The chilly original from Robert Louis Stevenson, is retold with a new young cast. This classic continues to be an experience of lifetime.

Released in 1962, this first James Bond movie remains one of the best and serves as an entertaining reminder that the Bond series began (in keeping with Ian Fleming's novels) with a surprising lack of gadgetry and big-budget fireworks. Sean Connery was just 32 years old when he won the role of Agent 007. In his first adventure James Bond is called to Jamaica where a colleague and secretary have been mysteriously killed. With an American CIA agent (Jack Lord, pre-Hawaii Five-O), they discover that the nefarious Dr. No (Joseph Wiseman) is scheming to blackmail the US government with a device capable of deflecting and destroying US rockets launched from Cape Canaveral. Of course, Bond takes time off from his exploits to enjoy the company of a few gorgeous women, including the bikini-clad Ursula Andress. She gloriously kicks off the long-standing tradition of Bond women who know how to please their favourite secret agent. A sexist anachronism? Maybe, but this is Bond at his purest, kicking off a series of movies that shows no sign of slowing down. --Jeff Shannon
Edition details

• Inside Dr. No (PG)
• Terence Young: Bond Vivant
• Audio commentary featuring director Terence Young and members of the cast and crew
• 1963 Dr No "featurette"
• Dr. No gallery of pictures
• Radio advertising
• Trailers for Dr. No, From Russia With Love and Goldfinger
• Goldfinger and Dr. No TV advertising

Originally broadcast in 2001, Dr Terrible's House of Horrible is a six-part pastiche of 1970s Hammer Horror from Steve Coogan's Baby Cow production company. Each episode is topped and tailed by Coogan beneath a mass of prosthetics in a high-back leather chair as the avuncular, flatulent, faintly morally debauched Dr Terrible. "That was truly diabolical", he concludes of each show, a verdict with which one or two critics unkindly and unfairly concurred.

Coogan also stars in each as six different characters. In "And Now the Fearing...", for example. he plays rat-faced, unpleasant millionaire Denham Denham; in "Frenzy of Tongs"--a mickey-take of the Fu Manchu films--he's the insufferably suave Nathan Blaze, a Jason King-a-like; in "Scream, Satan Scream", meanwhile, he superimposes a parody of Peter Sellers over a lampoon of the Vincent Price film Witchfinder General.

Although most of these episodes are elaborate period pieces and genuine care has been made to render them as scary as possible, the real period detail has been in recreating the luridly quaint, over-acted, hammy feel of the 70s productions to which these episodes pay affectionate homage. Although hardly a perfect series, the camped-up daftness of the entire enterprise, a star-studded cast that includes Honor Blackman, John Thompson and Ronnie Ancona, some nice scripting and Coogan's versatility all make for a programme that's hard to dislike.

On the DVD Dr Terrible's House of Horrible is quite generous in its extras. These include "An Appointment with Terrible", a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the show, much of which was shot in the studio hangars where the original Hammer horrors were made, dry audio commentary by cowriters Graham Duff and Henry Normal and director Matt Lipsey, and "Behind the Screams" a mock-70s film journal ("only 10p!") reflecting on the making of one of the episodes. --David Stubbs

As the third in what became a series of eight, Prince of Darkness was distinguished among the Hammer Dracula movies for several reasons. It was the third and last directed by Terence Fisher and his familiarity with the mythos and studio practices meant the rushed production still came out looking spectacular in places. Moving into the tail end of the 1960s, Hammer looked for ways of cost cutting: the film's dramatic finale on a frozen river takes place on a two-for-one set being used simultaneously for another shoot. This was also the series entry that included a substitute for the Renfield character missing from the first movie. Thorley Walters as Ludwig is a colourful cameo and that's also all that can be said of Christopher Lee. Despite top billing, the mute monster occupies but a fraction of the overall on-screen time. The real frights come from gaunt butler Klove who scares the life (literally) out of hapless travellers Alan, Charles, Helen and Diana. Surely their fate would ensure no-one else took the mountain pass to Carlsbad? But only two years later, audiences discovered Dracula Has Risen from the Grave.

On the DVD: apart from scene access there's nothing making use of the DVD format here. The 2.55:1 presentation is certainly welcome, and the mono audio somehow feels appropriate. --Paul Tonks