Guillermo del Toro’s interview with star Paul Williams was just one of the extras on the Collectors’ Edition of Brian De Palma’s classic Phantom of the Paradise, which made its debut on Bu-ray.
Ghostbusters celebrated its 30th Anniversary on Blu-ray, while the 40th Anniversary Blu-ray of Young Frankenstein came with deleted scenes.
Halloween: The Complete Collection was a fifteen-disc Blu-ray set from Anchor Bay/Scream Factory featuring a number of new extras.
From Scream Factory, Nightbreed: The Director’s Cut restored twenty minutes to Clive Barker’s 1990 monster movie, along with a new making-of documentary. A special three-disc set only available from the distributor’s website included deleted and lost scenes, concept art and a newly restored version of the original theatrical release.
The Blu-ray of Thor: The Dark World included the fourteen-minute short film Marvel One Shot: All Hail the King, which featured a welcome return for Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin impersonator from Iron Man 3.
The British Film Institute and the BBC teamed up to release several classic DVDs just in time for Christmas, including the seven-disc set of Out of the Unknown, which included all surviving twenty episodes from the 1960s anthology SF series. The Changes, a 1975 serial based on Peter Dickinson’s trilogy of young adult books received its DVD premier, as did the 1978 adaptation of Alan Garner’s Red Shift and the 1971/1980 BBC serial The Boy from Space.
Also from the BFI, Out of This World: Little Lost Robot was based on the story by Isaac Asimov and is the only surviving episode from the ITV anthology series hosted by Boris Karloff in 1962. The extras included an audio commentary, audio-only versions of two other episodes, a downloadable script for the first episode, and an illustrated booklet.
Uncle Forry’s AckerMansions was a visual tour through all three of Forrest J Ackerman’s legendary homes, stuffed to the rafters with memorabilia.
Two years after his apparent dive off the roof of St. Bart’s Hospital, Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) finally resurfaced in London, much to the surprise of a still-grieving John Watson (Martin Freeman). Although the first two feature-length episodes of the third season of the BBC’s contemporary Sherlock were spoiled by too much comedy and not enough plot, the third and final show almost made up for it.
‘His Last Vow’ featured Lars Mikkelsen as master blackmailer Charles Augustus Magnussen, along with a surprising secret about Watson’s new wife Mary (the wonderful Amanda Abbington), before the cliff-hanger revelation that Moriarty was back.
In the UK, 8.8 million tuned into the final instalment and, in a nice touch, Holmes’ parents were played by Cumberbatch’s real-life parents, Wanda Ventham and Timothy Carlton.
When all three seasons of Sherlock were released on Blu-ray, the deluxe set included mini-busts of Holmes and Watson.
The long-awaited fifth season of Jonathan Creek on BBC was a huge disappointment, mostly due to the lack of on-screen chemistry between the always excellent Alan Davies and Sarah Alexander as his nagging new wife. The three cosy murder mysteries involved a “locked room” musical, a retired psychic’s unlikely prediction and an apparently cursed Aladdin’s lamp.
Vanessa Redgrave starred as a reclusive author being interviewed by Olivia Colman’s damaged journalist in the BBC-TV movie The Thirteenth Tale, Christopher Hampton’s overwrought adaptation of Diane Setterfield’s novel about sinister siblings and incestuous relationships.
Predictably, British TV and radio did almost nothing to celebrate Hallowe’en in 2014. However, the following month the BBC showed Ashley Pearce’s Remember Me, a creepy three-part contemporary ghost story by Gwyneth Hughes in which a curmudgeonly old pensioner (Michael Palin in a rare dramatic role) was haunted by water, the folk song ‘Scarborough Fair’ and a murderous guardian from his childhood. The supporting cast included Mark Addy, Jodie Comer and Julia Sawalha.
Nick Willing’s The Haunting of Radcliffe House (aka Altar) starred Olivia Williams as an interior designer who discovered that her artist husband (Matthew Modine) and two children were gradually falling under the spell of the remote old house on the Yorkshire moors that she had been hired to renovate for its mysteriously absent owners.
After the destruction of Air Force One, Linda Hamilton was an unlikely Admiral searching for the President of the United States (John Savage) in the Bermuda Triangle in Syfy’s awful Bermuda Tentacles (aka Dark Rising).
Antonio Fargas was a Louisiana bayou local dealing with a sharp-toothed fish curse in SnakeHead Swamp, while a group of guardians unwisely decided to transport the Jersey Devil and his human half-sister to a new location in Dark Haul (aka Monster Truck), starring Tom Sizemore.
The best thing that could be said about Anthony C. Ferrante’s Sharknado 2: The Second One was that it was marginally better than the first one, as returning stars Ian Zierling and Tara Reid attempted to stop it raining sharks in New York City. It included a neat Twilight Zone gag, while Vivica A. Fox, Kari Wuhrer, Judd Hirsch, Downtown Julie Brown, Billy Ray Cyrus, Andy Dick, Robert Hays, Perez Hilton, Matt Lauer, Al Roker, Kelly Osbourne, Kelly Ripper, Michael Strahan and an uncredited Wil Wheaton were amongst the celebrities who thought it would be cool to appear in this rubbish.
The concept behind Syfy’s Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark, starring Christopher Judge, Elisabeth Röhm and singer Debbie Gibson, was a straight steal from King Kong Escapes (1967).
Ascension, a three-part mini-series on Syfy, began with a murder on a 1960s-style spaceship halfway through its 100-year journey to another galaxy, as the First Officer (Brandon P. Bell) was forced to learn investigative techniques from watching recordings of Fritz Lang’s M. As the plot became more intriguing, anyone familiar with Hammer Films’ The Damned (aka These Are the Damned) would have had a pretty good idea about what was actually going on.
Zoe Saldana co-produced and starred as the hysterical mother of the Anti-christ in NBC’s pointless two-part remake of Rosemary’s Baby, which relocated Ira Levin’s 1967 novel (and its also credited sequel) to contemporary Paris. Carole Bouquet and Jason Isaacs played her seductive Devil-worshipping neighbours.
Heather Graham and Ellen Burstyn headed the cast of the Lifetime movie of V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic, which was even worse than the 1987 feature adaptation. Incredibly, a few months later the network screened a sequel, Petals in the Wind.
Laura Allen’s wife and mother had to deal with a psycho babysitter (India Eisley) in the Lifetime movie Nanny Cam, and The Good Witch’s Wonder marked the seventh annual outing on the Hallmark Channel of Catherine Bell’s magical Cassandra Nightingale.
Sean Patrick Thomas’ New York doctor relocated his family to a small rural town that turned out to be controlled by creatures in the nearby forest in Chiller Network’s Deep in the Darkness, which also starred Dean Stockwell and was based on the novel by Michael Laimo.