"Actor: Abraham Verduzco"

• Desperado | DVD | (21/03/2011) from £7.16   |  Saving you £1.82 (43.65%)   |  RRP £5.99

  In this sequel/remake to 'El Mariachi' a case of mistaken identity leads to a very high body count involvement with a beautiful woman who works for the local drug lord and finally the inevitable face-to-face confrontation and bloody showdown...

• Solo | DVD | (12/04/2004) from £12.97   |  Saving you £-3.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Mario Van Peebles stars as a force of one in Solo a high-octane power fuelled action-thriller about an Army android who learns to think - and kill - for himself. The Army's biggest threat since the atom bomb Solo is indestructible - made to look like flesh and blood he is actually constructed of polymers and computer chips - and wired to win every battle. But when innocent civilians are torched by his unit Solo discovers he's on the wrong side of an illegal operation and heading on a collision course with Col. Madden (William Sadler) a man as implacable and pitiless as Solo was designed to be. Now the Army's ultimate weapon is waging a one man war against his own creators...

• Solo | DVD | (01/10/1999) from £12.96   |  Saving you £10.02 (100.50%)   |  RRP £19.99

  There is a hint, albeit a very brief one, of James Whale's classic 1931 Frankenstein in this low-budget movie about a robot soldier, Solo (Mario Van Peebles), created by the Pentagon to be the perfect, unfeeling fighting machine. When Solo is sent into Central American jungles to battle guerrillas, a flaw in his program emerges when it is discovered that he has compassion and a conscience. Fleeing his keepers, the robot becomes part of a jungle village after its inhabitants get over the need to run from him (this is where the Frankenstein parallel comes in). The film isn't particularly clever, just noisy and ugly, and one can't help but think of it as a knock-off of The Terminator. Van Peebles doesn't seem the ideal choice for an action hero along the lines of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Kurt Russell--who do this kind of thing well--but then again this is straight-to-video fodder. --Tom Keogh

• Desperado --Superbit | DVD | (14/10/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Antonio Banderas is the titular Desperado out for revenge against the drug-lord responsible for the death of his girlfriend in Robert Rodriguez's semi-sequel, semi-remake of his debut El Mariachi (1992). Set in a Mexican town, this is a contemporary Western that combines elements familiar from classic Sam Peckinpah movies with the post-Reservoir Dogs school of film-making. With a threadbare story and unbelievable characters acting in unbelievable ways the result is a repulsively blood-soaked comic-book treatment, in which the best scenes are bar-stool monologues by Steve Buscemi and Quentin Tarantino. The film also introduced Salma Hayek to English-speaking audiences. She's incandescently sensual here and survived a farcical rock-video-style sex scene to become a Rodriguez regular. On the DVD: Desperado is a Superbit DVD, meaning maximum disc space has been given to the film, with a data rate close to double that of a normal DVD, no extras and just a choice between Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1 soundtracks. The 1.78:1 anamorphically enhanced transfer is virtually flawless, with excellent detail, accurate colours and a refreshing absence of grain. The Dolby Digital soundtrack is very good and the DTS even better, though as this comparatively low-budget film was originally released in stereo it's not state-of-the-art even when remixed. Only those with high-end home cinema set-ups are likely to notice significant technical improvements over a standard DVD version. --Gary S. Dalkin