeps the viewer a step ahead of Shand, providing us with a telling but teasingly incomplete glimpse of the misstep by his underlings that has set chaos loose. At the same time, Keeffe underlines the bourgeois pretensions of the rough-hewn, barrel-chested Shand, how the elegant Victoria (Mirren) helps serve those ambitions and the myriad parallels between Shand's minions and the local politicians and police only too willing to join in his scheme. Tart, funny dialogue and alternately playful and pungent Eastertide imagery complete Keeffe's shrewd design--two key scenes, in a meat locker and a warehouse, invoke the Crucifixion itself. Even with lesser performances, the script and John Mackenzie's solid direction would make The Long Good Friday a keeper but Hoskins's explosive portrait of Shand and his descent toward brutal revenge elevates the film into the very front rank, earning admiring comparisons to TheGodfather, Scarface, GoodFellas and other classics of that genre. --Sam Sutherland

• Battleground | DVD | (31/05/2004) from £5.56   |  Saving you £8.43 (151.62%)   |  RRP £13.99

  Director William Wellman (The Big Heat) offered up this 1949 treatment of the Battle of the Bulge, which won Oscars for best screenplay and best cinematography. The film concentrates on the camaraderie and the divisions between the troops as they prepare for the big offensive. Told in a taut narrative, the men of the 101st, led by Van Johnson, wait out the winter in the Ardennes forest to confront the German army in what would be the last major offensive of World War II. The men are demoralised and trapped, with no hope of support from the Allies as they are forced to band together and defend their position. A classically assembled war drama that nevertheless manages to be both engrossing and entertaining, Battleground is a mainstay of the genre. --Robert Lane

• They Were Expendable | DVD | (21/08/2006) from £18.49   |  Saving you £-5.50 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Supplies are dwindling. Troops are hopelessly outnumbered. But even in defeat there is victory. The defenders of the Philippines - including PT-boat skippers John Brickley (Robert Montgomery) and Rusty Ryan (John Wayne) - will give the U.S. war effort time to regroup after the devastation of Pearl Harbor...

• The Long Good Friday | DVD | (10/10/2005) from £12.96   |  Saving you £-1.98 (N/A%)   |  RRP £7.99

  In the savage and deadly world of the gangland king the man at the top is ruler only for as long as he controls everything in his territory. For that man the rewards can be infinite but so are the dangers. Harold Shand is enjoying the height of his powers and he is on the verge of something that would make his current 'arrangements' small fry. But stronger forces than even he can control have moved in and taken over. Climaxing in one long and bloody day of terror an Easter Good Friday he is to see his empire begin to crack and crumble.

• It! The Terror From Beyond Space | DVD | (30/05/2016) from £7.79   |  Saving you £5.20 (66.75%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Too terrifying to even have a name, It is a seemingly invincible monster that is hell-bent on killing everyone on a mission to Mars. A rescue ship travels out to Mars to retrieve the only survivor of a space probe that has experienced some sort of cataclysm. That survivor, Col Ed Carruthers (Marshall Thompson) is accused of murdering his fellow crewmen. But Ed claims that the killer was a Martian monster, and hopes to prove his assertions by signing up for a second journey to the Red Planet. Before long, the crew members of this second expedition are being systematically killed off, and it looks as though Ed is up to his old tricks. As it turns out, however, Ed was telling the truth: there is a monster on board, the savage descendant of the once-mighty Martian civilization, who snuck on board when an irresponsible crew member left the door open. The monster stays alive by absorbing the vital body fluids of its victims-and there seems to be no way to stop this parasitic creature! Will they be able to destroy the monster before it manages to feed on them all?

• First Man Into Space | DVD | (24/08/2015) from £8.75   |  Saving you £4.24 (48.46%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Classic science-fiction from the golden age of 1950's cinema in this Robert Day directed tale of alien life forms! In this cautionary tale of interstellar exploration, brash U.S. Navy test pilot, Lieutenant Dan Prescott (Bill Edwards), hungry for fame, rockets himself beyond Earth's atmosphere on test flight Y-13, only to become encrusted with cosmic dust and return to earth as a blood-drinking monster... Produced by one of the most respected British film producers, Richard Gordon (Devil Doll, Grip of the Strangler, Tower of Evil), this early tale of space exploration has been remastered and restored by the BFI and will delight all fans of the science-fiction genre.

