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Review Head on / Trekkers Scrapbook - Trek History [1995]
Release date: 1995-10-16
Price: £9.99

Review Trekkers Scrapbook - Trek History [1995] / Head on:


Actors & Directors
  • James Spader
  • Alexis Cruz
  • Mili Avital
  • Kurt Russell
  • Roland Emmerich
  • Viveca Lindfors
Release date: 1995-11-06
Run time: 116 min.
Price: £14.99

Review Stargate [1995] / Universal Pictures UK:

A self-consciously epic sci-fi adventure of Cecil B DeMille-sized proportions, Stargate refreshes and combines several well-worn sci-fi and sword 'n' sandal genre conventions with some Erich von Daniken-style Biblical Egyptology. The directing-writing-producing team of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin had previously collaborated on B-movies Moon 44 (1990) and Universal Soldier (1992), but handed a significantly bigger budget they were able to give their Steven Spielberg pretensions free reign here ("Indiana Jones and his Close Encounters with the Chariots of the Gods" might be a suitable subtitle). James Spader is endearingly dithery as the fish-out-of-water academic who finds himself teamed with taciturn tough guy Kurt Russell: the two excellent leads are largely responsible for imparting what depth there is to otherwise two-dimensional characters. British composer David Arnold makes his major studio debut in the grandest fashion with an outstanding score that pays suitable homage to epic film music (John Williams' CE3K and Maurice Jarre's Lawrence of Arabia in particular). It's all done with such unabashed enthusiasm that viewers will happily forgive the film's derivative elements and even overlook the high-camp theatricality of Jaye Davidson's bizarre bad guy. Despite subsequent huge box-office hits (Independence Day, Godzilla, The Patriot), Stargate remains Emmerich and Devlin's freshest, most satisfying film. On the DVD: This special edition version adds approximately seven minutes of additional footage, much of which is in the form of slightly extended scenes, but does also include an opening sequence in Ancient Egypt, a scene with Kurt Russell and the fossilised Horus guards, and Ra's bath scene. These are also collected in a bonus "Promo Reel". The anamorphic widescreen presentation of the 2. 35:1 Panavision picture looks sharp and clear, although some of the additional footage is degraded; the sound is suitably spectacular 5. [+]
1 or DTS. Devlin and Emmerich provide a relaxed, chatty commentary ("We have nothing to do with the TV series"!), although you have to access this from the Set Up menu not the Special Features menu. There's a photo gallery and trailer, but sadly no "making-of" documentary. -Mark Walker.

Review Contender Entertainment Group / Farscape - Vol. 2.2 - 2.04 Crackers Don't Matter / 2.05 The Way We Weren't [1999]
Actors & Directors
  • Ian Watson (II)
  • Geoff Bennett (II)
  • Tony Tilse
Release date: 2001-03-12
Run time: 90 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £2.74

Review Farscape - Vol. 2.2 - 2.04 Crackers Don't Matter / 2.05 The Way We Weren't [1999] / Contender Entertainment Group:

Farscape is genre television at its most ambitious, inspired both by the cult appeal of Babylon 5 and the continuing success of the Star Trek franchise, but taking a visual and conceptual leap beyond those shows. Making extensive use of CGI, prosthetics and state-of-the-art puppetry, courtesy of Jim Henson's Creature Shop, the Farscape concept has a freshness that makes it look and feel completely original. The production design is all bio-mechanical curves and the script, which is peppered with post-modern pop culture references and movie in-jokes, never takes itself too seriously. It may be expensive to make, but it certainly looks (and sounds-in Dolby Digital 5. 1) like every penny made it to the screen. Ben Browder plays leading man John Crichton as a latter-day Buck Rogers but with an entirely believable sense of bewilderment, not to mention loss; the rest of the living ship Moya's crew also have plenty of difficult issues to deal with, allowing Farscape's writers licence to develop their characters in often unexpected ways. The result is episodic TV sci-fi that continually pushes at the accepted boundaries of the format. On this tape After a shaky start to the second season the show really hits its stride once again by the fourth episode, "Crackers Don't Matter": the crew slowly succumb to a state of paranoia-fuelled madness, fighting and trying to kill one another thanks to the presence of an odd light-seeking alien. Crichton has a string of great lines ("I hate it when villains quote Shakespeare") and much fun doing an impersonation of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Then, in "The Way We Weren't" there are shocking revelations about both Aeryn and Pilot's past lives and the show's gift for surprising as well as emotionally convincing character development is once more brought to the fore. [+]
-Mark Walker.

