Island of Death artwork announced
If you have seen Video Nasties: the Definitive Guide, you may have noticed a trailer for a film called The Devils in Mykonos, known in the UK as Island of Death, one of the least well-known of the DPP's banned list. Anyway, the film has never been...
Posted by David Beckett

The Beyond Blu-ray and DVD specs announced
ONLY DEATH AWAITS IN THE BEYOND! Lucio Fulci’s masterpiece of face chewing Spider action, milky eyed psychics, face melting embalming fluid and rotted, flesh-crazed Zombies returns in all its blood splattered, surreal and grossly disturbing glory...
Posted by David Beckett

Japanese masterpiece Battle Royale released on Blu-ray in December
ONE DEAD. 41 TO GO. Battle Royale is back. It’s time to return to the island and kill your friends, because the cult Japanese movie that defines twisted action and sickening violence is ready to shock you all over again. In a world where...
Posted by David Beckett

The Reef on DVD January 24, 2011
When the trip of a lifetime takes a devastating turn, four friends are faced with a life or death decision: should they stay put and pray for rescue or should they take their life into their own hands and make a desperate break for safety? The only...
Posted by David Beckett

Demons & Demons 2 coming to DVD later in 2010
THE ORIGINAL DEMON ZOMBIE CLASSICS - DEMONS & DEMONS 2 ARE JOINED BY THE ALL-NEW DEMONS 3! Arrow Video are proud to announce that in 2010 they will bring to DVD all-new transfers of the classic Dario Argento produced and Lamberto Bava directed...
Posted by David Beckett

French zombie movie The Horde out on DVD in September
Assault On Precinct 13’ meets ‘Dawn Of The Dead’ in The Horde, the latest addition to the ever-rising wave of superlative French horror cinema. Winner of the International Fantasy Film Awards for Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography at the 2010...
Posted by David Beckett

[Rec]2 out on DVD and Blu-ray in September
After terrifying audiences with their nerve-shredding cult hit ‘REC’, acclaimed filmmakers Jaume Balaguero (Darkness; Fragile) and Paco Plaza (Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt) return to crank the fear factor to unprecedented levels with the highly...
Posted by David Beckett

Animals out on DVD in August
THE DEADLIEST PREDATOR IS ALREADY INSIDE YOU Based on the best-selling 1992 novel by John Skipp and Craig Spector (who co-scripted 'A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child' and are regarded by many as key pioneers of the late-1980s literary...
Posted by David Beckett

A day I'd rather forget
Well, that was a weird old day! This morning, my care team leader (I'm a tetraplegic who requires 24/7 nursing care) who, along with my GP, was concerned that I was not shifting my second bout of Clostridium difficile so told me I should be...
Posted by David Beckett

Top 10 Vampire Movies
The vampire is the monster with the longest literary heritage, with the first story, The Vampyre, written by John Polidori at the same 'writer's retreat' at which Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley penned Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. Probably the...
Posted by David Beckett

Love Goddess Of The Cannibals out on DVD in June
THE EURO CULT CLASSIC FROM THE WARPED MIND OF ITALIAN SEX, SLEAZE AND HORROR MAESTRO, JOE D’AMATO. Meet Papaya (Melissa Chimenti), voodoo priestess, sex siren, eco-activist, blood crazed cannibal and the star of director Joe D’Amato’s...
Posted by David Beckett

George A. Romero's Martin re-released on DVD in June
Writer-director George A. Romero’s personal favourite of his own movies, Martin is a genuinely disturbing horror film that turns the traditional conventions of the vampire myth inside out and one which, at the time of its original release, reinvented...
Posted by David Beckett

American Dad Season Five out on June 14
An introduction to American Dad Volume 5 You thought the guys from Family Guy were crazy wait until you meet the Smith family from Langley Falls. Here is an introduction to the Smith family of American Dad. American Dad Volume 5 is out on DVD on the...
Posted by David Beckett

