"Actor: Mary Sheldon"

• For The Boys | DVD | (07/06/2004) from £13.14   |  Saving you £2.84 (27.98%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Bette Midler poured her heart and soul into For the Boys, the story of a pair of entertainers who repeatedly took time from their careers to entertain US troops at war, from World War II to Vietnam--and it sank like a stone at the box office. Granted, it's corny and emotionally over the top. It is the tale of an unlikely team of singer and comedian (played by Midler and James Caan), who are brought together for a reunion show in their dotage. As they nervously anticipate seeing each other for the first time in years, they are flooded with memories of their earlier days as a hot show-biz couple whose own troubles always took second place to their patriotic urge to buoy the boys in uniform. Some say this was a veiled film version of the Martha Raye story; Midler gives it her all and Caan isn't bad. But director Mark Rydell lays on the schmaltz so thickly at times that it overpowers the tougher material. --Marshall Fine, Amazon.com

• Bride of Re-Animator | DVD | (12/11/2007) from £8.45   |  Saving you £1.54 (18.22%)   |  RRP £9.99

  It's been eight months since the Miskatonic Massacre stained the halls with blood - and Dr. West and Dr. Cain's experiments have taken a bizarre turn. Now they have gone beyond re-animating the dead...into the realm of creating new life. The legs of a hooker and the womb of a virgin are joined to the heart of Dr. Cain's dead girlfriend - and the bride is unleashed upon her mate in a climax of sensual horror.

• Bride Of Re-Animator | DVD | (27/01/2003) from £29.95   |  Saving you £-9.96 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Brian Yuzna's Bride of Re-Animator (1990) was one of the last hurrahs for special-effects-based horror films before CGI extended the ease with which the impossible could be put on screen. Like its predecessor, Re-Animator, Bride is very loosely based on HP Lovecraft's stories of Herbert West, a scientist with a taste for investigation that knows no boundaries, especially not those of good taste. He and his agonisingly liberal sidekick Cain have discovered an improvement on their original serum--now they can not only bring the dead back to life but also assemble them from parts first. Jeffrey Combs gives a wonderfully dour performance as West, not even cracking a smile when a creature he has concocted from fingers and an eye-ball is running around the room unseen by a pestering detective. This is the sort of film that constantly escalates its macabre elements--the surviving villain of the first film has been left as simply an animated head, but that does not stop him pursuing his revenge on West, nor finding ways of using West's new techniques along the way. It all makes for cheerfully gruesome fun. On the DVD: Bride of Re-Animator is presented in an anamorphic widescreen visual aspect ratio of 1.85:1, and its Dolby 2.0 does what little can be done with the muddy soundtrack, but is rather better with the jauntily creepy score. The only special features on this Tartan issue are the trailer, the director's production notes and a reel of trailers for other Tartan horror movies. --Roz Kaveney