Lafcadio Hearn, the Greek-Irish-American author turned Japanese citizen, was one of the most singular writers of the 19th century, and from his collection of traditional Japanese ghost stories the director Masaki Kobayashi fashioned one of the most eerily beautiful films ever made. Kwaidan was Kobayashi's first film in colour; spurning realism and aiming for "the ultimate in stylised film method", he shot the whole movie inside a huge disused hangar, painting all the sets himself. The film comprises four stories: in "Black Hair" a man returns to seek the wife he abandoned; "The Woman of the Snows" is a chilly, beautiful spirit who preys on lone travellers; "Hoichi the Earless" tells of a young monk compelled each night by ghostly warriors to recount the saga of a famous sea battle (when he tries to evade them, they exact a horrible revenge); and the luckless protagonist of "In a Cup of Tea" discovers someone's soul grinning at him out of his beverage. Each story sustains its own distinct mood, but all four share an unsettling, dreamlike sense of otherworldliness. To enhance the overall weirdness, Kobayashi worked closely with the composer Toru Takemitsu to create an offbeat score, rejecting conventional instruments in favour of sonic effects such as wood being split and pebbles being struck together. There has never been another ghost film quite like this. -Philip Kemp.

By the time Alfred Hitchcock's second-to-last picture came out in 1972, the censorship restrictions under which he had laboured during his long career had eased up. Now he could give full sway to his lurid fantasies, and that may explain why Frenzy is the director's most violent movie by far-outstripping even Psycho for sheer brutality. Adapted by playwright Anthony Shaffer, the story concerns a series of rape-murders committed by suave fruit-merchant Bob Rusk (Barry Foster), who gets his kicks from throttling women with a necktie. This being a Hitchcock thriller, suspicion naturally falls on the wrong man-ill-tempered publican Richard Blaney (Jon Finch). Enter Inspector Oxford from New Scotland Yard (Alex McCowan), who thrashes out the finer points of the case with his wife (Vivian Merchant), whose tireless enthusiasm for indigestible delicacies like quail with grapes supplies a classic running gag. Frenzy was the first film Hitchcock had shot entirely in his native Britain since Jamaica Inn (1939), and many contemporary critics used that fact to account for what seemed to them a glorious return to form after a string of Hollywood duds (Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz). Hitchcock specialists are often less wild about it, judging the detective plot mechanical and the oh-so-English tone insufferable. But at least three sequences rank among the most skin-crawling the maestro ever put on celluloid. There is an astonishing moment when the camera backs away from a room in which a murder is occurring, down the stairs, through the front door and then across the street to join the crowd milling indifferently on the pavement. There is also the killer's nerve-wracking attempt to retrieve his tiepin from a corpse stuffed into a sack of potatoes. [+]

Virgin Classic Horror. In the tradition of "The Raven", an earlier Poe movie this black comedy set in a Funeral Director's has laughs along with the darkness.

Allowing for all the low-budget shortcomings that plague any straight-to-video production, Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation serves up 92 minutes of passable SF action. Parlaying his veteran status as an animator, special-effects wizard, and stalwart survivor of the CGI revolution, Phil Tippett (with returning screenwriter Ed Neumeier) makes a woefully uninspired directorial debut with this makeshift sequel to Paul Verhoeven's 1997 blockbuster, retaining the jarhead militarism of Robert Heinlein's original novel while serving up more bugs, an all-new cast of attractive young stars and all-too-familiar plot elements borrowed from a dozen better movies. "Bigger is better" is out of the question under such meagre budgetary circumstances, so Tippett and Neumeier compensate with gruesome bug fights and gross-out effects at regular intervals, some standard-issue nudity and escalating paranoia (echoing Carpenter's The Thing) when a new breed of bugs use human hosts (à la The Hidden) to overtake a stranded platoon of Federation soldiers on a bug-infested planet. Relying on murky confinement to hide nondescript sets, Starship Troopers 2 has three engaging leads in its favour: US TV regular Richard Burgi is solidly cast as the titular hero (he's the military equivalent of Pitch Black's Riddick); Colleen Porch is engaging as the most sensible Federation survivor; and screen veteran Ed Lauter makes the most of his salty role as a battle-hardened general. Unfortunately, they're adrift in a knock-off sequel (shot on high-def digital video) that could never do justice to its energetic predecessor. -Jeff Shannon.

Fresh from Stuart Little, young Jonathan Lipnicki carries on his pint-sized shoulders his every scene in The Little Vampire as eight-year-old Tony, befriender of vampires. The Scottish setting lends itself nicely to spookiness, too. A continent away from his native California, Tony's having a tough time making new friends when a band of vagabond vampires enters his life through his bedroom window. The encounter seems pure coincidence at first, but then the scary truth surfaces: Tony, though he's not a vampire himself, has "sympathy for our kind", as the dad of the bat-linked brood puts it. Visions of vampire happenings from generations past invade the kid's consciousness, and they hold the key to the clan's current gypsy-like predicament. Through his clairvoyance and, by extension, the discovery of a long-lost amulet, the mostly benevolent bloodsuckers are able to reclaim their rightful status as proper cave-dwellers in their homeland. Clueless-parent predicaments abound-Tony's mum and dad smirk at their son's vampire-obsessed imagination until the cape-draped heads of the clan drop by for a visit-and viewers of around Tony's age will find the gang's adventures eluding a bumbling vampire hunter genuinely chuckle worthy. -Tammy La Gorce.

