Gathered friends, listen again to our legend, of the Bionicle. In a time, before time, the Great Spirit, Mata Nui, fell from the heavens, carrying we, the ones called the Matoran. We were separate, and without purpose, so the Great Spirit illuminated us with the three virtues: Unity, Duty, and Destiny!
– Turaga Vakama, Bionicle: Mask of Light

As the father of two boys, I have just finished watching the four Bionicle movies with them. A strange experience to say the least; the Bionicle movies describe a world of heroic, living machines possessing a bizarre blended theology of polytheism and Eastern philosophy. Since I sat through all four, (some more than once) Goozlepipe presents the first of a four-part review.

When I was a child LEGOs were brightly colored, nearly indestructible plastic blocks that you could use to build anything your wanted… as long as it was roughly rectangular. But times have changed. Sleek and stylized, LEGO’s Bionicle (“biological” + “chronicle”) is a line of toys marketed primarily to 6 – 16 year-old boys.

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Popularity: 5%

“He looks determined… without being ruthless. There’s something heroic
about him. He doesn’t look like a killer. He comes across so calm…
acts like he has a dream… eyes full of passion.” – The Killer (1989)

Assassin movies are a guaranteed hit with moviegoers. And for some reason, we too often cheer on this ‘bad guy.’ Why?

Hitmen are the inevitable descendants of our Western gunslingers like Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter (1950) or Alan Ladd in Shane(1953). Even when those films were made, there was acknowledgement that such killers had already outlived their usefulness and had no place in civilized society. But modern cinema isn’t so “civilized,” because professional killers are thriving in it. The reason is most likely that hitmen are ‘cool’ because, like rebels, vampires, psychopaths, and Lords of the Sith, they operate totally outside of societal norms and do whatever they want. Such freedom is enviable, but naturally not the sort of behavior most people would think of emulating. That’s sort of the basic pleasure of cinema: escapism.

In the vein of celebrating these anti-heroes, Movie Trailer Talk has compiled the “Top 10 Badass Hitmen Movies” (summaries added from IMDb):

1. Léon aka The Professional (1994) – Leon is a first-class hit man, but is also a sensitive guy who loves his potted plants. He is moral: “No women, no children” is his professional motto. He is sympathetic to his neighbor, Mathilda, a typically rebellious twelve-year-old who has trouble with her family. But when her father runs afoul of drug kingpin Norman Stansfield, Mathilda turns to Leon for assistance.
2. Pulp Fiction (1994) – Jules and Vincent work as hitmen for crime boss Marcellus Wallace. Wallace is currently dealing with Butch Collidge, a boxer who failed to throw a fight after taking Wallace’s money and is now planning to flee the city, but can’t leave his father’s watch behind. Vincent faces some problems of his own when Wallace asks him to show his wife Mia a good time while he’s away. Some of these people redeem themselves and some don’t, and all meet an end appropriate to their choices.
3. El Mariachi (1992), Desperado (1995), Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) – El Mariachi just wants to play his guitar and carry on the family tradition. Unfortunately, the town he tries to find work in has another visitor…a killer who carries his guns in a guitar case. The drug lord and his henchmen mistake El Mariachi for the killer, Azul, and chase him around town trying to kill him and get his guitar case.
4. Dip huet seung hung aka The Killer (1989) – A violent Hong Kong action film, this is the story of an assassin,
   Jeffrey Chow (aka Mickey Mouse) who takes one last job so he can retire
   and care for his girlfriend Jenny. When his employers betray him, he
   reluctantly joins forces with Inspector Lee (aka Dumbo), the cop who is
   pursuing him. Together, the new friends face the final confrontation of
   the gangsters out to kill them.
5. Kill Bill Vol. I, II (2003, 2004) – The lead character, called ‘The Bride,’ was a member of the Deadly
   Viper Assassination Squad, lead by her lover ‘Bill.’ Upon realizing she
   was pregnant with Bill’s child, ‘The Bride’ decided to escape her life
   as a killer. She fled to Texas, met a young man, and on the day of
   their wedding was gunned down by an angry and jealous Bill (with the
   assistance of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad). Four years later,
   ‘The Bride’ wakes from a coma, and discovers her baby is gone. She,
   then, decides to seek revenge upon the five people who destroyed her
   life and killed her baby. (more…)

Popularity: 20%

“Tales of typically normal excitable youngsters going on epic adventures that lifted the heart stirred the soul and haunted our dreams. But it was the palpable sense of adventure that really convinced, giving us youngsters an achievable sense of daydream adventure” — Oliver Pfeiffer
For those who were young in the 1980s, the decade’s movies hold a special place in their hearts. CGI was just coming into its own on the silver screen and fantasy adventures were a staple for children and teenagers alike.

