"Actor: Brad Collins"

• Phil Collins - Live And Loose In Paris | DVD | (01/05/2000) from £8.99   |  Saving you £9.00 (100.11%)   |  RRP £17.99

  If Phil Collins isn't the hardest-working man in show business, he's right up there, at least if the nearly 90-minute concert Live and Loose in Paris is any indication. The man is non-stop motion, whether seated behind his drum kit, prowling the stage as frontman (the format is in-the-round, so it takes an effort to keep all of the arena-sized audience involved), or, of course, singing the hits (including "Against All Odds", "In the Air Tonight" and "Sussudio"). The "loose" part of the title is a bit of a misnomer; Collins' excellent band is unerringly tight, and the performance is well-choreographed while still maintaining some sense of spontaneity. There's no denying the appeal of Collins' drum-heavy, horn-driven, R&B-cum-world-music sound, and if his music ultimately isn't as challenging or engaging as that of Peter Gabriel's (the other ex-Genesis lead singer), no one in this Paris audience seems to mind a bit. Good show, Phil. --Sam Graham

• Twenty Four Seven | DVD | (30/06/2003) from £9.43   |  Saving you £3.56 (27.40%)   |  RRP £12.99

  From the poverty and despair of a small industrial town one man with a dream forms a boxing club to give troubled teenagers self-respect and a fighting chance. But amidst the triumph of the biggest tournament of their lives tragedy strikes. The hard lesson learned is that anything is possible but only if you believe in yourself.

• Footballers' Wives - The Complete Season 1 | DVD | (27/01/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £29.99

  Footballers' Wives plays rather like a dramatisation of the worst bits of Heat magazine, fuelling our obsession with worshipping at the celebrity altar. In essence it's Dynasty set in the world of premiership football, though you shouldn't be fooled by the title: this is definitely not a "game of two halves". For the first time in history, men may leave the room at the mention of football to let the women gorge themselves on a surfeit of bad fashion, affairs, drug habits, long-lost children and the gratuitous disposal of excessive wealth. There are more than a few recognisable characters--the foreign manager, the glamour-model wife, the smouldering Italian mid-fielder--whose presence only adds to the (intended) impression that this just might be fact thinly disguised as fiction (though it's unlikely that any real footballer's wife would almost kill the chairman of the club in a fit of rage, as Tanya does in the first episode). Unsurprisingly Footballers' Wives was created by the same team that produced the trash-fest that was Bad Girls and despite never being a contender for best drama it offers a perfect opportunity to become a voyeur in a world with more glitz and leg action than most. On the DVD: Footballers' Wives is presented with an ordinary TV transfer. The special features are nothing to get excited about, just standard interviews and photo galleries. --Nikki Disney

• Piranha | DVD | (21/10/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  As a producer, Roger Corman has always loved to make low-budget rip-offs of hit movies, and Piranha is his typically cheeky take on Jaws--and, as so often with Corman, in many ways it's funnier and more entertaining than the original. Directed with gusto by schlock-horror specialist Joe Dante and sharply scripted by John Sayles, it replaces one huge underwater toothy monster with dozens of little ones and ups the body count by a factor of 10 or so. Two hapless teenagers, hiking in a remote mountain region, stumble on a secret US military research lab. They don't last long, but their intrusion leads to the release into the local river system of a huge shoal of super-intelligent piranha, originally specially bred for use in Vietnam. Downstream from the virulent little munchers lie a kiddies' holiday camp and a tacky new waterfront theme park. Lunch time, fellas! Sayles, with his staunch left-wing credentials, slips in some mordant political satire at the expense of the military-industrial complex, and authority figures of any kind come off pretty badly, but the satire never gets in the way of the gleeful black humour. The two leads, Bradford Dillman and Heather Menzies, are fairly pallid, but there are ripe cameos from such cult horror-movie icons as Kevin McCarthy, Dick Miller and Barbara Steele. Pino Donaggio's score impudently borrows aspects of John Williams' famous Jaws theme while never quite infringing copyright. The movie was successful enough to spawn a much-inferior sequel, Piranha II: The Spawning (1982), which marked the inauspicious directing debut of one James Cameron. On the DVD: Piranha on disc comes with just the theatrical trailer as an extra. The transfer is a respectable job, reproducing the original's full-screen ratio. --Philip Kemp

• Footballers' Wives - The Complete Series 2 | DVD | (09/02/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  They're young they're rich and they've got everything that money and fame can buy. They should be having the time of their lives. But the reality is very different... The second season of the exciting drama from the team that brought you 'Bad Girls'.

• Young Mr Lincoln | DVD | (21/02/2005) from £13.48   |  Saving you £-3.49 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Revered director John Ford's fictionalized account of the early life of the American president as a young lawyer facing his greatest court case...

• Cool World | DVD | (08/12/2003) from £49.99   |  Saving you £-34.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Jack Deebs is a cartoonist who is due to be released from jail. His comic book ""Cool World"" describes a zany world populated by ""doodles"" (cartoon characters) and ""noids"" (humanoids). What Jack didn't realize is that Cool World really does exist and a ""doodle"" scientist has just perfected a machine which links Cool World with our World. Intrigued at seeing his creation come to life Jack is nonetheless wary as he knows that not everything in Cool World is exactly friendly...

• Hardbodies 2 | DVD | (05/07/2005) from £20.00   |  Saving you £-16.01 (N/A%)   |  RRP £3.99

  Everything that can go wrong does so when a film crew ends up in adventure far more dangerous than they were ready for.

• Ultimax Force | DVD | (03/02/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Missing in action and presumed dead Captain Dave Morgan turns up alive in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp. He has been able to send word out - but help better come quickly before the sadistic Colonel Minh who runs the hellish internment stockade succeeds in breaking Morgan's body and spirit. Getting into Vietnam through the back door is easy enough with the help of gunrunning soldiers of fortune but trying to ferret out the phantom POW camps rescuing half dead prisoners and getting them out of 'Nam seems a pipe dream. No one has ever escaped from Colonel Minh's hell hole and lived to tell the tale. That's the kind of challenge that Chris Burton and his boys look forward to. The Ultimate Maximum. Armed with their Ninja skills forged on them by Sensei Hiroshi; thirty-sixth direct descendant of the Iga-Ninja Chris Burton Bill Norton and Mike Dobson form what mercenaries dub 'The Ultimax Force' - what Colonel Minh will call the 'curse of the devils'. Fate has destined this final confrontation between Burton and Minh and there is no stopping now the one-on-one that began years ago in the jungles of 'Nam is now about to resume. Try as he might to prevent it by moving camp and sending out his elite blocking forces against the rescue party Minh realises that his time is running out and that the unfinished duel between him and Burton will have to be brought to an end - death to the loser....