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The first of Roger Corman's celebrated cycle of Edgar Allan Poe films, The Fall of the House of Usher is an enjoyably odd fright-flick that overcomes its modest budget and dull leading man with a surfeit of cinematic style and a scenery-chewing performance from Vincent Price. This Blu-ray release gets the best out of the film's lurid visuals with its lovingly restored AVC 2.40:1 1080p encode and backs it up with a solid LPCM dual-mono soundtrack. A director's commentary, an interview with former Corman protégé Joe Dante and an archival French TV interview with Vincent Price are among the disc's superb extras.

Scottish comic book writer Mark Millar shot to fame a little over a decade ago with a series high profile gigs for DC Comics and Marvel including The Authority, The Ultimates, Superman: Red Son and Marvel Knights Spider-Man.

Regular readers will know that as well as home cinema, I also have a passion for automotive audio and cars in general. In that field, while many admire the exotic Italian offerings from the likes of Lamborghini and Ferrari, there's a similar passion for the German marques. BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche – all are praised for their sheer engineering innovation. And if these speakers are anything to go by, the same national stereotypes could apply equally to home cinema. Quadral may not be as desirable a brand as, say, Italy's Zingali, but I like its attitude. It makes well-built speakers with some neat technical tricks.

Panasonic currently stands alone in producing decks capable of both recording Freeview programmes to hard disk and archiving them to Blu-ray, and the DMR-BWT735 is its latest such offering. Burning content to disc may seem an old-school concept – this deck does, however, feature state-of-the-art Smart functionality.