During the boat ride there is a clash of personalities. The buy has a habit of playing with a switchblade knife. The husband is a self-made man and delights in showing up the boy. In an argument, he knocks the boy off the boat.

The couple thinks he has drowned and the husband swims to shore for help. But the boy has hidden behind a buoy and comes aboard to seduce the wife. She finally brings in the boat and assures her husband the boy is alive and that she has cheated on him.

DVD FEATURES: Original 4:3 full frame version . Original Polish Mono, DTS & Dolby Digital 5.1 Audio Options . English Subtitles . 'A Ticket to the West' - An all-new featurette . Theatrical Trailer . Poster and Stills Gallery . Collector's Booklet.

Shot in icy black and white, it is a film in which purity is defiled by the warped powers of sensual desires. Carol (flawlessly beautiful French star Catherine Deneuve), a young girl living in Sixties' London, is repelled, yet fascinated, by men. Her radiant beauty attracts the opposite sex, but she shrinks from their advances. Her days are spent in an intensely feminine atmosphere: working in a beauty salon, and clinging to her sister Helen for love. But, as she incarcerates herself in the sinister, shadowy flat, men begin to invade her dreams night and day, mixing her terror with delight as bizarre sexual hallucinations take hold of her mind. The walls start to crack, literally, before her eyes.

Finally, wracked and depraved through her delirium, she is left with only one instinct towards the men who invade her life - that of a killer. Vibrant and daring, Repulsion is a film which resounds in the memory, from its stunning cinematography to the famous images of hands which can reach out through the cracks in the walls to claw and caress Deneuve as she passes by. (The hands in REPULSION were an inspiration to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and seem, to me at least, a sinsiter homage to Cocteau's BEAUTY AND THE BEAST where in the Beast's castle rows of hands protruding from the walls of a similar hallway serve as torch holders.)

DVD FEATURES: Widescreen Presentation Enhanced for 16x9 TVs . Original English Mono, DTS & Dolby Digital 5.1 Audio Options . Audio Commentary with Roman Polanski and Catherine Deneuve . 'A British Horror Film' - An all-new featurette . Theatrical Trailer . Original Script Extracts . Original Drawings by Art Director Seamus Flannery . 'Eye and Brain' (audio) by Professor Richard Gregory . Poster and Stills Gallery . Collector's Booklet.

CUL-DE-SAC (1966) A mismatched couple (he effeminate and petulant, she sensual and enigmatic) share a bizarre sexual relationship, living in a remote castle. Their very isolation from the world prevents their eccentric partnership from foundering.

Only an outsider can disrupt their make-believe lifestyle. That disruption arrives in the belligerent form of Richard and Albert, two oddball gangsters straight out of a 1940's film noir, wounded, desperate and on the run. They demand shelter, and as Richard waits for instructions from his gangland boss, he slips into a dangerous round of game-playing with his unwilling hosts. But it seems that Richard is not always to have the upper hand.

Starring Donald Pleasence, Françoise Dorléac, Lionel Stander and featuring the first credited screen appearance of Jacqueline Bisset.

DVD FEATURES: Widescreen Presentation Enhanced for 16x9 TVs . Original English Mono, DTS & Dolby Digital 5.1 Audio Options . 'Two Gangsters and an Island'- An all-new featurette . Theatrical Trailer . Poster and Stills Gallery . Collector's Booklet

KNIFE IN THE WATER (1962) This brooding thriller, Polanski's first feature as director, is a fine exercise in economy and symmetry. The film captures all the tension which builds between a mismatched couple and a young hitchhiker as they struggle for control over each other, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1963.

DVD FEATURES: Original 4:3 full frame version . Original Polish Mono, DTS & Dolby Digital 5.1 Audio Options . English Subtitles . 'A Ticket to the West' - An all-new featurette . Theatrical Trailer . Poster and Stills Gallery . Collector's Booklet

REPULSION (1965) With Repulsion, Roman Polanski arrived on the English-Language film scene with the force of a thunderbolt. Like his subsequent masterpieces Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, this classic study of insanity and sexual repression shows the controversial Polish director's unflinching obsession with shocking subject-matter and masterful use of disturbing imagery.

