Phoenix DVD Blog

Some films arrive at exactly the right time in your life. For me, Predator was one of them. I didn’t first see it in the cinema. I didn’t rent it properly. I didn’t even watch it under ideal conditions. I saw it on a VHS tape that had been recorded from a multichannel box many years ago by a school friend. He was the person who introduced me to a whole world of 18-rated action and sci-fi films well before my time. Alien. Predator. Aliens. Die Hard. Terminator. And many more. Predator also has one of the more obvious crossover paths in sci-fi horror, because sooner or later the series was always going to collide with Alien. The Alien vs Predator films are messy, uneven and nowhere near the best of either franchise, but I still have a soft spot for them. If you want to follow that side branch, I looked at it separately in my Alien vs Predator post . Original sci-fi artwork created for a Phoenix DVD Blog guide to the Predator movies in order. Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have been w...

Some war films are just action films with uniforms. The best ones are something else entirely. They stay with you because they are not really about explosions, weapons, or battle scenes. Those things matter, of course, but the war films and series that hit hardest are usually about people. Ordinary men placed in extraordinary circumstances. Friends who become brothers. Soldiers who are terrified, exhausted, angry, loyal, brave, broken, and still somehow willing to move forward because the man beside them is moving forward too. War Films and Series Are Really About People That is what keeps drawing me back to the best war films and war series. It is the bond. When a war film gets that right, the audience feels it too. You start to care about the group, not just the lead character. You remember faces. You remember small moments. You remember losses that, in another type of film, might have passed by quickly. For me, the best examples are still Band of Brothers, The Pacific, and Black Haw...

By the late 1980s, television was starting to change. Budgets were growing, visual effects were improving, and some TV shows were beginning to feel more ambitious than the simple standalone entertainment many of us had grown up with. For me, Star Trek sits right in the middle of that change. I had seen the original Star Trek when I was in primary school, mostly through repeats. I didn’t watch it religiously. I was young, there were bikes, fields, friends, footballs, and plenty of other things pulling me outside. But it was there in the background, colourful, strange, and instantly recognisable. Even if I wasn’t fully following the stories, I knew the look and feel of it. It was only later, when Star Trek: The Next Generation started appearing on TV, that the franchise really clicked for me. Suddenly, sci-fi on television felt calmer, more thoughtful, and more grown up. I was old enough by then to realise there was more going on than spaceships, uniforms, and alien worlds. Together...

There was a different feeling to television in the 70s and 80s. You didn’t binge watch entire seasons in a weekend. You didn’t pause episodes halfway through to check your phone. And unless you owned a VHS recorder, if you missed an episode, that was usually it. Television felt more temporary back then, but somehow more memorable at the same time. Some of these shows were huge parts of my childhood. Others drift in and out of memory like fragments from weekday afternoons, summer holidays, or Saturday mornings in front of the TV with cereal before the rest of the house was awake. Looking back now, what strikes me most is how different those shows were compared to modern television. Most older series were built around self-contained episodes. Problems appeared and were solved within 45 minutes. Characters rarely changed dramatically. Major story arcs were uncommon. You could miss three episodes and still jump right back in without confusion. That’s very different from modern televis...

Television mattered more in the early 1980s than it’s easy to remember now. With limited choice and fixed schedules, TV wasn’t something you curated, it was something you shared . Families watched together, kids absorbed what was on, and shows repeated often enough to become familiar whether you followed them closely or not. What we didn’t realise at the time was that we were watching television slowly evolve, not just in production quality, but in ambition. Looking back now, the journey from brightly coloured, standalone episodes to fully serialised, long-form storytelling mirrors how our own tastes changed as we grew up. As television became more ambitious, more cinematic, and more willing to tell longer stories, it also made me look back differently at the programmes that first shaped my viewing habits. I’ve written more about those earlier shows and the wider viewing habits of the time in   The TV Shows I Grew Up With - Before Streaming Changed Everything , where I gather th...