wheels128

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Reviews

Komodo vs. Cobra
(2005)

What a learning experience!
This is like a zoology textbook, given that its depiction of animals is so accurate. However, here are a few details that appear to have been slightly modified during the transition to film:

  • Handgun bullets never hit giant Komodo dragons. It doesn't matter how many times you shoot at the Komodo, bullets just won't go near it.


  • The best way to avoid being eaten by a giant Cobra, or a giant Komodo dragon, is just to stand there. The exception to this rule is if you've been told to stay very still, in which case you should run off, until the Komodo is right next to you, and then you should stand there, expecting defeat.


  • Minutes of choppy slow motion footage behind the credits really makes for enjoyable watching.


  • $5,000 is a memory enhancement tool, and an ample substitute for losing your boating license/getting arrested.


  • Members of elite army units don't see giant Komodo dragons coming until they are within one metre of the over-sized beings. Maybe the computer-generated nature of these dragons has something to do with it.


  • When filming a news story aiming on exposing illegal animal testing, a reporter and a cameraman with one camera is all the gear and personnel you will need; sound gear, a second camera, microphones etc are all superfluous.


  • When you hear a loud animal scream, and one person has a gun, he should take it out and point it at the nearest person.


  • When you take a gun out, the sound of the safety being taken off will be made, even if your finger is nowhere near the safety


  • Reporters agree to go half-way around the world in order to expose something - without having the faintest idea what they're exposing. Background research and vague knowledge are out of fashion in modern journalism.


  • Handguns hold at least 52 bullets in one clip, and then more than that in the next clip. Despite that, those with guns claim that they will need more ammo.


  • Expensive cameras (also, remember that the reporter only has one camera) are regularly left behind without even a moment's hesitation or regret. These cameras amazingly manage to make their way back to the reporter all by themselves.


  • The blonde girl really is the stupid one.


  • The same girl that says not to go into a house because a Komodo dragon can easily run right through it, thus making it unsafe, takes a team into a building made of the same material for protection - and nobody says a word about it.


  • High-tech facilities look like simple offices with high school chemistry sets.


  • Genetically-modified snakes grow from normal size to 100 feet long in a matter of a day, but don't grow at all in the weeks either side.


  • The military routinely destroys entire islands when people don't meet contact deadlines.


  • Men with guns don't necessarily change the direction they're shooting when their target is no longer right in front of them. Instead, they just keep shooting into the air.


  • The better looking you are, the greater your chance of surviving giant creatures.


  • Women's intuition is reliable enough to change even the most stubborn of minds.


  • Any time you're being hunted by giant creatures is a great time to hit on girls half your age.


  • Animal noises are an appropriate masking noise for 'swearing' at the same volume.


  • Old Israeli and Russian planes are regularly used by the US Military.

Daybreak
(2000)

An informative step-by-step guide to surviving earthquakes.
Here are some of the important things I learnt while watching this movie:

  • Smart and gifted kids, when paying for their train fare and noticing that they have 60 cents left to pay, put in one small coin and are dismayed when it comes up short of the 60 cents.


  • Further to the last point, that coin dropped the total left to pay from 60 to 25 cents. Therefore, there must be a 35 cent coin. There just must be.


  • All people getting on the subway at any one station will sit within two metres of each other, all on the one carriage. Absolutely everyone else on the train will get off on the next station. This just must be normal behaviour.


  • Earthquake is just an abbreviation of "the camera is shaking".


  • During earthquakes, fire burns on the the outside of non-broken 15th floor windows.


  • The only buildings destroyed in earthquakes are created by computers.


  • Men whose chests have been crushed by a steel support pole are only in pain when the pole is lifted off their chests.


  • Teenage kids are never freaked out by unknown men giving them money, regularly initiating conversation and following them around darkened collapsed tunnels.


  • One spark is all it takes to set the entirety of a subway carriage on fire. Within a second.


  • There's always a nurse, an insecure beautiful girl, a man dealing with personal loss, a nerd and an aggressive criminal trapped by every cave-in.


  • "A train full of unsuspecting commuters" really means four people.


  • Explosions powerful enough to send dumpsters with two people half the length of a storage room are not powerful enough to move anything else in the room, despite many other items being lighter and closer to the explosion.


And finally, imagine a scenario where a reporter is told, during a press conference, that a few people are presumed to be dead. If these people were to appear (alive, of course) right next to the press conference, how would the reporter phrase her next question? (Keep in mind that by now, everyone knows that the people are alive.)

a) "Now that we know they are alive..." b) "Why did you assume they were dead when..." c) "A source tells me that these people may, in fact, be alive..."