DVD FEATURES: Widescreen Presentation Enhanced for 16x9 TVs . Original English Mono, DTS & Dolby Digital 5.1 Audio Options . Audio Commentary with Roman Polanski and Catherine Deneuve . 'A British Horror Film' - An all-new featurette . Theatrical Trailer . Original Script Extracts . Original Drawings by Art Director Seamus Flannery . 'Eye and Brain' (audio) by Professor Richard Gregory . Poster and Stills Gallery . Collector's Booklet

BONUS DVD - EARLY SHORTS: Teethful Smile (Usmiech zebiczny, 1957) . A Murderer (Morderstwo, 1957) . Two Men and a Wardrobe (Dwaj ludzie z szafa, 1958) . Lamp, The (Lampa, 1959) . When Angels Fall (Gdy spadaja anioly, 1959) . Fat and the Lean, The (Gruby i chudy, 1961) . Mammals, The (Ssaki, 1962) . Let's Break the Ball (Rozbijemy zabawe, 1957)

Donald Pleasence and Françoise Dorléac play a mismatched couple - he effeminate and petulant, she sensual and enigmatic - who share a bizarre sexual relationship, living in a remote castle. Their very isolation from the world prevents their eccentric partnership from foundering. Only an outsider can disrupt their make-believe lifestyle. That disruption arrives in the belligerent form of Richard and Albert, two oddball gangsters straight out of a 1940's film noir, wounded, desperate, and on the run.

They demand shelter, and as Richard waits for instructions from his gangland boss, he slips into a dangerous round of game-playing with his unwilling hosts. But it seems that Richard is not always to have the upper hand.

With its larger-than-life performances, wicked black humor and superb use of striking outdoor locations - the film was shot on Holy Island in Northumberland - Polanski has created an exceptional film which is very different to, but no less memorable than Repulsion.

Features black-listed actor Lionel Stander and the first credited screen appearance of Jacqueline Bisset.

DVD FEATURES: Widescreen Presentation Enhanced for 16x9 TVs . Original English Mono, DTS & Dolby Digital 5.1 Audio Options . Two Gangsters and an Island'- An all-new featurette . Theatrical Trailer . Poster and Stills Gallery . Collector's Booklet.

"Comedy-horror film directed by Roman Polanski. An expert on bats, Professor Abronsius and his dim-witted assistant, Alfred, travel to Transylvania to try to find and destroy vampires. Alfred falls for the vampire's latest target - the inn-keeper's daughter."

"...A fast, funny, knockabout spoof of vampire movies" - Jack Purdy, Baltimore City Paper

"Near-brilliant mixture of humor and horror." - Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide

Starring Jack MacGowran, Roman Polanski, Alfie Bass, Jessie Robins, Sharon Tate

Many (most?) great modern horror films operate on two levels . Kubrick's THE SHINING is about alcoholism, Cronenberg's THE FLY is about cocaine and AIDS, THE EXORCIST is about the guilt feelings of working mothers, and so on. ROSEMARY'S BABY is a feminist horror story about society, pregnancy and choice. Everyone wants Rosemary to have her baby. As pregnancy removes more and more of her options she becomes trapped, bound by circumstance to her husband.

Eventually she finds herself reduced to host for an unwanted parasite for the benefit of her husband (John Cassavettes) and symbolic would-be grandparents played by Sidney Blackmer and show-stealing Ruth Gordon in her Oscar-winning role. (Their symbolic role as paternal grandparents is reinforced by their names, the Castavets. I don't recall if that's their name in Ira Levin's original novel, but it's funny that their name is so similar to Cassavettes.)

Rosemary is powerless and her powerlessness all flows from her sex. Most of Rosemary's terrorization comes in the form of "help" from people who know what's best for her, best for her body, best for her child. The devil worshipers are something even worse; they are busy-body custodians of an old social order unfriendly to young women in the city.

Ostensibly produced by William Castle, the 1950s-1960s low budget horror impresario that used to do things like put buzzers in the seats or have skeletons on wires fly out of the screen, but I think Robert Evans was sort of the real producer. (There's a story there, I just can't remember it. Castle must have optioned the book or something.)

What a diverse cast! Starring Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Maurice Evans, Ralph Bellamy, Elisha Cook Jr. and yes, that is Charles Grodin.

Polanski's acting role is excellent, but the movie belongs to star Sydne Rome, a portrait of cluelessness with riotous blonde curls and a perfect streamlined 1970s figure who looks and acts remarkably like Farrah Fawcett as she wanders (mostly topless) through a host of bizarre situations. She escapes a trio of would-be rapists by seeking refuge in an Italian villa full of reproductions of the best of European erotic painting and a lot of crazy people. Since she doesn't speak Italian it's even more confusing. At times you think it's a bordello, at other times an asylum. Truth be told, there's no telling what this elegant mansion is.

Dream logic rules. Rome's clothes are stolen every time she falls asleep. There are peep-holes in the walls. Helmut Newton style nude amazon sunbathers drift across the veranda without a sound except the distant din from a constant game of ping pong. Mastroianni dons a tiger skin and capers about demanding that Rome whip him. A senile patriarch presides over bizarre dinners where everyone laughs at Rome to her face, though not speaking the language she'll never know why.

