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Nico Mastorakis has an uncanny ability of pulling ideas from various sources and running them through the Cuisinart of his peculiar sensibility, producing something altogether idiosyncratic. The six films assembled in Arrow Video’s new box set—one evocative religious allegory and five bawdy action comedies—testify to Mastorakis’s skills as a pop-cultural bricoleur. As a result, they serve as a series of variably amusing time capsules, deploying plenty of medium-specific references that might just delight viewers who came of age in the 1980s and early ’90s. Others will have to spend some time doing due diligence on Wikipedia.

The Time Traveler, from 1984, stars Keir Dullea as a man who fell to Earth, found naked along the Mykonos shore by expat American widow Andrea (Adrienne Barbeau). The new arrival soon names himself Glenn (as in astronaut John Glenn) and proceeds to learn the ways of the world. Unsurprisingly, a...

Unbridled Passion by Howard Hughes

Following the release in March of ‘A Man Called Gannon’ (1968), Simply Media in the UK continue to release more Universal-International westerns, this time of 1940s and ‘50s vintage. The new releases, out on 18 April, are ‘Calamity Jane & Sam Bass’ (1949), ‘Cattle Drive’ (1951) and ‘Black Horse Canyon’ (1954). This trio of films are literally ‘Horse Operas’, with the accent on thoroughbred steeds and their importance and role in the working west. Be they cattle drovers, stock breeders or outlaws, where would any of them be without the horse? The answer, of course, is walking.

I’ll review the DVDs in the order I watched them. First up is ‘Cattle Drive’, a 1951 western directed by Kurt Neumann. Chester Graham Jnr (Dean Stockwell), the spoilt, arrogant son of railroad magnet Chester Graham Snr (Leon Ames), is accidentally left behind when the train he is travelling on makes a water stop.