If you answered (C), disregarding the fact that she had no source who could've seen the people alive and then relayed that information to her, and the reason she knows they are alive is that she has seen them with her own eyes, you would be correct.

Expect to Die
(1997)

The events in this film are all true.
They must be. I'll list them so that you can check them off one-by-one:

  • Police regularly leave tens of millions of dollars of cash and drugs just lying around, because they don't have evidence facilities.


  • When you get shot, you always grunt the same way, and fly back the same way, even though there's never a mark on your body.


  • Police are not able to identify the sound of gun shots, and don't think anything is suspicious when an undercover policewoman's phone call during a high-level drug-and-money deal is cut shot by that gun shot.


  • Bad guy gunmen can hit mannequins with one shot, but can't hit a big, bulky martial artist with 100.


  • If you rocket launcher a car in a car park, the next three cars in a line will blow up evenly in 15 second intervals.


  • Further to the last point, all the cheap cars are always parked next to each other.


  • The smoke that is caused from the firing of the rocket launcher is much greater than the amount of smoke caused by four cars blowing up.


  • Virtual reality games that are a long, long way ahead of anything any other gaming company can produce fit on five floppy disks.


  • Virtual reality games that are a long, long way ahead of anything any other gaming company can produce have graphics that look like Windows 3.1 screen-savers.


  • Floppy disks can be read even after they've been shot up.


  • Semi-drunk guys in bars attentively watch the news when they're at the pub, and have a deep understanding of American modern military history, Agent Orange, and the family trees of high-ranking military officials. However, they're only able to articulate their points using dialogue that sounds silly coming from anyone over the age of seven.


  • Even though fights appear to break out almost hourly in a bar, that bar has only one staff worker, who both pours the beers and handles security. Of course he knows martial arts.


  • Gold medal Olympians regularly make the simple transition to corporate CEOs of software companies in a matter of years.


  • A woman who works for a computer game company knows everything about how to beat a game she's never played, raves constantly about her competitor's great games, and can rattle off facts and figures regarding her company's rivals - but she didn't know that they overtook almost all the other companies in the field in large corporate mergers.


  • Bad guys always die in slow motion. Always.


  • Wives tell their husbands that they're pregnant by raving about their man's bravery in killing bad guys.


  • Wives do large amounts of their husband's police work; this might explain why she whines and complains so much every time he has to go to work. Although, it doesn't explain why she adores him so much every time he gets up in the morning and she can read about his murderous escapades.


  • It's fairly typical for a police officer to be involved in kidnappings, kill tons of people on three separate occasions and stop a variety of multi-million dollar illegal deals in a week.


  • When trying to lose a car that's following you, it's wise to continue driving under the speed limit. And if you're following a cop, subtlety is not important - you can tailgate him for miles, then park right next to him. He won't notice.


  • All cops are experienced martial artists.


  • It is possible to kick a guy four metres in distance.


  • People scream or grunt in pain when they are punched or kick, yet when they have their arm broken, they don't make a sound.


  • Bad guys clean their bloodied axes with their handkerchiefs, and then leave them in their pocket for many days.


  • Pieces of wood, when swung with one sharp blow, shatter sturdy ladders in six or more places simultaneously.


  • The photo, and listed special features on the back of the DVD case don't necessarily have to be on the DVD. The advertised interactive menus? Why not no menu at all! The advertised scene index? Why not have the whole thing as one scene/chapter, and not need an index! Likewise, it's OK to use The Matrix's font and title in the tag-line, and not be a rip-off in any way.


With all of this, I'm in shock that 12 out of the 15 top credited actors never acted again.

Fair Game
(1995)

If you take the facts out of this film, you gut it.
Fair Game is one of those films that teaches you things you never realised were true until it happened on screen. Things like this:

  • Explosions that blow up a mansion, and send someone flying into the water never leave a mark on that person. But they will have blood on their clothes, irregardless.


  • Teams of expert assassins can be beaten by one cop.


  • It's not humanly possible for a bad guy to kill someone without using a one-liner first. This may explain why they don't feel any remorse.


  • Cars blow up on impact, regardless of where the impact is and what the impact is with. Unless of course our hero is in the car, in which case, it just catches fire.


  • Perfect looking fake IDs aren't necessarily done with the use of any computers.


