By Peter Covino

Entertainment Editor

Call it an early Christmas or maybe a Halloween present but if you are a Harry Potter fan you really should be getting the Harry Potter Ultimate Editions.

Blu ray is the way to go, of course (standard DVD is available as well) for the newest Ultimate Editions Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the third and fourth movies in the series.

I haven’t had time to make it through both of these box sets, there is just too much to view and not enough time. But the movies themselves sure look swell. I am always amazed at the details I find on my home HD screen that I never noticed before even in a theater setting.

Both Ultimate Editions feature three discs, including a digital copy of the film for the computer or mobile device.

And that is only the beginning. If you collect cards, each ultimate set contains two more character cards (Hermione Granger, Sirius Black, Ronald Weasley and Alastor Moody) and these are not playing card size cards, but large cardboard presentations of each character.

Each set also includes a music and photo book as well.

And those are just the fun things inside these nicely packaged sets.

Each set includes another chapter in the eight-hour documentary series Creating the World of Harry Potter, with never before seen footage from the films.

There are many more bonus features as well including conversations with the cast and several other featurettes.

The good stuff included is so much that there is hardly time to talk about the films, and these are both good additions to the Potter legacy, and definitely fun watching on a Halloween weekend with the lights out. These are the first two films when Harry, Ron and Hermione are beginning to leave childhood behind them and their problems are more teen oriented.

In Azkaban, (winner of the British Academy Award for best feature film) Harry and friends must do battle with escaped prisoner Sirius Black. There are some other interesting creatures about including the creepy Dementors and the half-horse, half-eagle Hippogriff.

In Goblet of Fire, Harry becomes a competitor in the grueling Triwizard Tournament, which is far more deadly than a game of Quidditch.

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Keeping in that Halloween mood, but this is a movie that wouldn’t scare anyone, Synergy Entertainment proudly, okay not proudly, has released the 45th anniversary edition of Monster A-Go Go.

Yes, Monster A-Go Go (1965), widely hailed as one of the worst films ever made, you will laugh, shake your head and say “they actually made this,” this marvelous piece of ineptitude is the story of..well I don’t know.

There is an astronaut who is missing after a trip to space. And anyone who comes in contact with the capsule starts melting or something. I don’t know really. There also are a bunch of teens happily dancing at a party. That is the go go part, I guess.

The acting is terrible and the plot is worse. There is one of those voice-over narratives that stops any semblance of a story from ever happening.

The main problem (and there are so many) is the film was started by one director, never completed and then taken over by Herschell Gordon Lewis of 2,000 Maniacs and other memorable gorefest films. There is no gore here though, except for melting bodies or whatever it is the bodies are doing.

You will laugh, you will cry. You will want your money back, but only if you don’t appreciate the very worst in movie-making.

Bonus features, yes amazingly there are bonus features, includes an audio commentary by director Bill Rebane (the other director of the film), and two film shorts not seen since their original release: Twist Craze (1961) and Dance Craze (1962) and the 24-page booklet featuring a reprint of a story that ran in Scary Monsters magazine about the making of the film.

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If you have a fear of flying, Crash of Flight 447 probably won’t help too much.

This intriguing documentary examines the June 1, 2009 crash of Flight AF4347, an Air France Airbus A330 that disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean with a loss of all 228 passengers and crew on board.

The PBS NOVA team (pilots, engineers and safety experts) examines the crash and the evidence, spending weeks to come up with a diagnosis of what would make a state-of-the-art airliner crash. It is as satisfying as any mystery and will make you think twice the next time you fly.

The DVD is available at select retailers or online at shopPBS.org.

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New releases from the Warner Archive Collection include The Power (1968) with George Hamilton and Suzanne Pleshette; the sci-fi fantasy Atlantis, The Lost Continent (1961) and the World War II thriller-based-on-a-true story, Operation Daybreak (1975).

The Power is a nicely told tale of a telekinetic guy who is really good at the whole telekinetic thing. Too good. People around him start dying.

Even more compelling is Operation Daybreak. Set in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, there are lots of really bad Nazis trying to eradicate a group of patriots leading a resistance movement in Czechoslovakia. The patriots main objective is to rid the country of “The Butcher of Prague,” but they keep missing their target.

It is moving story, with Timothy Bottoms (The Last Picture Show) as one of the main good guys, with nice location shots too.

Atlantis, The Lost Continent is definitely a lesser effort, typical of the mythical, European shot films of the era. But the earthquake climax is quite good and required so much work to pull off, something that needs more recognition in a film world dominated by computer images.

All films in the Warner Archive Collection (the list of hard to find, first time on DVD film, etc., keeps growing each week) are made to order and found only at www.Warner

Archive.com.