Horror and Suspense

• Dracula vs. Frankenstein | DVD | (27/02/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.75

  In the late 1960s and early 70s, a bizarre alliance between the Filippino movie company Hemisphere and the American exploitation outfit Independent International yielded a series of weirdly interconnected horror movies, most of which work the word Blood into the title. The Filippino items are strangely fascinating vampire and mad scientist pictures with oddball colour effects and a mix of naive serial-style thrills and extreme-for-the-era sex and gore; the American efforts, from director Al Adamson, are shoddier, thrown together from offcuts of previous pictures, and are lead-paced but nevertheless curiously appealing. Gaze in awe at mutant killer trees, slobbering hunchbacked servants, faded matinee idols, stripper-turned-actress heroines with concrete blonde hairdos, evil dwarves, John Carradine or Lon Chaney, footage cut in from completely different films, Dracula and Frankenstein meeting hippies and bikers, red filters when the vampires attack, chanting natives! Plus lots of exclamation marks! Plus lurid trailers! "The kings of horror battle to the death" in Dracula vs Frankenstein. The last of the Frankensteins (J Carrol Naish) works in a carnival horror house with his sidekick Groton the Mad Zombie (Lon Chaney Jr). A Frank Zappa-like Dracula (Zandor Vorkov) and a monster with a face like a big mushroom slug it out. The film also features Russ Tamblyn as a beach biker and a Vegas showgirl heroine on LSD. This Region 2 DVD is sadly bereft of the extras found on the US Troma Region 1 disc. --Kim Newman

• Nosferatu The Vampyre | DVD | (23/10/2006) from £11.05   |  Saving you £-5.06 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  It is 1850 in the beautiful perfectly-kept town of Wismar. Jonathan Harker is about to leave on a long journey over the Carpathian Mountains to finalize real estate arrangements with a wealthy nobleman. His Wife Lucy begs him not to go and is troubled by a strong premonition of danger. Despite her warnings Jonathan arrives four weeks later at a large gloomy castle. Out of the mist appears a pale Wraith-like figure with a shaven head and deep-sunken eyes who identifies himself as Count Dracula. The events that transpire slowly convince Harker that he is in the midst of a vampyre. What he doesn't know however is the magnitude of danger he his wife and his town are about to experience as victims of the Nosferatu.

• Dead Of Night | DVD | (16/05/2016) from £21.58   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• The Blair Witch Project | DVD | (23/10/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £18.99

  Anyone who has even the slightest trouble with insomnia after seeing a horror movie should stay away from The Blair Witch Project--this film will creep under your skin and stay there for days. Credit for the effectiveness of this mock documentary goes to filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, who armed three actors (Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Josh Leonard) with video equipment, camping supplies, and rough plot outlines. They then let the trio loose into the Maryland woods to improvise and shoot the entire film themselves as the filmmakers attempted to scare the crap out of them. Gimmicky, yes, but it worked--to the wildly successful tune of $130 million at the US box office upon its initial release (the budget was a mere $40,000). For those of you who were under a rock when it first hit the cinemas, The Blair Witch Project tracks the doomed quest of three film students shooting a documentary on the legend of the Blair Witch from Burkittsville, Maryland. After filming some local yokels (and providing only scant background on the witch herself), the three, led by Heather (something of a witch herself), head into the woods for some on-location shooting. They're never seen again. What we see is a reconstruction of their "found" footage, edited to make a barely coherent narrative. After losing their way in the forest, whining soon gives way to real terror as the three find themselves stalked by unknown forces that leave piles of rocks outside their campsite and stick-figure art projects in the woods. (As Michael succinctly puts it, "No redneck is this clever!") The masterstroke of the film is that you never actually see what's menacing them; everything is implied, and there's no terror worse than that of the unknown. If you can wade through the tedious arguing--and the shaky, motion-sickness-inducing camerawork--you'll be rewarded with an oppressively sinister atmosphere and one of the most frightening denouements in horror-film history. Even after you take away the monstrous hype, The Blair Witch Project remains a genuine, effective original. --Mark Englehart, Amazon.com

• Crying With Laughter | DVD | (24/01/2011) from £6.97   |  Saving you £11.28 (197.55%)   |  RRP £16.99

  After a number of popular DVD titles, BritFilms Distribution Company will be distributing their first theatrical release, the BAFTA Scotland winning Crying with Laughter, a black comedy about a stand-up comedian who's life has just stopped being funny.