Oliver Pfeiffer takes us back to those halcyon days with his list of the “Top 10 Cult Classic 80s Fantasy Adventure Flicks.” We’ve added IMDb plot summaries as well as a bonus list of movies we thought deserved recognition as well.

1. The Goonies (1985): A young teenager named Mikey Walsh finds an old treasure map in his father’s attic. Hoping to save their homes from demolition, Mikey and his friends Data Wang, Chunk Cohen, and Mouth Devereaux runs off on a big quest to find the secret stash One-Eyed Willie.
2. Return to Oz (1985): Dorothy Gale has recently come back to Kansas from the land of Oz is now almost back to perfect health since the incident of the tornado, only she cannot get that wonderful place out of her head. She talks frequently about it and cannot get any sleep at night. Her Aunt Em worries about her health/well-being. Thinking that her niece is suffering delusional depression and acute insomnia, she decides to take Dorothy to see a special doctor in another town. While the doctor tries to treat little Dorothy with electro-shock treatment and take away those nasty dreams from her head, Dorothy is rescued by a mysterious girl who leads her back to the land of oz for a new adventure.
3. Labyrinth (1986): Grown angry about the fact that she must watch over her little brother Toby, Sarah (Jennifer Connely) wishes the child to the goblins. They translate this careless statement into action: The Goblin-King Jareth (David Bowie) announces that soon Toby will mutate into a goblin. There is only one hope: Sarah has to find the way to Jareth’s castle – through a dangerous labyrinth – where she will find strange creatures.Young Sherlock Holmes (1985): Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson meet as boys in an English Boarding school. Holmes is known for his deductive ability even as a youth, amazing his classmates with his abilities. When they discover a plot to murder a series of British business men by an Egyptian cult, they move to stop it.
4. Explorers (1985): Ben Crandall, an alien-obsessed kid, dreams one night of a circuit board. Drawing out the circuit, he and his friends Wolfgang and Darren set it up, and discover they have been given the basis for a starship. Setting off in the ThunderRoad, as they name their ship, they find the aliens Ben hopes they would find… but are they what they seem?
5. The Lost Boys (1987): Financial troubles force a recent divorcee and her teenage sons Mike and Sam to settle down with her father in the California town of Santa Carla. At first, Sam laughs off rumours he hears about vampires who inhabit the small town. But after Mike meets a beautiful girl at the local amusement park, he begins to exhibit the classic signs of vampirism. Fearing for his own safety, Sam recruits two young vampire hunters to save his brother by finding and destroying the head vampire. (more…)

Popularity: 100%

Popsci.com takes a look at a few of cinema’s most mind-boggling moments of scientific inaccuracy—plus a few rare films that manage to get things (mostly) right.

All ten examples are collected here for those who don’t want to flip through ten separate pages:

Mission Impossible II (2000):
In a critical scene in John Woo’s motorcycle-heavy second installment of the Mission Impossible series, Tom Cruise and evil Dougray Scott have a head-on showdown on their respective high-powered bikes, which ends in a midair collision after each is somehow able to leap off his bike. Neither seems particularly fazed, as the two continue to grapple apparently unhurt on the ground and for the rest of the movie.

