"Actor: Bruce Lea"

• Die Hard | DVD | (10/01/2000) from £3.98   |  Saving you £16.01 (402.26%)   |  RRP £19.99

  This seminal 1988 thriller made Bruce Willis a star and established a new template for action stories: "Terrorists take over a (blank), and a lone hero, unknown to the villains, is trapped with them." In Die Hard, those bad guys, led by the velvet-voiced Alan Rickman, assume control of a Los Angeles high-rise with Willis's visiting New York cop inside. The attraction of the film has as much to do with the sight of a barefoot mortal running around the guts of a modern office tower as it has to do with the plentiful fight sequences and the bond the hero establishes with an LA beat cop. Bonnie Bedelia plays Willis's wife, Hart Bochner is good as a brash hostage who tries negotiating his way to freedom, Alexander Godunov makes for a believable killer with lethal feet, and William Atherton is slimy as a busybody reporter. This film is exceptionally well directed by John McTiernan. --Tom Keogh

• Alive | DVD | (04/03/2002) from £6.79   |  Saving you £6.20 (91.31%)   |  RRP £12.99

  On the afternoon of Friday October 13 1972 one of the most controversial and inspirational tales of survival began when an airplane carrying a team of young rugby players from Uruguay crashed into the Andes Mountains. Several of the passengers died instantly but most survived. For eight days they sat and waited to be rescued. But help never came and they learnt from the radio that the search had been abandoned. Soon their food and drink were gone. Forced to exist in sub-zero wea

• Collateral - Single Disc Edition | DVD | (17/01/2005) from £3.98   |  Saving you £12.01 (301.76%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Tom Cruise uncovers his dark side to play a contract killer who hijacks a taxi - and its driver - to take him from job to job.

• The X Files: Season 1 | DVD | (06/11/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £34.99

  In the first season of The X Files, creator Chris Carter was uncertain of the series' future, so each of the episodes is a self-contained suspense story; they do not delve deep into the ongoing X Files mythology or turn to self-parody and humour as do episodes in later seasons. Yet, these episodes display the elements for which the show would become famous: the cinematic production values and top-notch special effects, the stark lighting of the Vancouver sets, the atmospheric halo of Mark Snow's score, and the clever plots dealing with subjects ranging from the occult, religion, and monsters to urban legends, conspiracy theories and science fiction. Most importantly, Season 1 introduces FBI agents Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox "Spooky" Mulder (David Duchovny), two of the most attractive government officials around. Scully is the serious-minded medical scientist assigned to join Mulder on the X Files, a division of the FBI dealing with the paranormal. Mulder is the intuitive thinker with a dry wit, a passionate believer in the existence of paranormal phenomena and one of the few characters on television smart enough to figure out who the bad guy is before the audience does. Their muddled relationship, a deep friendship laced with sexual tension, provides the human heart in a world where the bizarre and horrible lurk in everyday society. The materials on the bonus disc provide some interesting trivia and background, but it is the 24 episodes themselves that make this seven-disc boxed set a true find. Those unfamiliar with The X Files often view all the fuss with the same scepticism with which Scully first regards her new partner's ideas. But just as she comes to realise the uncanny accuracy of Mulder's outlandish theories, newcomers to The X Files who sample a few episodes in this boxed set will likely find themselves riveted to their television late into the night. And undoubtedly, the shadows and creaking noises in the house that evening will seem more menacing than usual. --Eugene Wei, Amazon.com

• The X Files: Season 1 | DVD | (11/10/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £34.99

  In the first season of The X Files, creator Chris Carter was uncertain of the series' future, so each of the episodes is a self-contained suspense story; they do not delve deep into the ongoing X Files mythology or turn to self-parody and humour as do episodes in later seasons. Yet, these episodes display the elements for which the show would become famous: the cinematic production values and top-notch special effects, the stark lighting of the Vancouver sets, the atmospheric halo of Mark Snow's score, and the clever plots dealing with subjects ranging from the occult, religion, and monsters to urban legends, conspiracy theories and science fiction. Most importantly, Season 1 introduces FBI agents Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox "Spooky" Mulder (David Duchovny), two of the most attractive government officials around. Scully is the serious-minded medical scientist assigned to join Mulder on the X Files, a division of the FBI dealing with the paranormal. Mulder is the intuitive thinker with a dry wit, a passionate believer in the existence of paranormal phenomena and one of the few characters on television smart enough to figure out who the bad guy is before the audience does. Their muddled relationship, a deep friendship laced with sexual tension, provides the human heart in a world where the bizarre and horrible lurk in everyday society. The materials on the bonus disc provide some interesting trivia and background, but it is the 24 episodes themselves that make this seven-disc boxed set a true find. Those unfamiliar with The X Files often view all the fuss with the same scepticism with which Scully first regards her new partner's ideas. But just as she comes to realise the uncanny accuracy of Mulder's outlandish theories, newcomers to The X Files who sample a few episodes in this boxed set will likely find themselves riveted to their television late into the night. And undoubtedly, the shadows and creaking noises in the house that evening will seem more menacing than usual. --Eugene Wei