Review The X Files / The X Files : Nothing Important Happened Today
Release date: 2002-06-10
Run time: 83 min.
RRP: £14.99
Price: £2.96

Review The X Files : Nothing Important Happened Today / The X Files:

As with earlier releases, The X-Files: Providence splices together two episodes, "Provenance" and "Providence", into a pseudo-movie. Again, the results fall way below the series average as the long-dead alien conspiracy business is flogged, with a lot of running around and ominous rumbling still not adding up to anything like an actual story. FBI agent Neal McDonaugh (of Minority Report) inexplicably survives a flaming motorcycle crash, leaving behind brass rubbings taken from an alien spaceship, then shows up and tries to murder Scully's psychokinetic baby, who is promptly kidnapped by a UFO cult. In Part 2, Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Reyes (Annabeth Gish) fend off enemies and friends within the bureau as they track down the cultists, who are having trouble with a spaceship they've dug up, and a typical pointless climax has things happen without the characters doing anything to contribute. Even at this late, post-Duchovny stage in the game, The X-Files has turned out some fine stand-alone episodes, but these dreary wallowings go a long way towards explaining why only diehards are still watching. After the child says "I made this" at the end of the credits, it's becoming very hard not to shout "well, clean it up then". On the DVD: The X-Files: Providence, as with Nothing Important Happened Today, arrives in a great-looking anamorphic widescreen transfer. There are two slight promotional "featurettes"-three-minute clips/talking heads promos focusing on the episode "Providence" and actor Cary Elwes' character. -Kim Newman.

Release date: 2003-03-24
Run time: 156 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £6.95

Review "Tribe, The - Season 1 - Episodes 49-52 (Wide Screen)" / Sanctuary Digital Entertainment:


Review Mosaic Movies / Komodo [1999]
Actors & Directors
  • Paul Gleeson
  • Jill Hennessy
  • Kevin Zegars
  • Michael Edward-Stevens
  • Michael Lantieri
  • Billy Burke
Release date: 2003-02-24
Run time: 86 min.
Price: £5.99

Review Komodo [1999] / Mosaic Movies:


Review Entertainment in Video / Lost In Space [1998]
Actors & Directors
  • Mimi Rogers
  • Jack Johnson (II)
  • Stephen Hopkins
  • Lacey Chabert
  • Heather Graham
  • William Hurt
Release date: 1999-03-15
Run time: 125 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £2.99

Review Lost In Space [1998] / Entertainment in Video:

Packed with more than 750 dazzling visual effects, this US$70 million adventure does more (and less) than give the 1965-68 TV series a state-of-the-art face-lift. Aimed at an audience that wasn't born when the series originally aired, the sci-fi extravaganza doesn't even require familiarity, despite cameo appearances by several of the TV show's original cast members. Instead, Lost in Space is a high-tech hybrid of the original premise with enough sensory overload to qualify as a spectacular big-screen video game, supported by a time-travel premise that's adequately clever but hardly original. It's certainly never boring, and visually it's an occasionally awesome demonstration of special effects technology. But, in its attempt to be all things to all demographics, the movie's more of a marketing ploy than a satisfying adventure, thankfully dispensing with the TV show's cheesy camp but otherwise squandering a promising cast in favour of eye-candy and ephemeral storytelling. -Jeff Shannon.

Review Warner Home Video / Crusade - Vol. 1.02 - The Well Of Forever / Ruling from the Tomb [1999]
Actors & Directors
  • Tony Dow
  • Alex Mendoza
Release date: 2000-03-06
Run time: 85 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £0.25

Review Crusade - Vol. 1.02 - The Well Of Forever / Ruling from the Tomb [1999] / Warner Home Video:

When Babylon 5 finished its promised five-year run, it was obvious some things had been left out. Numerous plotlines lay casually unresolved and way too many "hints" looked ahead to an ominous future. With the Shadows dispatched at the end of the Great War, the final season revealed a race of hangers-on who stayed behind to continue the mischief-making. The biggest clue that more was to follow, came in the fourth TV movie A Call To Arms which introduced several new characters into the mix. Here we saw the Drakh's final "Planet Killer" let loose in Earth's atmosphere-a deadly virus that will take five years to adapt to human DNA, and then wipe it out. The rather high-stakes solution offered by Earthgov is to send an experimental starship, the Excalibur, out into the galaxy to find a cure. The Excalibur's crew is headed up by Gary Cole as Capt. Matthew Gideon; a no-nonsense leader whose principles seem to be challenged every show ("I'm not subtle. I'm not pretty. And I'll piss off a lot of people along the way. [+]
") Along for the ride are Daniel Dae Kim as the secretly telepathic Lt. John Matheson, Peter Woodward as quixotic Technomage Galen, and Carrie Dobro as the feisty criminal Dureena Nafeel. Although in theory there are members of the heroic Rangers at their side, the initial idea that this series should have the feel of an Arthurian quest clearly didn't come to pass. Suffering a plague of its own in studio indecisiveness, Crusade managed a run of 13 episodes which during post-production were juggled out of chronological order. It should be taken into consideration when viewing that the first eight were filmed last, so the "redesign" seen in the final five is in fact the opposite of what it seems. Technomage Galen tries the crew's patience with what seems a wild goose chase to "The Well of Forever". While Lt. Matheson undergoes telepathic testing, Captain Gideon ponders the Well's possibilities. Nobody but Galen really knows why they are there. "Ruling from the Tomb" sees the Excalibur returning to Mars for an update on the Drakh plague, and the race to find a bomb. Guest stars are B5 regulars Dr. Franklin and Captain Lochley. -Paul Tonks.