Assuming speeds of 50 mph, a collision time of 0.015 second, and masses of 80 and 90 kilograms for Cruise and Scott, respectively, the force generated by the impact is an incredibly large 124,000 newtons, all exerted on the upper-right halves of the combatants bodies. Estimating the area of impact to be around .35 square-meters, we can solve for the amount of pressure exerted on their bodies at the point of impact: 350,000 N/m2. Putting these numbers in real-life terms (what, you don’t know what one newton of force feels like?): In car-crash studies, any pressure of that magnitude on the human body results in a 50-50 chance of surviving, with those who do survive coming away with massive internal trauma. Not only do Cruise and Scott survive the initial impact, they don’t appear to have even a broken bone between them, when in reality, Tom would need a whole lot of nontraditional healing to recover from this one.
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Popularity: 22%

“This one’s for connoisseurs of the ‘totally preposterous crap’ school of fantasy cinema. You know who you are: You have all the Warlock sequels on Laserdisc, the complete Leprechaun series on DVD, and go see Uwe Boll movies on opening weekend.” — Luke Y. Thompson of L.A. Weekly

Release: 2007
Runtime: 1 hour, 30 min
Genre: Action, Drama, Fantasy
Language: English/Korean
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Starring: Jason Behr, Amanda Brooks, Robert Forster, Jack Craig Robinson, Aimee Garcia

Amazon Link: Dragon Wars

SYNOPSIS: A young woman possesses the reincarnated power to transform a legendary giant serpent into an omnipotent, celestial dragon with her ultimate sacrifice. But the forces of darkness are out to seize the young woman while her reincarnated lover and his aged mentor stand in their way.

When viewing Dragon Wars, it should be noted to leave your brain at the door. That way, when you start hearing things involving good and evil dragons, reincarnated warriors, and such, you’ll just smile and watch the eye candy. This film is geared toward the sensibilities of young kids. In other words, my six and eight year-olds loved it. The story, what little there is, isn’t of much concern here. For the most part, Dragon Wars is actually kind of enjoyable, in a really dumb, cheesy kind of way – think of a Sci-Fi Channel original movie. As a matter of fact, the only uniquely interesting thing about the movie is that it isn’t an American production, but an Asian one, specifically South Korea.

Supposedly based on an ancient Korean legend, a 200-meter-long evil serpent called Buraki is denied a chance at immortality when two young lovers, who are to perform the ceremony, run away and leap to their deaths in 1507 AD. 500 years later in Los Angeles, the man is reincarnated as American news reporter Ethan (Jason Behr), who as a child was given a powerful pendant by an elderly antiques dealer named Jack (Robert Forster) and now has to find the reincarnated woman, Sarah (Amanda Brooks), before her 20th birthday.

“D-War” is a film that looks and sounds amazing, in theory, but the execution is so poor that you’ll rightfully feel that you’ve been cheated by the time the credits roll. The film’s human players are paper-thin caricatures and deliver cheap, insipid dialogue in scenes that rarely connect. More importantly, when you pay to see a movie called Dragon Wars, you expect it to, at least, live up to its title. The biggest flaw of Hyung-rae Shim’s film is that it barely even does that, focusing most of its energy on a mumbo-jumbo plot about destiny: Dialogue about fate and destiny peppered with more weird names than you can shake a stick at takes up about half the running time, and it just plain confusing. On more than one occasion, a character asks another, “what are you talking about?” and you get the impression that no one really knows the answer.

But you don’t come to a movie called Dragon Wars for the story or the performances. You want to see some tail stomping and some flame throwing. And for a few minutes in the final reel, D-Wars delivers. There are two sequences – an attack on Los Angeles by the armies of evil and the final battle between the good and bad dragon – where D-War finally delivers. In fact, the attack sequence is clearly what the entire film was built around; an impressive battle between flying creatures and helicopters that almost feels like it was transported from a better movie.

“D-War” unfortunately comes off as cousin to the American adaptation of “Godzilla” (1998) than anything that is uniquely Korean. Also, the story seems to take itself a little too seriously, the acting and direction seem mediocre at best, and the execution is flawed; maybe the director was trying to do too much without really working out the material in greater detail first.

All in all, Dragon Wars is what it is, and if you’re interested in it for whatever reasons, then chances are that you know what you’re getting here: Another “B”-grade monster movie. With no blood or nudity, virtually no bad language, and monsters galore, Shim’s picture is suitable for youngsters and delivers enough goofy fun to keep adults from getting too restless. When asked why they liked the movie, my children replied, “because it has giant dragons,” and for kids that’s a perfectly fine rationale.

Goozlepipe Rating:Liked it

Popularity: 5%