  • Letters that look like 3s, but aren't, are found by typing in '3' into the computer.


  • Employees of small stores swear freely and loudly while on the phone in the store.


  • Continuity is not important. It can easily flow from late afternoon, before the sun starts to set at all, to well after the sun has set, in a matter of seconds.


  • Choppers can't be heard over bad sex scene music and Cindy Crawford's disinterested moaning.


  • Cops leave the safety off when they put their gun away.


  • Trained assassins watch their target do a random Baldwin brother instead of actually doing their job.


  • A bomb counts down from 2 minutes 57 seconds to 1 minute 47 seconds in just under 15 seconds. That bomb then proceeds to blow up everything except the room the bomb is located in.

Demolition University
(1997)

You'll learn so much, your brain will split at its seams.
Demolition University is one of those films that is so close to the facts that you feel like you're being given a counter-terrorism lecture. Here are some of the facts covered in the film:

  • Nerve gas that could kill the whole world is protected by a handful of poorly armed men, one of whom is considered to be an extreme megalomaniac psychopath.


  • Universities have bright yellow school buses, which they take to Physics field trips.


  • Universities have organised dances, and taking the cutest girl in your class is the most important thing.


  • That nerve gas multiplies infinitely when put in water. Stuff like this exists, apparently.


  • When a building has a self-destruct option, it means "set off cheap explosives and fires outside the building". The director will pan up in an attempt to disguise the fact that the building was not touched.


  • Terrorists drive a motor-home, and an old one at that. Let's call it the Terrormobile.


  • Six terrorists is about the right number to secure a number of hostages and a water treatment plant.


  • When you shoot someone in the head, and they have a hardhat on, the hardhat goes flying about 15 feet, then spins for about 20 seconds.


  • Terrorists cannot shoot. At all. They probably couldn't hit the Terrormobile from 50 feet. Then again, the US military can't shoot straight either.


  • The temperature of something in the water treatment plant will go from 100 to 300 in two seconds, but will stick at 300 for about 25 minutes. Without going any higher. Then it will magically jump up to 400 in another two second patch.


  • When bullets hit the side of a van, they just disintegrate into sparks. Without leaving a mark.


  • Armed terrorists following orders to kill someone would rather chase someone than shoot them, even if they're only 15 feet behind them. Then again, judging by how poor they are at shooting, it's not overly surprising they'd rather run after them.


  • Psychological profiles contain every single piece of information on the person imaginable, except information that might actually be required/useful.


  • The US gives in to terrorist demands.


  • A quarterback who can't throw straight gets his hands on a beaker of nerve gas. He'll throw it inside a water treatment plant - despite pipes and machines being everywhere - on the off chance that a guy who can't catch a football will safely catch a delicate glass beaker.


  • Telling a girl that she "can make it" means she'll run faster than ever before.


  • AK-47s are never used as automatic weapons. Ever.

The Secret Force
(1995)

Quite simply, the most boring film I've ever watched.
But I learned a fair bit:

  • If you only have enough dialogue and plot to cover a 2 minute long cartoon, don't worry. You can just get every character to repeat every line three or four times and take long pauses in between the words. The audience won't find this tactic really annoying, even after 85 minutes. (You'll note that I'll be referring to this point regularly throughout the review.)


  • Women who are in the same room as a police mini-interrogation need to ask someone else who was there to find out what was said.


  • American cops drive South African police vehicles. In fact, the whole film is guilty of trying to pass off South African locations as American.


  • Government officials target small groups of Vietnam war friends for mind-control, so that they will randomly mow down civilians. What purpose this achieves is unknown.


  • Crazy, shrieking women actually do know everything about what the Government is up to.


  • Top secret government experiments are carried out in standard hospitals. No military or police are ever present to ensure any secrecy.


  • The tagline and title of a movie do not have to have anything to do with the events of a film.


  • When the back of the video case talks about a Rambo-style arsenal, it really means just one shotgun.


  • Police allow a highly-armed mentally insane man to stand around while they get one of his untrained friends to try and talk him out of killing people. Apparently this is standard protocol if the friend asks politely.

Invasion U.S.A.
(1985)

Details not necessary. Rocket launchers more important.
Invasion U.S.A. can only be described as one of the finest examples of how to put brilliant action sequences before any vague realms of plot. But what if this movie was factually accurate? Here's a list of things I discovered while watching this film:

  • When a large amount of cocaine is under the floor of a boat, and the people on that boat need to be moved, you shoot them all and they'll not only miraculously fall away from the door to the cocaine, but not one bag of coke will be damaged, despite firing about a thousand bullets at the boat.


