Two remarkable (and similarly themed) DVD collections have crossed my desk recently and I thought I'd share even though it isn't Friday (have no fear, though -- the DVD pick of the week, along with its attendant Cinema Listomania, will appear in two days as always).

The first is Classic British Thrillers, a single disc set from MPI Home Video, which revives three fascinating low budget UK mysteries from the 30s and 40s. Two of them -- The Phantom Light (1935) and Red Ensign (1934) -- are early efforts from the great Michael Powell , and while they're not in the same league as his masterpieces like The Red Shoes or Peeping Tom, they're interesting both on their own terms (TPL in particular is a wonderfully breezy entertainment) and as harbingers of his later work. The third film in the set -- The Upturned Glass (1947) -- is also worth seeing thanks to the presence of a very young James Mason as a surgeon turned detective; it's certainly no mystery that Hollywood came calling soon after.

The second is British Cinema: Classic "B" Film Collection Volume 1, a three disc six film box from VCI Entertainment covering similar ground, although there's one entry -- Tread Softly Stranger, starring Brit Marilyn Monroe wanna-be Diana Dors -- that was produced in the late 50s. The pneumatic Dors' obvious charms aside, the most notable film here (from a historical standpoint) is Girl in the News, an entertaining murder mystery starring the wonderful Margaret Lockwood (the heroine from Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes) and directed by (Sir) Carol Reed several years before his international success with The Third Man. But the real reason to get this is two films starring the now mostly forgotten but quite beyond remarkable Tod Slaughter.

Slaughter [right, as the title character in the 1936 version of Sweeney Todd] was, essentially, the Brit Bela Lugosi, i.e. an actor with a healthy whiff of pork product about him who got typecast in horror movies, but that description doesn't really do justice to the magnificent unreality of his performances; to watch him cackling insanely or playing with his mustache while chasing a shrieking virgin up a flight of stairs is (as Dave Kehr observed in the New York Times a few weeks ago) to be transported back to the Golden Age of Victorian Stage Melodrama. VCI's new set (the first of several, one hopes) includes Slaughter as a Fu Manchu-esque villain in Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror (1938) and totally over the top as a dastardly killer in Crimes at the Dark House (1940). The former is an efficient entry in a long-running detective series (Sexton Blake was a popular UK Sherlock Holmes knock-off), while the latter is an excellent update of Wilkie Collin's often-filmed The Woman in White.

Bottom line: Both sets -- beautifully restored across the board -- are compulsively watchable period curios that behoove beholding. You can (and definitely) should order the MPI set here; for the astounding Tod Slaughter, simply click here and prepare to have your mind blown.