In this erotic comedy from famed director Roman Polanski, Sydne Rome stars as a very sexy and quite bewildered young hitchhiker. As the film opens, she has just escaped the clutches of three would be rapists only to find her way to a seaside villa. Things are, as she discovers, very strange at the villa. She is given a room and, within moments of undressing she is under the peeping eye of a hedonistic pervert, played with bravado by Marcello Mastroianni. She soon encounters the rest of the occupants of the mansion, all are completely anomalous and each tries to persuade into a sexual encounter. Throughout her entire erotic adventure, she carries a diary under her arm and writes curiously impersonal and un-erotic entries. This is the least discussed of Polanski's films, but on some levels it may be his most revealing.

Robert Townes crackling, hard-boiled Oscar-winning screenplay is usually described as reminiscent of Raymond Chandler, but it's Chandler as seen through the cynical eyes of the 1970s. Chandler's Phillip Marlowe was a poor and principled lone wolf who never did divorce work. Jack Nicholson's 1930s Los Angelean private eye J.J. Gittes is a successful cad who specializes in divorce work.

When a client (Diane Ladd) hires him to spy on her "husband," who is rumored to be having an affair with a younger woman, Jake does indeed find the man with a younger girl. He also finds the man's real wife, the glamorous Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) and the mystery is on. Mulwray and her larger than life father, Noah Cross (John Huston), are at the center of a tangled of secrets involving murder, perversion and water, the life-blood of drought-stricken southern California. The script by Robert Towne won a well-deserved Oscar, and the muted color cinematography makes the goings-on seem both bleak and impossibly vibrant. Polanski himself has an unforgetable cameo as the stilleto weilding thug who famously bisects Nicholson's nose.

Nineteen year-old Nastassja Kinski had achieved only trivial noteriety in silly European sexploitation and horror movies before Polanski fixated upon her. TESS seems to be born of the best aspect of Polanski's traumatized late-1970s emotional flight to whatever refuge he thought could be found in the beauty of teenage girls (the worst aspects are amply documented in California court records)

"First time on DVD! Academy Award®- winning timeless adaptation of Thomas Hardy's classic romance about a rural clergyman in 19th-century England who tells a simple farmer that he may be descended from the illustrious d'Urberville family. The farmer sends his daughter Tess to check on a family named d'Uberville living in a manor house less than a day's carriage ride away. However, her so-called cousin purchased his ancestral name and coat of arms. Tess plays her own game of illusion when she finds, loses, and finds again her true love. Starring: Nastassia Kinski, Peter Firth."

Harrison Ford stars as Richard Walker, an American doctor who has come to Paris, where he's scheduled to deliver a paper to a medical conference. Richard has brought along his wife Sondra (Betty Buckley), because Paris was the site of their honeymoon 20 years earlier. Sondra picks up the wrong suitcase at the airport, which leads to her kidnapping and an ever-more complicated quest that takes Richard into the seedy and dangerous underworld of European drug smuggling and terrorist arms sales.

Along the way, he is rebuffed by skeptical officials at the American Embassy and meets Michelle (Emmanuelle Seigner), a sexy courier who agrees to help him in exchange for the money she's owed for trafficking in narcotics.

Stuffy British couple Fiona (Thomas) and Nigel Dobson (Hugh Grant) are sailing to Istanbul en route to India. They encounter a beautiful French woman (Emmanuelle Seigner), and that night Nigel dances with her alone in the ship's bar, while the Mrs. is laid up sea-sick. Soon he meets her crippled American husband Oscar (Peter Coyote), who tells him their story... How, while living in Paris trying to be a writer, he became obsessed with a woman he met by chance on a bus, tracked her down, and won her.

Finding himself too deeply in love to bear, he became shockingly cruel. Oscar pours out the details over several evenings, and then the entire sordid tale reaches its present-tense climax.

Actors: Hugh Grant, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emmanuelle Seigner, Peter Coyote, Victor Banerjee, Sophie Patel, Stockard Channing, Patrick Albenque.

In an unspecified South American country after the recent fall of the dictatorship Gerardo (Stuart Wilson), a respected lawyer, has just been appointed to head a commission on human rights violations under the old regime. His wife, former political activist and torture victim Paulina Escobar (Sigourney Weaver), suffering from severe psychological trauma ever since her arrest, decries his investigation as a sham. One stormy night the couple receives an unexpected visitor when an affable stranger, Dr. Miranda (Ben Kingsley), experiences car trouble while dropping off Gerardo at the Escobars' isolated house. When Paulina hears the visitor speak she becomes convinced his is the voice of the doctor who supervised her torture and raped her on several occasions while she was blindfolded and strapped to a table. Determined to get a taped confession from him she appears with a gun and, over her husband's objections, she binds and interrogates the man.