2004 has been a banner year for superhero movies, and now the first contender for the prestigious title of Dave’s Favorite Hero Movie Ever has arrived on a fairly packed 2-disc DVD that will almost certainly be eclipsed by an even more special edition some time in the next twelve months. If you want to get Spider-Man 2 on DVD today, I have to say, your impatience will be rewarded. The extra features in this set are enlightening, entertaining, and often amusing. And the movie looks pretty darned great, too. (more…)

I have such mixed feelings about the fourth season of Red Dwarf. It’s still fall-down funny in many places, and still packs enough of a conceptual SF punch that it puts whole seasons of certain Star Trek spinoffs to shame. But somehow, it began to veer away from its roots, those early shows with no budget that relied on character relationships, into something more action-oriented because suddenly the producers realized that they did have a budget. In the following season, action would take center stage in several episodes. It’s still funny – it would always be funny – but just somehow lacked the heart of the early seasons. (more…)

This is actually more of an editorial than a review. I had been looking forward to the Crusade DVD for two reasons. For one, I originally had a pretty harsh opinion of the series, which I expressed on this site before it even aired and which the first-aired episodes did little to dissuade me from. By the end of the run, though, I was seeing a few things I liked, and I was looking forward to reacquainting myself with the show and trying to get a new appreciation for it. And I admit I was also hoping to gain a little clarity and detail on the troubled history of the show and the disputes with TNT that ultimately led to its early demise. Indeed, at an appearance in New Jersey earlier this year, J. Michael Straczynski said that his condition for participating in the DVD set was that he have the chance to put his story out there. (more…)

When it comes to full-season TV DVD box sets, it’s hard to top Red Dwarf. Commentaries on every episode by the entire regular cast of the show, documentary features that redefine the word “extensive,” and bags of other bonuses. Red Dwarf III certainly isn’t about to make an exception.

It certainly doesn’t help that this may well have been the best season the show ever had. Delicately balanced between the SF action show it was about to become, and the hilariously wordy sitcom origins from which it sprang, the third season manages to reach for the best of both worlds and comes up a winner more often than not. (more…)

I’ve spent so much time in past reviews fawning over the amazing video and film restoration applied to the 1960s B&W episodes of Doctor Who, I think I can cut the size of this review in half by assuming you know about that already. Suffice to say, the amazing VidFIRE process has been applied to Seeds Of Death, an Ice Warrior epic from Patrick Troughton’s final season as the Doctor, with amazing results.

Seeds is spread across two DVDs, with a fair package of extras on the second disc, and nothing but the six-episode story, its commentary and subtitles on the first disc. The commentary was a first for the Doctor Who DVDs, and helped to establish a new way of doing commentaries, in that not all of the commentators are on every episode. (more…)