Blu-ray

Trawl through the list of supporting features for double-bill programmes, the staple diet for UK cinemagoers up until the early 1970s, and you’ll be surprised at what you find. While the majority of independent studios concentrated on Film Noir subjects (crime, mystery etc), there are also quite a few low-budget science fiction titles, including Devil Girl From Mars, Stranger From Venus, The Strange World of Planet X, Invasion, The Night Caller, They Came From Beyond Space, The Body Stealers and this curiosity from Anglo Amalgamated called Unearthly Stranger.

This franchise continues along its curious route of serving up made-for-DVD sequels that actually improve on the 1992 original. This fourth in the 'official' series brings back Van Damme and Lundgren, but its mix of action and psychological horror follows a new protagonist played by English martial artist Scott Adkins. The Blu-ray's 2.40:1 1080p encode can be watched in 2D or 3D, with the latter working particularly well (it was actually shot stereoscopically). Extras are limited to the trailer and short interviews with the stars and director.

Unstoppable finds director Tony Scott teaming up with his regular leading man Denzel Washington for yet another bout of chaos involving public transportation. Thankfully, while no cinematic classic, it’s a vast improvement on their meandering remake of The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3 – delivering a straight-forward rush of undemanding action movie fun that partners Washington with Chris Pine in a tale of a runaway freight train packed with deadly chemicals, inspired by a true event that occurred back in 2001. As always, while the actors do their best with fairly limited parts, it’s Scott’s wild direction that amps up the action to breaking point and delivers the film’s real excitement.

Horror anthologies are tricky things to pull off, but this creepy collection of six shorts gets more right than wrong – and injects some new life into the 'found footage' genre in the process. Naturally, given the nature of the content (camcorder, VHS, etc) the issue of picture quality is fairly subjective – but from a technical standpoint it's hard to fault the disc's AVC 1.78:1 1080p encode for its faithfulness to the source material. Helping to raise the scare-quota is an atmospheric DTS-HD MA 5.1 soundtrack. Sadly the commentary from the US release is missing, but we still get a couple of interviews, an alternate ending for one short, and behind-the-scenes footage from another.

It may not be quite as sharp or foul-mouthed as The Thick of It, but Armando Iannucci still manages to mine plenty of laughs from the sour heart of the political world with his first US sitcom. And as we've come to expect from HBO, this two-disc Blu-ray release is a very slick operation, delivering attractively sharp and bright AVC 1.78:1 1080p encodes and cleanly-rendered DTS-HD MA 5.1 mixes for all eight episodes. The set also includes some excellent extras including 12(!) cast and crew episode commentaries, a 14-minute Making of… and deleted scenes.

The apotheosis of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg's obsession with body horror and the externalising of psychological terrors, the worryingly prescient Videodrome deals with a TV exec (James Woods) looking for ever more extreme content to show on his sensationalist station. When he chances across a pirate broadcast featuring what appears to be scenes of real torture he becomes obsessed, leading him into a world of terrifying hallucinations and violent conspiracies.