"Actor: Michael Balfour"

• Melody Club | DVD | (31/08/2015) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  MELODY CLUB (1949) 63 mins Black & White. A Tempean Films production with cinematography by Peter Newbrook. Terry-Thomas stars in one of his earliest starring roles as a nitwit detective on the trail of a gang of jewel thieves. He traces them to a nightclub and ultimately more by luck than judgement rounds them up.

• Breakaway | DVD | (25/06/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  When Johnny Matlock whisks away a cold war secret from under the noses of Berlin's top secret agents his every move is followed when he returns to England. His girlfriend Paula is kidnapped but her handbag is discovered at the scene of the crime by the aristocratic private eye Duke Martin (Tom Conway). Inside it he discovers the secret formula that the agents are searching for and tracks down her sister Paula (Honor Blackman). As Johnny grows frantic for the safe return of his girl

• The Persuaders - Vol. 5 - Episodes 15-18 | DVD | (18/02/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Further action-fuelled adventures with those cool crimefighters Lord Brett Sinclair (Moore) and Danny Wilde (Curtis). Epsisodes include: The Man In The Middle: A double agent is discovered working in British Intelligence... Element of Risk: A known criminal arrives in London and gets mixed up with Danny... A Home of One's Own: Danny buys himself a cottage and gets involved with the illegal activities of the local squire... Nuisance Value: A fake kidnapping threatens to test the sleuthing skills of Brett and Danny...

• 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