  • All Cuban refugees that arrive in the Florida area wear identical plain white underwear and shorts.


  • Chuck Norris can single-handedly take down tens of terrorists, but needs help to take on one alligator.


  • Prostitutes carry flick knives.


  • The guards to a big drug dealer only need to be shot at twice, and they'll then die of fear. There's no other way to explain their deaths despite not being hit by either bullet sent in their direction.


  • The main characters to a movie don't need any background. Rostov is known only by name, as is Hunter, while the terrorist 2IC isn't given a surname. No further details on the pasts of these characters are necessary for you to understand what's going on, especially the dream sequence.


  • A terrorist leader who has no qualms about killing boatloads of refugees, houses of innocent people and blowing up shopping centres goes into uncontrollable rages about one-liners like "It's time to die."


  • The head of Hunter's ex-agency (NSA? CIA? FBI? Who cares!) gets to his place via a rowboat, and comes alone.


  • A variety of bad guys blow Hunter's house up with a lot of rocket launchers, machine guns and RPGs, with the intent of killing him - yet don't check that he's dead afterwards.


  • Rocket launchers carry six rockets without the need to reload.


  • Likewise, shotguns carry around 17 shots without the need to reload.


  • Terrorists who have important business to get to don't do it, because they need to go into clubs to pick up cheap, old hookers who are slightly overweight.


  • Between six guys with automatic weapons, they're unable to hit the windows in Chuck Norris's car, or put it out of commission. Despite firing around 500 bullets.


  • Uzis are more accurate than any other weapon. Mostly because Chuck Norris is firing them.


  • A professional photographer, when riding in a car that's attempting to chase a hostage-taking terrorist down, doesn't take any photos.


  • It's impossible to blow up terrorists with their own bombs unless you deliver a one-liner first.


  • School children sing "Row, row, row your boat..." for minutes endlessly while on a school bus.


  • Chuck Norris catches up to a moving bus over 250 metres ahead of him, picks a bomb off it, catches up to a speeding car of terrorists, who are clearly a long way ahead of the bus, places the bomb on their car and drives off. In under 25 seconds. From a standing start.


  • Automatic weapons, like shotguns and rocket launchers, carry more bullets than you can physically fit into the weapons.


  • When you're involved in a fight with a fast opponent, where mobility and fast firing is imperative, a rocket launcher truly is the weapon of choice. Then again, it does hold six shots.


In closing, it's time to die.

Boa vs. Python
(2004)

This movie informed me of so many things I didn't previously know
I'm serious, I learnt a lot from Boa Vs Python: - Bulgaria looks a lot like 24 miles outside Philadelphia.

  • Multi-millionaire businessmen with their own private jets spend their free time at amateur-level wrestling matches where the wrestlers dress up in coloured masks. The businessman is more than willing to pay 500 US dollars for a seat though.


  • You have to show a beautiful girl disrobing three times, and stepping into the bath three times, before the audience can understand that she is taking a bath. Some of the shots are in slow motion to allow the even slower audience members to catch on in time.


  • Multiple sticks of dynamite, causing an explosion roughly 80 feet high and 15 feet wide, is not quite enough to blow up two cars and a truck, but it will partially destroy one of the cars, leaving it on fire. Police, the FBI and the Fire Brigade will make no attempt to put out such fires, even 8-12 hours after the explosion.


  • The television will un-mute itself when an answer to a rich man's conundrum is on the news.


  • Multi-millionaire businessmen watch local news channels from cities that they're not even from, while flying 39,000 feet in the air.


  • 80 feet long snakes that have the diameter of over 3 feet, can get through holes in doors roughly a third of that size.


  • Philadelphia sheriffs trip over and fall onto corpses at a crime scene, but this presents no problem of any kind.


  • The worlds foremost marine research scientist is a blonde girl in her late 20s with breast implants, who likes taking off her bikini underwater to win money.


  • Guys who want to take their singlet off, while at the pool, don't just take it off. They put it on, so that they rip it off, and throw it away.


  • Even though you can clearly see the bottom of a pool that's 2 metres (6½ feet) deep, when people stand on the floor of that pool, their actions are completely unknown to onlookers.


  • Leading research scientists repeatedly tap on the glass of a snake's cage out of interest as to see what it will do.