My Top 10 Zombie Movies
Zombies are dissimilar to other horror icons as they, unlike Dracula or Frankenstein's monster, don't really have any background in Gothic literature. Zombies are strange, shambling and unkempt figures who are really the walking dead. They are the...
Posted by David Beckett

3-D: Wave of the Future or Fad?
As more and more filmmakers decide to try their hand at stereoscopic entertainment, the more and more sick of 3-D I become. What was once a novelty, where only one screen in my local Cineworld would have a 3-D film, where you pay extra money for the...
Posted by David Beckett

Why Horror?
As my parents can’t stand horror films and my brother is largely impassive to them, I’ve often wondered and have been frequently asked why I like horror films so much. The following ramble is a vain attempt to explain this. As I said in Becoming a...
Posted by David Beckett

Becoming a Film Addict: Part 2
The previous 'Becoming a Film Addict' seemed to go down well and, looking back on it, the article seemed a little perfunctory.  I have thought about it some more and this is an expansion on Part 1. This addiction to film and DVDs led me, following...
Posted by David Beckett

Oscar Predictions 2010
As I had finished my Master’s in September I was free this year to spend more time in the cinema and see all of the contenders possible.  There are a couple that haven’t been release or shown around here – The Blindside will only hit UK cinemas after...
Posted by David Beckett

Becoming a Film Addict: Part 1
For many people, a love of film and cinema was developed from a very young age with weekly (or even more frequent) trips to the local picture house with parents or other relatives. Others may have picked up that habit from friends and relatives at...
Posted by David Beckett

My Top 10 Favourite Horror Films
In the spirit of Halloween I’ve decided to go through my collection and try and work out (in the style of High Fidelity) my top ten all time favourite horror films.  I’ve had in mind those that would go into the list and have been slowly reviewing...
Posted by David Beckett

Halloween Horrors 2009 Part 2
As Halloween gets closer, I continue my roundup of some of the horror films on the shelves that may grace your screen on Saturday night.  As has become traditional, I’ll be watching, amongst others, John Carpenter’s Halloween (not the pointless...
Posted by David Beckett

Halloween Horrors 2009 Part 1
With Halloween approaching, the pace of horror releases is increasing with labels keen to cash in on the appetite for horror around this time.  If you want something more than the classics or Hollywood remakes then there are plenty of alternatives...
Posted by David Beckett

A Solution to the Remake 'Problem'
I recently read that there is a remake of Dario Argento’s classic 1977 horror Suspiria in the works with Natalie Portman highly touted to play the Suzy Bannion role and Pineapple Express helmer David Gordon Green writing the screenplay.  This is the...
Posted by David Beckett

So, what exactly is a Giallo?
With the first batch of Arrow’s Masters of Giallo DVDs out today and Shameless Screen Entertainment preparing to release Footsteps, a little-known giallo to add to their already impressive collection, most people will be wondering ‘what is a giallo ?’...
Posted by David Beckett

The Faux Documentary and 'Found Footage' Horror Film
There are filmmakers whose names are legendary for inventing cinematic techniques that influence motion pictures to this day.  Men like Sergei Eisenstein for his dialectic montage, D.W. Griffith for pioneering the twin narrative structure of...
Posted by David Beckett

Reality TV - The 21st Century Freak Show
If you know anything about me it's that, aside from sport and films, I basically don't watch television. There are the odd TV shows that I'll tune into but generally what passes for popular culture is a mystery to me. When I was watching the extended...
Posted by David Beckett

Oscar Predictions 2009
One of the drawbacks of postgraduate study is not having as much spare time as you would otherwise have; in other years I would have seen all of the big-hitters at the Oscars but this year, I’ve missed out on several, notably Milk and Revolutionary...
Posted by David Beckett

Shameless Screen Entertainment - One (and a bit) Year On
It’s been over a year now since the launch of Shameless Screen Entertainment and since then there have been 17 releases, with Oasis of Fear as the latest. When they announced themselves, they said they would be a “highly visible pulp-inspired in-y...
Posted by David Beckett