Review Fabulous Films Ltd. / Blake's 7 - Horizon / Pressure - Episodes 17 And 18 [1978]
Actors & Directors
  • Fiona Cumming
  • Douglas Camfield
  • Jonathan Wright-Miller
  • Viktors Ritelis
  • Vivienne Cozens
Release date: 1998-09-14
Run time: 100 min.
RRP: £10.99
Price: £10.50

Review Blake's 7 - Horizon / Pressure - Episodes 17 And 18 [1978] / Fabulous Films Ltd.:


Review MGM Entertainment / The Outer Limits - The New Series - Vol. 3 - Caught In The Act / The Voyage Home [1995]
Actors & Directors
  • Tibor Takacs
  • Mark Sobel
  • Matt Craven
  • Saul Rubinek
  • Jason London
  • Garry Chalk
  • Alyssa Milano
Release date: 1996-07-22
Run time: 86 min.
RRP: £10.99
Price: £9.60

Review The Outer Limits - The New Series - Vol. 3 - Caught In The Act / The Voyage Home [1995] / MGM Entertainment:


RRP: £13.99
Price: £1.98

Review Original Return of the Jedi - Special Edition Widescreen:


Review Battlestar Galactica / Battlestar Galactica - Vol. 2
Release date: 1999-09-27
Run time: 83 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £3.85

Review Battlestar Galactica - Vol. 2 / Battlestar Galactica:


Review Paramount Home Entertainment / Star Trek The Next Generation: Time's Arrow - The Full Length TV Movie [1990]
Actors & Directors
  • Patrick Stewart
  • LeVar Burton
  • Whoopi Goldberg
  • Michael Dorn
  • Jonathan Frakes
  • Les Landau
Release date: 1995-03-13
Run time: 84 min.
RRP: £5.99
Price: £2.50

Review Star Trek The Next Generation: Time's Arrow - The Full Length TV Movie [1990] / Paramount Home Entertainment:

In 1987, some 20 years after the original series had ended, Star Trek: The Next Generation was launched into a decade renowned for its materialistic greed, but also for its hesitant steps towards a more unified world order. Creator Gene Roddenberry revised his vision of humanity's future accordingly, shifting the Trek timeline 80 years on and reinventing the new Starship Enterprise as an Ark-like exploration vessel full of families, schools, soothing recreational facilities and a maternally pacifying computer voice (Roddenberry's wife, Majel Barrett). The Next Generation crew were not soldiers, but scientists and diplomats. Unlike the fiercely individualistic Captain Kirk, Patrick Stewart's patrician Captain Jean-Luc Picard was a model team leader: no matter how desperate the crisis, he ensured that everyone got to sit round the Conference Room table and talk it over. And in a true late-1980s touch, a key member of the Bridge crew was psychoanalyst Counsellor Troi, always on hand to discuss everyone's feelings. Season Two saw the welcome introduction of the cybernetic horror that was the Borg. Originally a powerful symbol of technological misuse in an otherwise technologically utopian universe, ultimately their hive-like existence served to reinforce the message that everyone would be much happier as a team player. Even renegade super-entity Q (John De Lancie) relied on Picard as much as his fellow god-like playmates; Data followed Pinocchio and Spock in a quest to discard what made him an individual; and there was even an episode that rationalised why all aliens basically looked alike (we're all one big family). Even the slogan change to "Where no one has gone before" acknowledges that there's no "one" in a team. But for all its earnest political correctness and an over-reliance on "technobabble", good stories played by an appealing ensemble cast were at the heart of the show's success. [+]
After seven successful seasons, "All Good Things" finally came to an end. Until Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise, that is. -Paul Tonks.