• The Nightmare On Elm Street Collection (Five Disc Box Set) | DVD | (25/06/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £53.99

  The flagship horror film series of the second half of the 1980s was the Elm Street cycle, inaugurated in 1984 by Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street. A low-budget, high-imagination effort, the film revived the moribund teenage slasher genre by adding a fantastical premise (just as Craven's Scream would do 10 years later) playing post-modern games. A ghost story about a murdered murderer who can haunt the night terrors of the children of the mob who burned him to death, A Nightmare on Elm Street is the ultimate instance of horror taking its tone from a bad dream. The fact that the monster's powers are irrational is the film's greatest strength rather than a script weakness. Freddy Krueger, who was just plain Fred to start with, is the 80s monster par excellence, a razor-fingered, scarfaced pervert in a hideous jumper and battered hat, lurking in the shadows of the unconscious from which he emerged rather too often in the follow-ups. Craven made him scary, but the directors who followed treated him as the star and he gradually became a ridiculous, comic creation, more tiresome than terrifying. The sequels are what they are: none aspire to the status of the original, though A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is a rip-roaring fantasy adventure that always pleases, and even the weakest entries (2 and 5) have their moments. From 3 onwards, the dreams become showpieces for the effects men, which makes for sequences at once startling and silly, but sadly bereft of the power to chill. As the 80s recede into the stuff of nostalgia television, other aspects of the series seem more prominent: like a parade of the ghastliest haircuts ever worn by human teenagers (Johnny Depp's cockatoo pompadour or the roach-girl's fluffy perm in 4 as the worst offenders) and several soundtrack album's worth of bland MTV tie-in pop music that never manages to be as memorable as the simple, nursery rhyme theme carried over movies.-- Kim Newman DVD extras. The most desirable add-on feature is a lively, informative commentary track on the original film, with contributions from Wes Craven Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon and cinematographer Jacques Haitkin; this was recorded for a US laserdisc release, and it's a shame that we don't get the outtakes and deleted scenes present on that version. Otherwise, it's the usual trailers, animated menus (all very imaginative) and cast and crew bios (with odd omissions - Nick Corri rates a write-up, but not Johnny Depp), and music videos keyed into sequels three to five, with clips from the films inter-cut with lousy rock and/or rap. A nice gimmick on all the discs is a "jump straight to a nightmare" feature, allowing instant access to the gruesome effects set-piece of your choice. All the discs are good-looking widescreen transfers, with rich sound and optional English sub-titles. Among the most notably absent extras, of course, are the sixth and seventh films, Rachel Talalay's Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare and, most importantly, Wes Craven's New Nightmare. -- Kim Newman

• Sherlock Holmes - The Blue Carbuncle | DVD | (24/05/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Horror Classics 7: The Corpse Vanishes/The Devil Bat | DVD | (26/10/1999) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.55

• Sherlock Holmes - Spiderwoman / The Pearl Of Death | DVD | (12/03/2007) from £6.99   |  Saving you £6.00 (46.20%)   |  RRP £12.99

• Killer | DVD | (18/09/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Eye, The / Three | DVD | (21/02/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

• The Eye | DVD | (23/08/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Fraternity Demon | DVD | (06/10/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Witch Academy | DVD | (06/10/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Jack-O | DVD | (06/10/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

• Deadfall | DVD | (01/01/1980) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Watch in terror as four friends spending a weekend of leisure in the woodlands unwittingly unleash a dark supernatural force that has remained imprisoned for over 500 years. Severed from civilisation with no means of escape, they are ravaged by this evil and forced to battle it out by any and all means necessary. Deadfall will make you fear what is behind every door and doubt your closest friends.

• Sherlock Holmes - Adventures / The Secret Weapon | DVD | (12/03/2007) from £4.83   |  Saving you £9.42 (263.87%)   |  RRP £12.99

• Planet Terror | DVD | (14/05/2008) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  When an experimental biological weapon turns the people of a small Texan town into flesh- eating zombies, it's up to a bunch of accidental warriors to make a stand. Led by Cherry Darling, a go-go dancer with legs like you wouldn't believe, and mysterious drifter, El Wray, the ragtag bunch of survivors fight their way through deformed madmen and a rouge military unit, leaving behind a trail of the dead and infected on their way to the last safe corner of PLANET TERROR.

• The Haunting Of Molly Hartley | Blu Ray | (03/08/2009) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Molly Hartley (Haley Bennett), a 17 year-old girl, was stabbed by her mother and survived but, although she has healed from the wound itself, she is still haunted psychologically by the experience. Her father, with whom she lives, enrols her in a new school to help her cope with the trauma and start a new life. However as her 18th birthday approaches molly must both deal with the stress of being a new student at her school and the continuing nightmares she has of her mothers attack on her. She begins to experience symptoms of the same psychosis that took control of her mothers life, but eventually Molly discovers that her mother and others who share her mothers concerns who want her killed in order to save her from a preordained life as a servant of the devil. Molly's parents made a pact with the devil to save her life. Molly stabs herself trying to break the pact, but the effort was in vain as the clock had already struck midnight.

• John Carpenter's Ghosts Of Mars | Blu Ray | (19/10/2009) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  It's their planet: we are the aliens... 200 years in the future a Martian police unit is dispatched to transport a dangerous prisoner from a mining outpost back to justice. But when the team arrives they find the town deserted and some of the inhabitants possessed by the former inhabitants of the planet.