007: Licence to Sell.
Product placement is something that has been increasingly noticeable in films. Whether it’s Pepsi in Back to the Future, FedEx in Cast Away, or Apple computers saving the World in Independence Day, corporations have always tried to get their brand...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e November 2nd 2008)
This may be the shortest WIWTW ever as it’s basically a review roundup – there’s only one thing I watched that I haven’t reviewed! Blu-ray: 30 Days of Night – A good film to watch around Halloween and a really interesting take on the vampire...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e October 26th 2008)
Blu-ray Cars – I watched this twice, once for the film and once with the Cine-Explore mode which incorporates two commentaries and PiP and featurettes by seamless branching. I liked the film more than previous viewings and was stunned by the AV...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e October 19th 2008)
Blu-ray No Country For Old Men – I enjoyed it at the cinema, again on DVD and the Blu-ray Disc looks and sounds fantastic. The film was one of the best of last year, is one of the Coens’ finest works and I look forward to seeing Burn After Reading....
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e October 12th 2008)
Blu-ray The Orphanage – This is one of those films that comes along when genre fans like me despair for the future of horror films. It reminds us why we love horror as there is such beauty and tragedy to be found in a film designed to unsettle...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e October 5th 2008)
This was a really bizarre week as I had 11 DVDs to review so I didn’t have any time to watch anything of my own – the only things I watched and haven’t reviewed were a couple of WRC discs from the 1990-99 boxset and half a season of The Big Bang...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e September 28th 2008)
Just out of interest, if you’ve read this, could you rate it so I can get an idea of how many hits it receives? Cheers. :) Blu-ray In The Valley of Elah – When Hank Deerfield, a former army sergeant and military policeman, learns that his son...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e September 21st 2008)
Blu-ray 30 Days of Night – Based on the graphic novel by Steve Niles, who co-wrote the screenplay, this takes place in a remote Alaskan town where the sun sets almost entirely for a month every year and most of the inhabitants leave, with only...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e September 14th 2008)
Blu-ray Close Encounters of the Third Kind – It’s been years since I saw this so decided to watch the Theatrical version and move onto the Special and Director’s cuts later. It stands up after three decades as an impressive sci-fi drama with a...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e September 7th 2008)
Blu-ray Apocalypto – Only Mel Gibson would consider making a hyper-violent drama set in the dying days of the Mayan Empire using a dead language. With The Passion of The Christ he also made an extremely violent horror film with (mostly) dead...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e August 31st 2008)
Blu-ray Hellboy – After watching its sequel I realised it had been ages since I saw the first instalment in Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Mike Mignola’s comic book. It is a excellent origins movie with Ron Perlman superb as the titular...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e August 24th 2008)
DVD The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Blu-ray) – The last time I saw Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck together on screen was in the terrible Ocean’s 13, but here they put in career-best performances and respond to the...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e August 17th 2008)
DVD There Will Be Blood (Blu-ray) – Paul Thomas Anderson had been very quiet since making Punch Drunk Love in 2002 and obviously found the time to read Oil! by Upton Sinclair. He has stormed back with an epic film about the discovery of oil in...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e August 10th 2008)
DVD Ratatouille (Blu-ray) – This will never get the love that the Toy Story films enjoy as they are as close to perfection as is possible for an animated film and Ratatouille, whilst a magnificent technical achievement just doesn’t move you in...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e August 3rd 2008)
Slim pickings this week as I have been reading No Country For Old Men and spending more time browsing the internet that normal, finally settling on a HD Plasma, a PS3 and several Blu-ray Discs. :D DVD The Wire: The Complete Third Season –...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e July 27th 2008)
DVD The Wire: The Complete Second Season – As I said last week, this was a show I never watched when it was broadcast on television and only bought the DVDs because the show had such a high reputation and the box sets were relatively inexpensive (...
Posted by David Beckett