• The Turning Point | DVD | (06/03/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  The generations change but the choices remain the same. As young dancers they were best friends and fierce rivals. Deedee (Shirley MacLaine) left the stage for marriage and motherhood while Emma (Anne Bancroft) would become an international ballet icon. When Deedee's teenage daughter (Leslie Browne) is invited to join Emma's dance company and begins an affair with a young Russian star (Mikhail Baryshnikov in his film debut) the two women are forced to confront the choices

• It! The Terror From Beyond Space | Blu Ray | (30/05/2016) from £14.49   |  Saving you £1.50 (10.35%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Too terrifying to even have a name, It is a seemingly invincible monster that is hell-bent on killing everyone on a mission to Mars. A rescue ship travels out to Mars to retrieve the only survivor of a space probe that has experienced some sort of cataclysm. That survivor, Col Ed Carruthers (Marshall Thompson) is accused of murdering his fellow crewmen. But Ed claims that the killer was a Martian monster, and hopes to prove his assertions by signing up for a second journey to the Red Planet. Before long, the crew members of this second expedition are being systematically killed off, and it looks as though Ed is up to his old tricks. As it turns out, however, Ed was telling the truth: there is a monster on board, the savage descendant of the once-mighty Martian civilization, who snuck on board when an irresponsible crew member left the door open. The monster stays alive by absorbing the vital body fluids of its victims-and there seems to be no way to stop this parasitic creature! Will they be able to destroy the monster before it manages to feed on them all?

• Fiend Without A Face | DVD | (24/07/2017) from £9.67   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Few 1950s creature features deliver in the way Fiend Without a Face does. The first hour is all build-up as tension grows between an Air Force research base and a small Canadian town (this is one of those British B films that pretends to be set overseas) as a series of mystery deaths are blamed by the superstitious on weird military experiments. It's not a spoiler to give away the big revelation, since every item of publicity material, including the DVD cover, blows the surprise: the initially invisible culprits turn out to be a killer swarm of disembodied brains with eyes on stalks and inchworm-like spinal cord tails. These creatures have a nasty habit of latching onto victims and sucking out their grey matter. The finale is a siege of a house by the fiends, which swarm en masse making unsettling brain-sucking sounds, and are bloodily done away with by the heroes. Using excellent stop-motion animation, this climax goes beyond silliness and manages to be genuinely nightmarish. The orgy of splattering brains stands proud among the cinema's first attempts at genuine horror-comic glee, setting a precedent for everything from The Evil Dead to Peter Jackson's Braindead. Marshall Thompson is a bland, stolid uniformed hero and most of the rest of the cast struggle with "anadian" accents, but Kynaston Reeves is fun as the decrepit lone researcher whose fault it all is. On the DVD: Fiend Without a Face on disc comes with a montage of scenes from other films in this batch of releases (The Day of the Triffids, The Stars Look Down) that plays automatically when the disc is inserted, but otherwise not even a trailer, much less the commentary track and other material found on the pricey but luxurious US Region 1 Criterion release. The print has nice contrasts but is pretty grainy. --Kim Newman

• Fiend Without A Face | DVD | (30/06/2003) from £28.97   |  Saving you £-18.98 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Few 1950s creature features deliver in the way Fiend Without a Face does. The first hour is all build-up as tension grows between an Air Force research base and a small Canadian town (this is one of those British B films that pretends to be set overseas) as a series of mystery deaths are blamed by the superstitious on weird military experiments. It's not a spoiler to give away the big revelation, since every item of publicity material, including the DVD cover, blows the surprise: the initially invisible culprits turn out to be a killer swarm of disembodied brains with eyes on stalks and inchworm-like spinal cord tails. These creatures have a nasty habit of latching onto victims and sucking out their grey matter. The finale is a siege of a house by the fiends, which swarm en masse making unsettling brain-sucking sounds, and are bloodily done away with by the heroes. Using excellent stop-motion animation, this climax goes beyond silliness and manages to be genuinely nightmarish. The orgy of splattering brains stands proud among the cinema's first attempts at genuine horror-comic glee, setting a precedent for everything from The Evil Dead to Peter Jackson's Braindead. Marshall Thompson is a bland, stolid uniformed hero and most of the rest of the cast struggle with "anadian" accents, but Kynaston Reeves is fun as the decrepit lone researcher whose fault it all is. On the DVD: Fiend Without a Face on disc comes with a montage of scenes from other films in this batch of releases (The Day of the Triffids, The Stars Look Down) that plays automatically when the disc is inserted, but otherwise not even a trailer, much less the commentary track and other material found on the pricey but luxurious US Region 1 Criterion release. The print has nice contrasts but is pretty grainy. --Kim Newman

• Daktari: The Complete Second Season | DVD | (19/03/2013) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• To Hell and Back | Blu Ray | (30/11/2021) from £21.65   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• The First Easter Egg | DVD | (07/04/2014) from £6.05   |  Saving you £-0.06 (-1.00%)   |  RRP £5.99

  A little bunny goes in search of an Easter gift for his mother. A friendly chicken gives him a beautiful egg but on his way home the bunny encounters several characters that have their own plans for the gift. The egg gets stolen found hard cooked and also painted but eventually the bunny gets the precious gift home to his mother and the story of his mishaps become the birth of a whole new tradition - giving Easter Eggs at Easter.