DVD

With a title like that, Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity carries with it a weight of expectation that - to be fair - it never really had a chance of truly living up to. This sci-fi version take on Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game stars Elizabeth Kaitan and Cindy Beal as Daria and Tisa, a pair of bikini-clad prisoners who break out of their cell, steal a spaceship and ending up crashing on a nearby planet. There our nubile heroines meet the seemingly friendly Zed (Don Scribner), who invites them to come and stay with him in his fortress home. But it soon becomes clear that Zed has a secret hobby – hunting his guests in the surrounding jungle and mounting their heads as trophies on his walls.

Harvey Spector is a charismatic high-flying lawyer. Mike Ross, his new junior associate, is a college drop-out who has never even studied law, but has helped a lot of people cheat their way through the exams. How’s that for a high concept? Well, while Suits is sometimes a little too smug for its own good, for the most part it’s a well-written show with excellent performances. It certainly left this reviewer interested to see how the concept develops across a second season.

Thanks to interest in the Apollo missions and the success of long running series like Doctor Who, ‘science’, both fact and fantasy, had become a popular subject with TV audiences during the late sixties and early seventies. Actor turned writer Richard Carpenter saw the possibilities with the genre, firstly with his highly successful ‘time travel’ series Catweazle and later with The Boy from Space, a serial he penned for the BBC Schools department.

I’ve always had a lot of time for slasher films. I know they aren’t particularly big or clever, but when they’re done right you end up with something truly magical like John Carpenter’s Halloween. And even when they aren’t done that well, you can still end up with something entertaining like the Friday the 13th series (there’s just something about the Voorhees clan that tickles my fancy) or even a My Bloody Valentine (either the original or the goofy 3D remake). So my interest was quickly piqued by the press release for Dark Castle Entertainment’s The Hills Run Red, a brand new slasher with a script by ‘splatter-punk’ author David J. Schow that was being touted as ‘a smart twist on extreme horror, with more blood, torture and suspense than ever before’.

Reviewing Wes Craven's 1972 debut feature The Last House on the Left isn't an easy thing. For those, like myself, who became horror devotees during the early 1980s the film has a significance and impact that is often lost on younger audiences. In this way it is much like those other '70s genre classics The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Exorcist, which are often greeted by hoots of derision rather than screams of terror these days.

'So he caresses her bosom and perhaps she does the same with him'

While this boxset's title (and those of the films it contains) conjures up cheerful images of light, saucy frolics, the contents prove to be a much more serious proposition. Of the six films included, three are actually sex education movies, while the three fiction films on offer centre on 'damaged' women caught up in games of sex, control and power.

Trick 'r Treat is a film that's been talked about (at least amongst online horror communities) for the best part of two years now. Originally slated for a Stateside cinema release back in October 2007, Warner Bros. withdrew the film from its schedules and left it languishing in the vaults with no explanation. Numerous theories started circulating, not least one rather ludicrous suggestion that the film was being buried as some sort of punishment to writer-director Michael Dougherty for the relatively poor box office performance of Superman Returns, which Dougherty has co-written.