• From Beyond | DVD | (25/02/2013) from £9.05   |  Saving you £6.94 (76.69%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Obsessive scientist Dr. Pretorious and his assistant Crawford Tillinghast have invented 'The Resonator'. A device intended to stimulate the brain's Pineal gland and expand the powers of the mind. The machine gives them more than they bargained for however when a parallel universe inhibited by slimy creatures ready to prey on humans reveals itself. Pretorious meets a sticky end and returns as a grotesque, deformed being and all manner of depravity ensues. Special Features: Stuart Gordon on From Beyond. Gothic Adaptation: An Interview with writer Dennis Paoli. The Doctors is in: An Interview with Barbara Crampton. Monsters and Slime: The FX of From Beyond. Directors Perspective. The Editing room: Lost and Found. An Interview with the Composer. Commentary with Stuart Gordon, Brian Yuzna and Jeffrey Combs. A Photo montage. Storyboard to film comparison.

• From Beyond | Blu Ray | (17/04/2019) from £15.99   |  Saving you £6.00 (42.89%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Obsessive scientist Dr. Pretorious and his assistant Crawford Tillinghast have invented 'The Resonator'. A device intended to stimulate the brain's Pineal gland and expand the powers of the mind. The machine gives them more than they bargained for however when a parallel universe inhibited by slimy creatures ready to prey on humans reveals itself. Pretorious meets a sticky end and returns as a grotesque, deformed being and all manner of depravity ensues. Special Features: Stuart Gordon on From Beyond. Gothic Adaptation: An Interview with writer Dennis Paoli. The Doctors is in: An Interview with Barbara Crampton. Monsters and Slime: The FX of From Beyond. Directors Perspective. The Editing room: Lost and Found. An Interview with the Composer. Commentary with Stuart Gordon, Brian Yuzna and Jeffrey Combs. A Photo montage. Storyboard to film comparison.

• Die Hard / Die Hard 2 / Die Hard With A Vengeance | DVD | (15/09/2003) from £9.99   |  Saving you £10.00 (100.10%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Exceptionally well-directed by John McTiernan, Die Hard made Bruce Willis a star back in 1988 and established a new template for action stories. Here the bad guys, led by the velvet-voiced Alan Rickman, assume control of a Los Angeles high-rise with Willis's visiting New York cop inside. The attraction of the film has as much to do with the sight of a barefoot mortal running around the guts of a modern office tower as it has with the plentiful fight sequences and the bond the hero establishes with an LA beat cop. Bonnie Bedelia plays Willis's wife, Hart Bochner is good as a brash hostage who tries negotiating his way to freedom, Alexander Godunov makes for a believable killer with lethal feet and William Atherton is slimy as a busybody reporter. Director Renny Harlin took the reins for the 1990 sequel, Die Harder, which places Willis's New York City cop in harm's way again with a gaggle of terrorists. This time, Willis awaits his wife's arrival at Dulles Airport in Washington, DC when he gets wind of a plot to blow up the facility. Noisy, overbearing and forgettable, the film has none of the purity of its predecessor's simple story; and it makes a huge miscalculation in allowing a terrible tragedy to occur rather than stretch out the tension. Where Die Hard set new precedents in action movies, Die Hard 2 is just an anything-goes spectacle --Tom Keogh The second sequel, Die Hard with a Vengeance brings Detective John McClane to New York City to face a better villain than in Die Hard 2. Jeremy Irons is the brother of Alan Rickman's Germanic terrorist-thief from the original film. But this bad guy has his sights set higher: on the Federal Reserve's cache of gold. As a distraction, he sets McClane running fool's errands all over New York--and eventually, McClane attracts an unintentional partner, a Harlem dry cleaner (Samuel L Jackson) with a chip on his shoulder. Some great action sequences can't obscure the rather large plot holes in the film's final 45 minutes. --Marshall Fine

• The X Files: Season 2 | DVD | (11/10/2004) from £14.93   |  Saving you £20.06 (134.36%)   |  RRP £34.99

