This week's new DVD & Blu-ray

The Plague Of The Zombies / The Reptile Even in these enlightened times, Hammer Films is still often seen as the British film industry's dirty little secret. While Hammer made more than just horror films, it was the horrors that kept the industry rolling through very lean times, proving extremely popular overseas in places like America, Japan and Italy, countries where more lauded British films would never get a foothold. These two Hammer films from 1966 were made back to back, sharing locations and cast members in order to save money. They are from a time when Hammer was trying new things, having exhausted dozens of permutations of vampire, Frankenstein and mummy movies. The Reptile is basically the werewolf's curse-style of tale given a few reptilian twists. More successful is Hammer's take on zombies, here not flesh-eaters, but instead cheap voodoo-activated undead labour in a Cornish tin mine. A mere two years later, Romero's Night Of The Living Dead turned zombies into a more contemporary terror and Hammer went from being thought of as pariahs to simply being ignored; neither is a fair way of looking at the company. Age may have softened the shock value of both films – Plague has been downgraded to a 12-certificate – but there's a classy confidence to Hammer films and their hard-working horror seems almost wholesome today. Blu-ray & DVD, Studiocanal Carnage Roman Polanski delivers a claustrophobic, bitterly funny stage adaptation. Blu-ray & DVD, Studiocanal Braquo Season 2 Mesrine writer Abdel Raouf Dafri adds to this great, punchy French cop show's stellar creds in a devastating saison deux. Blu-ray & DVD, Arrow The Woman In Black Daniel Radcliffe plays second fiddle to great old-fashioned atmospherics in this decent adaptation. Blu-ray & DVD, Momentum Revolution: The Director's Cut Hugh Hudson fixes some of the problems of his notorious 1985 flop. Still the only pairing of Al Pacino and EastEnders' Sid Owen. Blu-ray & DVD, BFI