"Actor: Peter Fraser"

• Ballad Of Josie | DVD | (31/07/2006) from £14.56   |  Saving you £-4.57 (-45.70%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Josie Minick is acquitted for accidentally killing her drunken husband; nevertheless her 8-year-old son Luther is taken to Cheyenne to be cared for by her wealthy father-in-law Alpheus Minick. Despite the offer of her rancher neighbour Arch Ogden to buy her rundown ranch Josie decides to renovate the place with her husband's insurance money but she soon becomes discouraged by her failure to resurrect the place. She tries a job as a waitress but is equally unhappy. Finally she

• Saturday Morning Pictures - The Best Of The Children's Film Foundation - Vol. 2 | DVD | (30/09/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Cup Fever Barton United's hopes of winning the Manchester junior football league receive a setback when their ground is taken over and used as a car park forcing the boys into action... Hide & Seek Keith absconds from school in the hope that his father will take him to Canada yet Keith's father seems more interested in robbing a bank...

• Sharpe's Honour | DVD | (15/01/2007) from £4.98   |  Saving you £3.01 (60.44%)   |  RRP £7.99

  Sean Bean stars as the dashing and daredevil Napoleonic hero Richard Sharpe Hero of Wellington's Spanish Army. But Sharpe unwittingly becomes caught up in a French plot; hie is convicted of the murder of a Spanish nobleman and sentenced to death this time he will need more than just his legendary courage to survive. In a desperate attempt to clear his name Sharpe is forced to venture deep into enemy territory to capture La Marquesa a beautiful French spy who alone can prove his innocence.

• Sharpe's Gold | DVD | (15/01/2007) from £9.98   |  Saving you £-1.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £7.99

  Once again action and adventure pursue maverick British rifleman Major Richard Sharpe (Sean Bean). In Sharpe's Gold the dashing and heroic major pits his wits against El Casco A Terrifying partisan leader who has a chilling way of dealing with his enemies.Sharpe's Mission to trade guns for deserters is imperilled by the beautiful and desirable Ellie who follows him into the hills where there is rumoured to be hidden Aztec gold.

• The Lord of the Rings -- Limited Edition Box Set | DVD | (26/11/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings is a bold, colourful, ambitious failure. Severely truncated, this two-hour version tackles only about half the story, climaxing with the battle of Helm's Deep and leaving poor Frodo and Sam still stuck on the borders of Mordor with Gollum. Allegedly, the director ran out of money and was unable to complete the project. As far as the film does go, however, it is a generally successful attempt at rendering Tolkien's landscapes of the imagination. Bakshi's animation uses a blend of conventional drawing and rotoscoped (traced) animated movements from live-action footage. The latter is at least in part a money-saving device, but it does succeed in lending some depth and a sense of otherworldly menace to the Black Riders and hordes of Orcs: Frodo's encounter at the ford of Rivendell, for example, is one of the film's best scenes thanks to this mixture of animation techniques. Backdrops are detailed and well conceived, and all the main characters are strongly drawn. Among a good cast, John Hurt (Aragorn) and C3PO himself, Anthony Daniels (Legolas), provide sterling voice characterisation, while Peter Woodthorpe gives what is surely the definitive Gollum (he revived his portrayal a couple of years later for BBC Radio's exhaustive 13-hour dramatisation). The film's other outstanding virtue is avant-garde composer Leonard Rosenman's magnificent score in which chaotic musical fragments gradually coalesce to produce the triumphant march theme that closes the picture. None of which makes up for the incompleteness of the movie, nor the severe abridging of the story actually filmed. Add to that some oddities--such as intermittently referring to Saruman as "Aruman"--and the final verdict must be that this is a brave yet ultimately unsatisfying work, noteworthy as the first attempt at transferring Tolkien to the big screen but one whose virtues are overshadowed by incompleteness. --Mark Walker

• The Sorcerers | DVD | (01/09/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  The Sorcerers, the second film directed by the lost "wunderkind" of British cinema Michael Reeves, may not have the scope and visceral impact of his masterpiece, Witchfinder General (1968), but there's enough fierce originality here to show what a tragic loss it was when he died from a drugs overdose aged only 24. The film also shows the effective use he made of minimal resources, working here on a derisory budget of less than £50,000--of which £11,000 went to the film's sole "named" star, Boris Karloff. Karloff plays an elderly scientist living with his devoted wife in shabby poverty in London, dreaming of the brilliant breakthrough in hypnotic technique that will restore him to fame and fortune. Seeking a guinea-pig, he hits on Mike, a disaffected young man-about-town (Ian Ogilvy, who starred in all three of Reeves' films). But the technique has an unlooked-for side effect--not only can he and his wife make Mike do their bidding, they can vicariously experience everything that he feels. At which point, it turns out that the wife has urges and desires that her husband never suspected. Karloff, then almost at the end of his long career, brings a melancholy dignity to his role; but the revelation is the veteran actress Catherine Lacey as the seemingly sweet old lady, turning terrifyingly avid and venomous as she realises her power. The portrayal of Swinging London, with its mini-skirted dollybirds thronging nightclubs where the strongest stimulant seems to be Coke rather than coke, has an almost touching innocence, but Reeves invests it with a dream-like quality, extending it into scenes of violent death in labyrinthine dark alleys. By this stage, some ten years after it started, the British horror cycle was winding down in lazy self-parody. Reeves had the exceptional talent and vision to revive it, had he only lived. On the DVD: The Sorcerers DVD has original trailers for both this film and Witchfinder General (both woefully clumsy); filmographies for Reeves, Karloff and Ogilvy; an "image gallery" (a grab-bag of posters, stills and lobby cards); detailed written production notes by horror-movie expert Kim Newman; and an excellent 25-minute documentary on Reeves, "Blood Beast", dating from 1999. The transfer is letterboxed full-width, with acceptable sound. --Philip Kemp

• Zulu Dawn / The Wild Geese / Ashanti | DVD | (06/06/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £20.99

  A box set featuring some of the best British war films ever made... Zulu Dawn (1979 Dir. Douglas Hickox): (Dolby Digital 5.1 / WS 16:9) This dramatic and true story recounts the breathtaking defeat of British forces at the hands of a 25 000 strong and relentlessly determined Zulu army in 1879. General Lord Chelmsford (brilliantly portrayed by Peter O'Toole) is the man responsible for the fatal decision to split up the troops based on faulty information provided by the fake