  Season Two, the 1994-95 run, of The X Files was the one where creator Chris Carter, having had a surprise hit when he expected a one-season wonder, started trying to make sense of all the storylines he had thrown into the pile in the first year. Moreover, he had to cope with Gillian Anderson's maternity leave by having Scully get abducted by aliens (back then, a pretty fresh device) for a few episodes and come back strangely altered. The season also inaugurated the tradition of opening ("Little Green Men") and closing ("Anasazi") with the show's worst episodes, both pot-boiling attempts to keep the alien infiltration/government conspiracy balls up in the air while seeming to offer narrative forward-thrusts or revelations. But it's also a show noticeably surer of itself than Season One, with its stars reading from the same page in terms of their characters' relationship and attitudes to the wondrous. Scully's no-longer-workable scepticism finally starts to erode in the face of Mulder's increasingly cracked belief. There are fewer marking-time leftover-monster-of-the-week shows--although we do get a human fluke ("The Host"), vampires ("3"), an invisible rapist ("Excelsius Dei") voodoo ("Fresh Bones")--and the flying-saucer stories at last seem to be going somewhere. The powerful two-episode run ("Duane Barry", "Ascension") features Steve Railsback as Mulder's possible future, an FBI agent burned out after a UFO abduction who has become a hostage-taking terrorist, which climaxes with Scully's disappearance into the light. The standout episode is also a stand-alone--"Humbug"--the first and still most successful of the show's self-parodies (written by Darin Morgan, who had played the Flukeman in "The Host"), in which the agents investigate a murder in a circus freakshow, allowing the actors to make fun of the mannerisms they have earnestly built up in a run of solemn, even somnolent, explorations of the murk. Other worthy efforts: "Aubrey", about genetic memory; "Irresistible", a rare (and creepy) straight psycho-chiller with little paranormal content; and "The Calusari", a good ghost/mystery. Rising deputy characters include Nicholas Lea as the perfidious Krycek and Brian Thompson as the shapeshifting alien bounty hunters. Notable guest stars: Charles Martin Smith, C.C.H. Pounder, Leland Orser, Terry O'Quinn, Bruce Weitz, Daniel Benzali, John Savage, Vincent Schiavelli, Tony Shalhoub. --Kim Newman

• American Gods | DVD | (31/07/2017) from £4.64   |  Saving you £8.36 (180.17%)   |  RRP £13.00

  When Shadow Moon is released from prison, he meets the mysterious Mr. Wednesday and a storm begins to brew. Little does Shadow know, this storm will change the course of his entire life. Left adrift by the recent, tragic death of his wife, and suddenly hired as Mr. Wednesday's bodyguard, Shadow finds himself in the centre of a world that he struggles to understand. It's a hidden world where magic is real, where the Old Gods fear both irrelevance and the growing power of the New Gods, like Technology and Media. Mr. Wednesday seeks to build a coalition of Old Gods to defend their existence in this new America, and reclaim some of the influence that they've lost. As Shadow travels across the country with Mr. Wednesday, he struggles to accept this new reality, and his place in it.

• The X Files: Season 3 | DVD | (11/10/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £34.99

  Focused lightning bolts, stigmata, possession, and ancient curses become secondary in Season 3 of The X-Files as more episodes are devoted to pursuing the increasingly complex story threads. "The Blessing Way" is an explosive start, introducing the Syndicate's well-manicured man (John Neville), while Scully's sister Melissa is shot and Mulder experiences Twin Peaks-like prophetic visions. We learn of medical records of millions, including Scully, who have been experimented upon ("Paper Clip"): the fast-paced train-bound two-parter "Nisei" and "731" suggests the experiments are about alien hybridisation. Krycek turns out to be hosting an alien in the next double-act, "Piper Maru" and "Apocrypha", in which Skinner is shot by Melissa's killer. Two great one-offs outside the arc are "Clyde Bruckman's "Final Repose", a bittersweet tale of foreseeing death (featuring an Emmy-winning performance from Peter Boyle) and Jose Chung's "From Outer Space", a spoof of alien conspiracy theories through an author's investigations into abductees. --Paul Tonks

• Paperback Hero | DVD | (22/08/2005) from £13.48   |  Saving you £-3.49 (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  He's hard tough ... and doesn't give a XXXX for anything ... except romantic novels. Jack Wallis is a road-train driver with a secret... He has just become a top selling romance novelist. However being a 'mans man' in the Australian outback to avoid embarrassment he needs a name a woman's name - and he chooses that of his best friend Ruby. When a glamorous city publisher shows up to sign 'Ruby Vale' to a major book deal Jack must do some fancy footwork to keep up the cha

