I Am Not A Serial Killer (15)

Bulldog Films, £9.99

Starring 19-year-old Max Records and (as his mum) Glasgow-born actress Laura Fraser, this blackly comic, American Mid West-set horror is directed by Irishman Billy O'Brien and based on the first of the John Wayne Cleaver trilogy of YA novels by American author Dan Wells.

Records plays John Cleaver and the denial of homicidal culpability outlined in the title refers to him: diagnosed as a sociopath by his cheerful Irish therapist Dr Grant (Karl Geary, Fraser's real-life husband), he's obsessed with serial killers because he's concerned that one day he's going to become one. Working with his mother in the family funeral parlour doesn't help matters much either. Pumping embalming fluid into naked cadavers all day would have a deleterious effect on anybody, but factor in John's morbid tendencies and you can see how things could easily take a turn for the socially unacceptable.

They don't, though, because someone else in John's home town of Clayton starts a serial killing spree instead. Trusting partly to luck and partly to an examination of his own dark desires, John tries to figure out who the culprit is. Before too long he's realised that his aptly-named neighbour Mr Crowley – Christopher Lloyd, channelling William S Burroughs and spouting William Blake – isn't quite what he seems.

Shot by Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan, Ken Loach's lensman of choice, the film has a cold, almost-documentary feel and its use of the same, snowy Minnesotan locations as Fargo puts that film in mind. Its (rather hopeful) billing as the new Donnie Darko is a little wide of the mark, though.

Memories Of Underdevelopment (15)

Mr Bongo, £12.99

Released by music label/DVD imprint Mr Bongo, which specialises in classic music and film from the Caribbean and South America, this 1968 film by Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea is set in Havana at the start of that decade, in a period between 1961's Bay Of Pigs invasion and the start of the Cuban missile crisis 18 months later. As the film opens, 30something bourgeois intellectual Sergio (Sergio Corrieri) is saying goodbye to his wife and parents, who are leaving for a new life in Miami. We then follow him as he drifts through the city and a series of sexual encounters, some in the present (such as with aspiring actress Elena, played by Daisy Granados) and some in the past (we see him with his wife, with prostitutes and with an earlier girlfriend who appears to be a schoolgirl). Intercutting the action is real documentary footage – Alea cuts his teeth in that genre, though here it's used as political scene-setting – and much of the film is narrated by Sergio as a sort of interior monologue.

The end result is a work which is fascinating on every level, from the picture it shows of late 1960's Cuba to the human dramas it portrays and even in the way it does it – a montage of techniques such as freeze-frames, found and looped footage and audio recordings make it as free-wheeling and invigorating as anything the French New Wave produced. Painstakingly restored from the original negatives with funds from the George Lucas Film Foundation, it comes to Blu-ray for the first time, though sadly without any extras – some historical context would have been helpful.