"Actor: Vincent Ventresca"

• Romy And Michele's High School Reunion | DVD | (05/02/2001) from £2.99   |  Saving you £12.00 (401.34%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino play ditzy best friends who decide to attend their 10-year high school reunion, but they completely make over their styles and identities first in order to impress the people who tormented them. The two stars keep Romy and Michele's High School Reunion going despite various lapses and potholes in David Mirkin's direction and despite a sneaking sense that the idea can't sustain the length of an entire feature. A midsection dream sequence underscores the latter problem through blatant padding, but Sorvino and Kudrow--both of whom became established stars playing airheads on other projects--are worth the weaknesses. --Tom Keogh

• Mammoth | DVD | (13/08/2007) from £6.57   |  Saving you £6.42 (97.72%)   |  RRP £12.99

  We hunted it into extinction....now it's hunting us! When a meteor smashes into a local museum the fury of a partially frozen 40 000 year old mammoth is unleashed on a small country town. Under orders to contain the threat that the mammoth posesses at all costs Special Agents Powers and Whitaker are given 17 hours to kill the mammoth or the entire town will be decimated. They recruit local paleontologist Dr. Frank Abernathy to help them hunt the creature down before its rampage of death and destruction gets to the outside world. With the clock ticking and the body count rising the only chance Dr. Abernathy has of saving his daughter and B-movie fanatic father is to help the agents destroy his lifes work.

• The Invisible Man, Series 1 (Box Set 2) | DVD | (07/04/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £39.99

  The Invisible Man continued its first year in increasingly tense and cryptic fashion. Anti-hero Darien has to keep up his spying gig in order to be fed an antidote to the side effects of the invisibility gland. Unfortunately it isn't working. The clock is ticking all the way to a tense finale, where the Quicksilver insanity threatens to consume him whole. There's lots of fun with the format on the way, of course. Darien encounters a ghost, a sperm thief and a hitman who likes to blind his witnesses. Some grander political backdrop comes to the fore as well, with the Chinese government seeking surreptitiously to obtain the gland. All the while there's a growing sense that the Agency has troubles of its own. In an unprecedented bit of audience participation, viewers were allowed to vote for the resolution of a story entitled "Money for Nothing". Fans went for the more interesting option, thankfully, and so an invisible bank raid pays off nicely for everyone. Creating constant conflict throughout the year is the lurking presence of arch-enemy Arnaud. The immediate resolution of that conflict is one of several surprise twists that singled out the show as more than standard TV SF fare. Not even a so-so cameo from Star Trek's Wil Wheaton could spoil the fun. On the DVD: The Invisible Man's second box set features even more extras than the first DVD set. Two cast commentaries are frequently comic, though with a constant sense of disappointment the show didn't go further than two series. There are lengthy interviews with the cast, too. But of real interest to fans will be alternate footage previously unseen in the UK. Some FX shots and script pages round out the package. --Paul Tonks

• The Invisible Man, Series 1 (Box Set 1) | DVD | (10/03/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £39.99

  The Invisible Man first appeared on American TV just a couple of months in advance of Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man in 2000. But unlike the rather overly serious movie, the idea of this series was to have as much fun with the concept as possible. Thief and con man Darien Fawkes (Vincent Ventresca) is apprehended and offered the choice of either being imprisoned or becoming a guinea pig in a scientific experiment run by his own brother. The result is the successful insertion of a Quicksilver Gland in his head, a device that secretes a substance able to bend light, causing him to become invisible at will. Unfortunately it also starts to send him insane. The mysterious Official and his Agency offer a solution. They can regularly administer an antidote, so long as he agrees to work for them in secret. Thus the series begins to explore the possibilities: Fawkes poses as a child's imaginary friend to get information; he stalks a stalker; and, of course, he does a lot of spying. In the background of the individual stories is a constant build-up of tension as both the audience and Fawkes wonder where the Agency's loyalties lie and what the constant use of the Quicksilver may do to him. At the midway point of the first series, the show adds an even weirder twist when a suspected additional Invisible Man turns out to be Fawkes himself, channelling the memories and violent temperament of the first test subject to have hosted the gland. Unpredictable and engaging, this is a show that deserved to go beyond the mere two years it managed before cancellation. On the DVD: The Invisible Man comes to DVD in a four-disc box set containing the first half of Series 1. Some weblinks and scripts of shows are accessible as DVD-ROM features, but the real score for the DVD's producers is an hour-long interview with cast members Vincent Ventresca, Paul Ben-Victor and Michael McCafferty. Much more is promised for the next box set comprising the second half of the series. --Paul Tonks