• The X Files: Season 2 | DVD | (30/04/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £34.99

  Season Two, the 1994-95 run, of The X Files was the one where creator Chris Carter, having had a surprise hit when he expected a one-season wonder, started trying to make sense of all the storylines he had thrown into the pile in the first year. Moreover, he had to cope with Gillian Anderson's maternity leave by having Scully get abducted by aliens (back then, a pretty fresh device) for a few episodes and come back strangely altered. The season also inaugurated the tradition of opening ("Little Green Men") and closing ("Anasazi") with the show's worst episodes, both pot-boiling attempts to keep the alien infiltration/government conspiracy balls up in the air while seeming to offer narrative forward-thrusts or revelations.But it's also a show noticeably surer of itself than Season One, with its stars reading from the same page in terms of their characters' relationship and attitudes to the wondrous. Scully's no-longer-workable scepticism finally starts to erode in the face of Mulder's increasingly cracked belief. There are fewer marking-time leftover-monster-of-the-week shows--although we do get a human fluke ("The Host"), vampires ("3"), an invisible rapist ("Excelsius Dei") voodoo ("Fresh Bones")--and the flying-saucer stories at last seem to be going somewhere. The powerful two-episode run ("Duane Barry", "Ascension") features Steve Railsback as Mulder's possible future, an FBI agent burned out after a UFO abduction who has become a hostage-taking terrorist, which climaxes with Scully's disappearance into the light. The standout episode is also a stand-alone--"Humbug"--the first and still most successful of the show's self-parodies (written by Darin Morgan, who had played the Flukeman in "The Host"), in which the agents investigate a murder in a circus freakshow, allowing the actors to make fun of the mannerisms they have earnestly built up in a run of solemn, even somnolent, explorations of the murk. Other worthy efforts: "Aubrey", about genetic memory; "Irresistible", a rare (and creepy) straight psycho-chiller with little paranormal content; and "The Calusari", a good ghost/mystery. Rising deputy characters include Nicholas Lea as the perfidious Krycek and Brian Thompson as the shapeshifting alien bounty hunters. Notable guest stars: Charles Martin Smith, C.C.H. Pounder, Leland Orser, Terry O'Quinn, Bruce Weitz, Daniel Benzali, John Savage, Vincent Schiavelli, Tony Shalhoub. --Kim NewmanOn the DVD: The individual episode discs have a small selection of deleted scenes, foreign language clips and behind-the-scenes footage, but the bulk of the extra material is on the final disc. There's not a lot to get to grips with, but what there is consists of a 14-minute documentary about the making of Season Two, with contributions from Chris Carter, various directors, writers and actors (but not the two principals); Carter talking briefly about each episode in turn; a series of short TV spots and pieces about the show's FX and secondary characters; and three very short behind-the-scenes glimpses, one of which has the self-explanatory title "Gillian eats a cricket". There's also a DVD-ROM utility with Web links and a game. --Mark Walker

• American Gods | Blu Ray | (31/07/2017) from £4.99   |  Saving you £13.01 (260.72%)   |  RRP £18.00

  When Shadow Moon is released from prison, he meets the mysterious Mr. Wednesday and a storm begins to brew. Little does Shadow know, this storm will change the course of his entire life. Left adrift by the recent, tragic death of his wife, and suddenly hired as Mr. Wednesday's bodyguard, Shadow finds himself in the centre of a world that he struggles to understand. It's a hidden world where magic is real, where the Old Gods fear both irrelevance and the growing power of the New Gods, like Technology and Media. Mr. Wednesday seeks to build a coalition of Old Gods to defend their existence in this new America, and reclaim some of the influence that they've lost. As Shadow travels across the country with Mr. Wednesday, he struggles to accept this new reality, and his place in it.

• The X Files: Season 5 | DVD | (27/12/2004) from £19.73   |  Saving you £15.26 (77.34%)   |  RRP £34.99

  Mulder continues his search for a cure for Scully's illness even as her genetically altered DNA takes her to the brink of death. Scully's DNA comes into play once again when it proves that she is somehow the mother of a little girl named Emily an incident that could only be related to her abduction years earlier. But in the end it is a young boy named Gibson Praise whose body may actually contain the elusive proof Mulder has been searching for so desperately. Episodes comprise:

• The X Files: Season 4 | DVD | (27/12/2004) from £16.90   |  Saving you £18.09 (107.04%)   |  RRP £34.99