Review Eastern Cult Cinema / Pyrokinesis [2000]
Actors & Directors
  • Ryuuji Harada
  • Hideaki Ito
  • Shusuke Kaneko
  • Akiko Yada
  • Yû Yoshizawa
  • Masami Nagasawa
Release date: 2002-10-28
Run time: 115 min.
RRP: £14.99
Price: £17.24

Review Pyrokinesis [2000] / Eastern Cult Cinema:


Review Warner Home Video / Babylon 5 - Vol. 6 - Survivors / By Any Means Necessary [1994]
Actors & Directors
  • Claudia Christian
  • Peter Jurasik
  • Andreas Katsulas
  • Michael O'Hare
  • Jerry Doyle
  • Jim Johnston
Release date: 1995-09-18
Run time: 84 min.
RRP: £12.99
Price: £0.25

Review Babylon 5 - Vol. 6 - Survivors / By Any Means Necessary [1994] / Warner Home Video:


Review Nouveaux Pictures / La Jetee [1966]
Actors & Directors
  • Davos Hanich
  • André Heinrich
  • Jean Négroni
  • Jacques Ledoux
  • Chris Marker
  • Hélène Chatelain
Release date: 1997-10-13
Run time: 26 min.
RRP: £9.99
Price: £18.25

Review La Jetee [1966] / Nouveaux Pictures:

A man from a post-apocalyptic future is chosen to return to the past in order help save humanity because he's haunted by a vivid memory from his childhood of a murder at an airport. If that sounds familiar, you've either already seen Chris Marker's exquisite "photo-roman" or Terry Gilliam's loose remake of it, (Twelve Monkeys. ) Good as Gilliam's film is, it's no substitute for La Jetée, which is the sort of cinematic experimental oddity that wraps around the imagination like a vine and, once seen, can never be forgotten. A mere 25 minutes long, the "film"-really a series of still photographs run together apart from one startling moment of movement-begins in Paris before a vaguely described war drives humanity underground "to rule over a kingdom of rats". Sent back in time to the present (or rather to the film's 1962 present) by nothing more high-tech than an injection, the hero (Davos Hanich) finds the woman (Hél&eagrave;ne Chatelain) whose face he's remembered all his life since a murder at Paris' Orly airport. They grab a modest measure of happiness in their romance, conducted around Paris' museums and public gardens. A sly allusion to Hitchcock's Vertigo underlines the film's key theme: the near-mystical power of memory and the way an image can form the basis of an obsession, hence the film's use of ominous black-and-white stills, like scraps from disorganised family album. Muted and melancholy, La Jetée also sports one of the all-time great cinematic twists. -Leslie Felperin.

Review Contender Entertainment Group / Mutant X - 1.1 - The Shock Of The New / I Scream The Body Electric / Russian Roulette / Fool For Love [2001]
Actors & Directors
  • Bruce Pittman
  • Jonathan Hackett (III)
  • Oley Sassone
  • Alan Goluboff
  • T.J. Scott
Release date: 2002-09-23
Run time: 172 min.
RRP: £9.99
Price: £4.99

Review Mutant X - 1.1 - The Shock Of The New / I Scream The Body Electric / Russian Roulette / Fool For Love [2001] / Contender Entertainment Group:


Review 4 Front Video / The Time Guardian [1987]
Actors & Directors
  • Dean Stockwell
  • Peter Merrill
  • Carrie Fisher
  • Brian Hannant
  • Nikki Coghill
  • Tom Burlinson
Release date: 1998-08-10
Run time: 84 min.
Price: £5.99

Review The Time Guardian [1987] / 4 Front Video:


Review Manga Entertainment / Ultraman - The Alien Invasion
Actors & Directors
  • Corinne Orr
  • William Kiehl
  • Peter Fernandez
  • Peggy Lobbin
  • Earl Hammond
Release date: 1993-03-01
Run time: 94 min.
RRP: £13.99
Price: £7.99

Review Ultraman - The Alien Invasion / Manga Entertainment:


Actors & Directors
  • Jun Fukuda
  • Godzilla
Release date: 1992-05-11
Run time: 163 min.
Price: £9.99

Review Godzilla vs Gigan / Godzilla vs Megalon / Universal Pictures UK:


Models & Brands:
Trekkers Scrapbook - Trek History [1995], Stargate [1995], Farscape - Vol. 2.2 - 2.04 Crackers Don't Matter / 2.05 The Way We Weren't [1999], The X Files : Nothing Important Happened Today, "Tribe, The - Season 1 - Episodes 49-52 (Wide Screen)", Komodo [1999], Lost In Space [1998], Crusade - Vol. 1.02 - The Well Of Forever / Ruling from the Tomb [1999], Blake's 7 - Horizon / Pressure - Episodes 17 And 18 [1978], The Outer Limits - The New Series - Vol. 3 - Caught In The Act / The Voyage Home [1995], Original Return of the Jedi - Special Edition Widescreen, Battlestar Galactica - Vol. 2, Star Trek The Next Generation: Time's Arrow - The Full Length TV Movie [1990], Pyrokinesis [2000], Babylon 5 - Vol. 6 - Survivors / By Any Means Necessary [1994], La Jetee [1966], Mutant X - 1.1 - The Shock Of The New / I Scream The Body Electric / Russian Roulette / Fool For Love [2001], The Time Guardian [1987], Ultraman - The Alien Invasion, Godzilla vs Gigan / Godzilla vs Megalon

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