Phoenix DVD Blog

For most of my childhood, television was something you dipped into. Miss an episode, and it didn’t matter. Everything reset by the end of the hour, and next week would look much the same. That changed in the 1990s, and for me, it started with The X-Files . I didn’t move neatly from one show to the next in release order. Instead, I fell into these series gradually, often late, sometimes through repeats, sometimes mid-run. As my tastes grew, so did my patience for longer stories, deeper characters, and shows that trusted the audience to remember what came before. Looking back now, these were the series that quietly trained me to stop watching TV casually. That change makes even more sense when placed alongside the TV shows I grew up with before streaming changed everything , when television was still shaped by fixed schedules, repeats and whatever happened to be showing when you turned it on. The Show That Hooked Me The X-Files This was the gateway. At first, it worked perfectly as...

Some movie franchises are not exactly cheerful comfort viewing. They are full of monsters, aliens, vampires, predators, infected cities, blood, shadows, collapsing worlds and characters who usually have a fairly rough time of it. And yet, these are the franchises I keep coming back to.

Some films arrive at the right age and stay with you forever. For me, Alien and Aliens were two of those films. A friend gave me copies around the same time I was watching all the other films that seemed far too big, violent, scary or exciting for a 12-year-old to fully process. But that was part of the thrill. You were not just watching a film. You were being introduced to a whole new kind of cinema. Alien was scary, dark, strange and very cool. It felt like a complete introduction to space alien horror. Then Aliens came along and took the same story into a much bigger world of soldiers, weapons, colonies, fear, survival and all-out action. Those two films left an indelible mark on me. But the Alien series did not stop there. It changed shape again and again. Horror. Action. Prison drama. Sci-fi weirdness. Cloning. Prequels. Engineers. Androids. Corporate greed. Body horror. Mythology. Legacy sequels. Some entries are loved. Some are argued over. Some are still unfairly dismissed. But...

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...