  In Season 4 of The X-Files, Scully is a bit upset by her on-off terminal cancer and Mulder is supposed to shoot himself in the season finale (did anyone believe that?), but in episode after episode the characters still plod dutifully around atrocity sites tossing off wry witticisms in that bland investigative demeanour out of fashion among TV cops since Dragnet. Perhaps the best achievement of this season is "Home", the most unpleasant horror story ever presented on prime-time US TV. It's not a comfortable show--confronted with this ghastly parade of incest, inbreeding, infanticide and mutilation, you'd think M & S would drop the jokes for once--but shows a willingness to expand the envelope. By contrast, ventures into golem, reincarnation, witchcraft and Invisible Man territory throw up run-of-the-mill body counts, spotlighting another recurrent problem. For heroes, M & S rarely do anything positive: they work out what is happening after all the killer's intended victims have been snuffed ("Kaddish"), let the monster get away ("Sanguinarium") and cause tragedies ("The Field Where I Died"). No wonder they're stuck in the FBI basement where they can do the least damage. The series has settled enough to play variations on earlier hits: following the liver vampire, we have a melanin vampire ("Teliko") and a cancer vampire ("Leonard Betts"), and return engagements for the oily contact lens aliens and the weasely ex-Agent Krycek ("Tunguska"/"Terma"). Occasional detours into send-up or post-modernism are indulged, yielding both the season's best episode ("Small Potatoes") and its most disappointing ("Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man"). "Small Potatoes", with the mimic mutant who tries out Mulder's life and realises what a loser he is (how many other pin-up series heroes get answerphone messages from their favourite phone-sex lines?), works as a genuine sci-fi mystery--for once featuring a mutant who doesn't have to kill people to live--and as character insight. --Kim Newman

• MTV's Beavis And Butthead Do America | DVD | (31/07/2000) from £10.96   |  Saving you £5.02 (62.99%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Mike Judge, the creator and voice of MTV's insouciant Beavis and Butt-head characters, made his feature film directorial debut with this full-length B&B misadventure, which finds the boys going on a cross-country adventure after their all-important television set is stolen. Fans of the now-defunct TV show will obviously enjoy this film the most, though almost anyone with a passing awareness of the characters will find something to chuckle about. (The funniest recurring gag finds beleaguered B&B neighbour Tom Anderson constantly sabotaged by the guys while on vacation.) Celebrity voices are fun to pick out, particularly that of David Letterman, who rather appropriately plays Butt-head's long-lost father.--Tom Keogh, Amazon.com --This text refers to the VHS edition of this video

• The X Files: Season 6 | DVD | (27/12/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £34.99

  Mulder and Scully return from Antarctica to discover they've been reassigned and are no longer a part of The X-Files. Their frustration turns to fear when Cassandra Spender a woman who claims to have been abducted the same night as Mulder's sister reappears with claims of an alien threat. But it is an extraterrestrial artefact found off the coast of Africa which may hold the key to the very origins of life on Earth and which has an unexplained and deadly effect on Mulder. Episod

• Britannic | DVD | (27/05/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  It was the sister ship of the infamous Titanic...and its final destiny was the same. Experience the true untold story of Britannic a tumultuous epic voyage of human passion courage and betrayal aboard an ill-fated ocean liner bound for a shattering demise. With the world at war an undercover British agent (Amanda Ryan) embarks the Britannic in search of a German spy believed to be on board to sabotage the ship. Posing as a governess the undercover agent finds herself falling in love with the ship's chaplain (Edward Atterton Man In The Iron Mask). In a stunning discovery the lovers suddenly find themselves enemies of war. And when a massive explosion deals a deathblow to the ship their battle becomes one for their own survival. With a dynamic international cast and story line that hosts a chilling tale of espionage politics and romance Britannic brings one of history's most devastating events to riveting new life.

• American Gods Steelbook | Blu Ray | (31/07/2017) from £19.99   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  When Shadow Moon is released from prison, he meets the mysterious Mr. Wednesday and a storm begins to brew. Little does Shadow know, this storm will change the course of his entire life. Left adrift by the recent, tragic death of his wife, and suddenly hired as Mr. Wednesday's bodyguard, Shadow finds himself in the centre of a world that he struggles to understand. It's a hidden world where magic is real, where the Old Gods fear both irrelevance and the growing power of the New Gods, like Technology and Media. Mr. Wednesday seeks to build a coalition of Old Gods to defend their existence in this new America, and reclaim some of the influence that they've lost. As Shadow travels across the country with Mr. Wednesday, he struggles to accept this new reality, and his place in it.