What would Hitchcock have done if he had had modern digital effects? The answer is almost certainly: something very like What Lies Beneath, Robert Zemeckis' technically accomplished supernatural thriller that pays open homage to Suspicion, Rear Window and Psycho, to name but three. Michelle Pfeiffer delivers one of the finest, most nuanced performances of her career as a woman in an ideal relationship whose perfect life begins to unravel with terrifying consequences. Harrison Ford plays sympathetically against type as her husband who may or may not be telling her the truth. Although made in the middle of his filming Cast Away, while the director waited for Tom Hanks to shed some pounds, this is no quickie throwaway picture. Zemeckis loads this character-driven story with genuinely scary suspense, using subtle camera moves, mirrored reflections and red-herrings in a classic Hitchcockian manner-the difference here is that he has access to the most up-to-date digital effects and employs them with characteristic imagination, creating seemingly impossible camera angles that only enhance the tension. The Production Design is equally carefully considered, as even the idyllic household setting with its pristine bathroom is gradually transformed into an object of terror. Composer Alan Silvestri's score winds up the drama several notches further with an appropriate Bernard Herrmann pastiche. On the DVD: The principal attraction of this disc is the pin-sharp anamorphic picture and 5. 1 soundtrack-superb picture and sound quality contribute greatly to the enjoyment here, since Zemeckis is one of the few contemporary directors who remains acutely sensitive to the composition of each and every scene. The brief featurette is a little misleadingly titled, as it's essentially a profile of Zemeckis' career with a few comments about this film thrown in for good measure. [+]

Shot in the UFA studios with a big movie star in the lead and all the special effects and production design resources any blockbuster of its time could wish for, FW Murnau's 1926 Faust represents a step up from his better-known Nosferatu. Oddly, Faust is a less familiar film than the vampire quickie and this release affords fans a chance to see what Murnau can do with an equally major fantasy story. Adapted neither from Marlowe's play Dr Faustus nor Goethe's verse drama, the script scrambles various elements of the legend and presents a Faust (Gosta Ekman) driven to summon the Devil by despair as a plague rages through the town, desperate to gain enough learning to help his neighbours. When this deal doesn't quite work out, because he is stoned by townsfolk who notice his sudden fear of the cross, Mephisto (Emil Jannings) offers Faust instead renewed youth and an opportunity to seduce a famously beautiful Italian noblewoman and then to return to his home village and get involved with the pure Gretchen (Camilla Horn). Like most versions of the story, it's episodic and some sections are stronger than others: the great stuff comes in the plague and initial deal sequences, though it picks up again for the tragic climax as Gretchen becomes the central figure and suffers horribly, freezing in the snows and burning at the stake. Jannings' devil, a gruesomely humorous slice of ham, is one of the great silent monster performances, reducing everyone else to a stick figure, and Murnau faces the challenge of topping his Nosferatu imagery by deploying a battalion of effects techniques to depict the many magical journeys, sudden appearances and transformations. On the DVD: Often seen in ragged, incomplete prints projected at the wrong speed, this is a decently restored version, running a full 115 minutes with a complete orchestral score. The original materials show some of the damage to be expected in a film of its vintage, but the transfer is excellent, displaying the imaginative art direction and camerawork to superb advantage. Aside from a nicely eerie menu, the sole extra is a full-length commentary originating in Australia: written by historian Peter Spooner but read by narrator Russell Cawthorne (who mispronounces the odd name). This provides an interesting wealth of background detail, such as Murnau's attempt to cast Hollywood's Lillian Gish as Gretchen, and delivers a balanced assessment of the film itself. [+]

Michael Mann's superb gothic thriller will grip you with it's combination of horror, romance and the supernatural.

From the outset, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was about conflict. Producers Rick Berman and Michael Piller challenged the utopian ideals of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek universe to create something totally different from its predecessors. This meant no familial camaraderie, squeaky-clean Federation diplomacy or beige décor. Instead they wanted interpersonal friction, ruthless enemies (Gamma Quadrant Imperialists-The Dominion) and rebellion at every turn. The DS9 concept was originally facilitated by introducing the Cardassian/Bajoran war during The Next Generation's final days. After a muted first reception fans gradually came to accept the new look, but no one liked Star Trek without a starship and eventually the producers capitulated to viewers' wishes by introducing the USS Defiant (an apt name) in Season 3. Relying far less on technobabble than TNG, DS9 was unafraid to focus on matters of the spirit demonstrating a gutsy independence from its parent shows. Taking up the gauntlet thrown down by Babylon 5, improved CGI space battles also became a fan favourite. Throughout the increasingly serialised story arc there were rebellious factions within the different establishments: Kira had belonged to the Shakaar resistance cell; The Maquis was Starfleet vs. Cardassians; Section 31 was a secret Starfleet group; The True Way was a Bajoran group opposed to peace; the Cardassians had their Obsidian Order and the Romulans their Gestapo-like Tal Shiar. [+]

Another Eddie Murphy action vehicle that pales in comparison to hits like Beverly Hills Cop, this standard cop-movie fare still manages to be engaging on the strength of Murphy's ease in front of a camera. Murphy plays an unorthodox hostage negotiator for the San Francisco Police Department on the trail of the criminal who killed his partner. Paired up with a bright new trainee played by Michael Rapaport (Beautiful Girls, Mighty Aphrodite), Murphy uses both his skills and his anger to hunt down the killer. A competent action movie, there are some standout moments such as a car chase culminating in a cable car shoot-out on the streets of San Francisco, and Michael Wincott's (The Crow) frightening performance as the villain. Metro offers up a standard action vehicle for Murphy to showcase his charm, as well as a moderate entertainment with some memorable moments. -Robert Lane.