Film snobbery or a matter of taste?
Please, someone, make them stop. When I saw The Dark Knight on Thursday (24/07) amongst the previews was a trailer (attached below) for Disaster Movie, which included Iron Man being squashed by a cow, the Incredible Hulk’s trousers ripping, the...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e July 20th 2008)
DVD The Wire: The Complete First Season – Chalk this up to the enormous list of television shows that I completely missed when they were broadcast but, through reputation and/or a decent price have bought on DVD. I’d heard that this was good –...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e July 13th 2008)
DVD Louis Theroux: The Collection – There’s something fantastic about Louis Theroux that makes him come across as both naïve yet highly intelligent and almost manipulative. He obviously knows how to extract information without asking the...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e July 6th 2008)
With the 22 ½ hours of Cracker taking over most of the week, I only had enough time to watch one other title and my review discs. DVD Rififi – Jules Dassin, the director of such films as The Naked City, was blacklisted in the McCarthy...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e June 29th 2008)
After finishing the pile of unread magazines, I set about reducing the pending pile, by watching the Russ Meyer DVDs that I bought a while ago (my least favourite of his films) and a lot of review discs. DVD The 4400 Season 3 – Somewhere in...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e June 22nd 2008)
This week was mostly taken up by watching review discs and season two of House, but there was also rugby, F1 and boxing on television and I’ve continued to try and catch up on the backlog of reading material. DVD House M.D.: Season 2 – As with...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e June 15th 2008)
DVD House M.D.: Season 1 – I’d never seen this on TV – but that goes for numerous shows that I’ve since watched on DVD – and only bought the first two seasons because a) I was told the show was good and b) it was cheap! Those who recommended it...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e June 8th 2008)
DVD The Horror of Frankenstein – This 1970 film is a loose remake of The Curse of Frankenstein with Ralph Bates in the Peter Cushing role. Sadly, he has none of the charisma or screen presence of Cushing and Dave Prowse is no Christopher Lee. :|...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e June 1st 2008)
Aside from continuing to work through the backlog of unread social reading, I finally started to work through the Hammer Collection that’s been sitting on a shelf for months, during which time the price at which it retails has continued to drop!...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e May 26th 2008)
Whilst continuing to catch up on my reading, I managed to watch: DVD American Gangster – This true story of Frank Lucas, who outdid the Mafia and flooded New York with cheap, high-grade heroin and Ritchie Roberts, the detective who eventually...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e May 18th 2008)
Having finished Uni for the summer, I’ve been catching up with my social reading and therefore haven’t watched as many films as usual. They consisted of review discs and two films that were at least three hours long! My V+ box is still pretty full...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e May 11th 2008)
DVD Inland Empire – This gets more and more impressive each time I watch it, seeing things that I hadn’t previously noticed. Laura Dern is superb and the extras disc is great for a Lynch fan – one of these weeks I’m going to go through his back...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e May 4th 2008)
DVD The Complete Prime Suspect – Over four days I watched the seven Prime Suspect series, a programme I’d never previously seen – I knew of it but that was it. It is a great piece of television – arguably the medium at its finest, with quality...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e April 27th 2008)
DVD Gas-s-s – With the full title of ‘Gas! Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It.’, this only had the shortened title on the DVD and is obviously influenced by Dr. Strangelove as an apocalyptic satire. Sadly this is...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e April 20th 2008)
DVD: Dracula – With Frank Langella as the count, this 1979 adaptation of Stoker’s novel is the first where Dracula is really seen as a romantic character. The special effects are a bit creaky by today’s standards, but these were the days before...
Posted by David Beckett

What I Watched This Week (w/e April 13th 2008)
DVD: Airplane! – A brilliant spoof of disaster movies with a host of memorable characters and dialogue. The decision to call the pilot, co-pilot and navigator Oveur, Roger and Victor leads to hilarious misunderstandings, the parodies are spot...
Posted by David Beckett

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