Video: RECORDED DELIVERY

A critical guide to the week's videos

At one moment in Mary Reilly (15, Columbia /TriStar, 29 Jan), Julia Roberts's simpering maid servant goes out into a dank courtyard to water some withering flowers. It's a rare moment of peace for the girl with the poorly plucked eyebrows and doily on her head, since she must spend the rest of the movie mutely observing the unspeakable horrors of John Malkovich's overacting. Recounting the tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from Robert's point of view, this prurient slice of Victorian Gothic has all the taste of Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors. The film has a deliberately claustrophobic feel, but every time Roberts steps out for an errand, the streets seem to be awash with blood as some leering working-class type guts a cow carcass or symbolically skins an eel. A trip to the local knocking shop (run by Glenn Close's Cruella de Vil madam) reveals a lurid salon stuffed with further bad meat. Imagine Seven mixed with The Jack the Ripper Experience and you get the idea.

Also out this week is Walter Hill's Last Man Standing (18, Entertainment in Video, 27 Jan) a remake of Kurosawa's 1961 film, Yojimbo. The film is half gangster movie, half spaghetti western and stars Bruce Willis (pictured above) in the unlikely role of a drifter/samurai caught between two rival gangs in early 20th-century Texas. As an attempt to consolidate Willis's position as "the thinking man's action hero" (Pulp Fiction, 12 Monkeys), the film is partially successful. Yet although it looks good, the stylised violence wears thin pretty quickly, and there's precious little else to keep your eyes on the screen.

The world of home buys, this week, sees plump pin-up Keanu Reeves, playing a cyber-courier in the airheaded actioner, Johnny Mnemonic (15, 20th Century Fox, 27 Jan), while the follically- challenged Ted Danson, puts in a decent performance as a cynical scientist in Loch Ness (PG, PolyGram, 27 Jan), a gentle monster movie for kids that looks like a Scottish tourist board ad. Continuing with the no-brainers, you might also like to check out Flynn (18, Medusa, 29 Jan), an enjoyably sensationalist biopic of the swashbuckling Errol Flynn.