“For me it’s always been the strangeness of zombies, in that they are very slow and almost inept and shambolic – without motive, without moral rage or agenda. They’re just us: motorised instinct,” he says. “There’s something really eerie about that. They don’t mean any harm; they’re just doing their thing.”
– Shaun of the Dead’s co-creator Simon Pegg

OMG Horror has posted their list of the Top 26 Best Zombies of All Time. We added synopsises (from IMDb) and a few we felt were overlooked.

1. Bub, Day of the Dead (1985): Zombies rule the USA, except for a small group of scientists and military personnel who reside in an underground bunker in Florida. The scientists are using the undead in gruesome experiments; much to the chagrin of the military. Finally the military finds that their men have been used in the scientists’ experiments, and banish the scientists to the caves that house the Living Dead. Unfortunately, the zombies from above ground have made their way into the bunker.
2. Tarman, Return of the Living Dead (1985): When a bumbling pair of employees at a medical supply warehouse accidentally release a deadly gas into the air, the vapors cause the dead to re-animate as they go on a rampage through Louisville, Kentucky seeking their favorite food, brains.
3. Conquistador Zombie, Zombie/Zombi 2 (1979): A young woman wants to search for her father who is missing since he made an expidition to the antilles. She starts the search together with her friends and a reporter. They arrive at an island where they get confronted with zombies. The zombies long eagerly for human flesh. In spite of desperate defence the situation becomes hopeless. More and more undead corpses crawl up and walk arround looking for flesh.

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Popularity: 96%

“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%

Peace is an accident, war is natural. Old men start it, young men fight it, everybody in the middle dies, and nobody tells the truth.

Synopsis (IMDB): Vietnam veteran John Rambo has survived many harrowing ordeals in his lifetime and has since withdrawn into a simple and secluded existence in Bangkok, where he spends his time salvaging old PT boats and tanks for scrap metal. Even though he is looking to avoid trouble, trouble has a way of finding him. A group of Christian human rights missionaries, led by Michael Burnett and Sarah Miller, approach Rambo with the desire to rent his boat to travel up the river to Burma. For over fifty years, Burma has been like a war zone. The Karen people of the region, who consist of peasants and farmers, have endured brutally oppressive rule from the murderous Burmese military and have been struggling for survival every single day. This is the time when medical assistance and general support from the Christian missionaries is needed most. After some consideration, and due to insistence from his mentor, former military man Ed Baumgartner, Rambo accepts the offer and takes Michael, Sarah, and the rest of the missionaries up the river. When the missionaries finally arrive at the Karen village, they are ambushed by the sadistic Major Pa Tee Tint and a slew of Burmese army men. A portion of the villagers and missionaries are tortured and viciously murdered, while Tint and his men hold the remainder captive. News soon reaches the minister in charge of the mission and with the help of Ed Baumgartner he employs Rambo to lead a rescue effort. With five young and highly diverse mercenaries at his disposal, Rambo has to travel back up the river and liberate the survivors from the clutches of Major Tint in what may be one of his deadliest missions ever.

Growing up in the 80s, I always liked the Rambo movies. He was a character that resonated uniquely with me as a teenager. Stallone’s Rambo taps into many people’s deep-rooted feelings about war, loyalty, veterans, and national pride, and managed to do it in both a smart and heartfelt way. Now in his fourth movie, Rambo attempts to reconnect with U.S. audiences again for one last hurrah.

John Rambo trailer:

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Rambo 3 trailer:

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Rambo First Blood Part 2 trailer:

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First Blood trailer

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And finally, a list of ‘Rambo stats’ sent to me by a friend:

Popularity: 1%

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) communications protocol. BitTorrent is a method of distributing large amounts of data widely without the original distributor incurring the entire costs of hardware, hosting and bandwidth resources. Instead, when data is distributed using the BitTorrent protocol, each recipient supplies pieces of the data to newer recipients, reducing the cost and burden on any given individual source, providing redundancy against system problems, and reducing dependence on the original distributor. — Wikipedia

Torrentfreak reports that “TV-shows are by far the most popular files on BitTorrent sites. On Mininova alone, some episodes are downloaded more than 2 million times. Movies are a good second, with over 500.000 downloads for the most popular titles.”

The data used for these lists is retrieved from Mininova and considered to be a representative sample.

Movies & number of downloads in 2007:

1. Transformers (569,259)
2. Knocked Up (509,314)
3. Shooter (399,960)
4. Pirates Of The.Caribbean At World’s End (379,749)
5. Ratatouille (359,904)
6. 300 (358,226)
7. Next (354,044)
8. Hot Fuzz (352,905)
9. The Bourne Ultimatum (336,326)
10. Zodiac (334,699)

TV-Shows & number of downloads in 2007:

1. Heroes (2,439,154)
2. Top Gear (1,217,923)
3. Battlestar Galactica (706,209)
4. Lost (705,724)
5. Prison Break (608,487)
6. Desperate Housewives (457,805)
7. 24 (524,303)
8. Family Guy (522,839)
9. Dexter (435,670)
10. Scrubs (427,420)

Popularity: 1%