  • An FBI agent can't find a 70-foot long Boa in a room about 30x18 feet, because 70-foot Boas find it very easy to hide in medium sized rooms.


  • Leading research scientists who have breast implants just happen to make sensor pads for animals, which are constantly referred to as implants by the research scientist. She doesn't appear to realise the cheap gag nature of her comments until a man uses the phrase "equipment", in which case she suddenly pauses, smiles to herself, and he has to avert all talk from topics that could be perceived to be relating to her upper chest.


  • One of the world's richest hunters cannot drive properly. Neither can his son. They can't shoot very well at all, either. Or throw a grenade more than 5 metres. And despite being overly rich, they drive a 90s model Volvo.


  • A girl cannot tell the difference between being licked by a 6ft tall male, and being licked by an 80-foot python with a mouth about 20 times the size of the male.


  • All sentences in front page news articles are condensed into one paragraph.


  • Newspaper photos do not have captions, and are never larger than 6cm by 6cm.


  • Members of the U.S. Army randomly, and in a very monotone voice, say "Ready-to-kick-some-ass-Sir" ... to an FBI agent. No commanding officers are present when national security is at stake.


  • Some people can't tell the difference between a pig and an 80-foot long python.


  • Members of the U.S. Army can't find a 70-foot Boa in an underground room, even when it screams every couple of seconds.


  • When there's "not a second to spare", leading scientists make jokes about cross-breed snake sex.


  • When the military's best sniper says "one shot, one kill", he means "two shots, one kill".


  • The best way to save your girlfriend from being crushed by a 70 foot boa, is to randomly aim your flamethrower at the boa's face, even if it is all of 1 foot from your girlfriend.


  • Wanted fugitives are never handcuffed, but they are allowed to easily slip into a tank and drive it away from a military base. With a flamethrower, of course.


  • The U.S. military trusted a rocket launcher to one of its soldiers, who couldn't hit a tank going at less than 20 miles an hour (32 km/hour) from 30 feet distance - directly behind the tank, no less.


  • To make sure that the audience knows that the scene has changed to a club, show at least one minute of naked body-painted dancers.


  • When a wanted fugitive starts attacking armed members of the army with a flame thrower, they don't shoot him. Instead, they run towards the flames, even after three have burnt to death.


  • A huge snake can't barge through metal bars being held by two people, but it can utterly destroy a concrete wall.


  • After someone one has been killed, ripped into two bits and thrown around, they can still let out one last scream.


  • Creating subway stations entirely in CGI makes a movie climax so much more interesting.


Honestly, you should show this movie to aspiring doctors and lawyers. The knowledge they will gain will pay dividends in the future. No other film can teach you the facts about all these things that you didn't previously know were true.

Operation Delta Force 4: Deep Fault
(1999)

Informative. Utter crap, but informative.
As a huge fan of the original Operation Delta Force, I thought I'd pick this film up. I figured it couldn't be too bad. However, here's a list of things I learnt from watching Operation Delta Force 4: Deep Fault.

  • The Delta Force, despite being the elite in American armed forces, are mostly mildly-overweight men in their late 30s and early 40s.


  • The Delta Force, despite being the elite in American armed forces, carry standard police issue pistols or AK-47s on their most important missions.


  • The Delta Force, despite being the elite in American armed forces, haven't learnt that during stealth missions, wearing bright red ski jumpers and running around in open spaces aren't exactly going to keep you out of sight.


  • When you drop a Molotov cocktail into a tank, it explodes externally like a grenade.


  • When you get hit by tank fire, you can run away, although the smoke caused may present minor difficulties for breathing.


  • You can die from one standard gun shot, but you can also live despite being hit multiple times by a sniper rifle, and a few times by an AK-47.


  • In hand-to-hand combat, members of The Delta Force, despite being the elite in American armed forces, are regularly pummeled by railroad attendants.


  • If bad guys are approaching you while on a slow-moving train, there's nothing to worry about - between the 4 of them, they can't manage to figure out how to get an automatic weapon to fire automatically, let alone hit anyone from 5 metres (16 feet) with at least 50 attempts between them.


  • If you're short on actors, just recycle them - the bad guy from Operation Delta Force 1 plays a good guy called Mac in Operation Delta Force 4, and the guy who played Mac in Operation Delta Force 3 now plays Skip Lang, a different good guy.


  • It's not OK for The Delta Force to shoot an unarmed terrorist, even if he's attempting to reload his weapon to kill you.


  • Grenades explode on impact with the ground when thrown by members of The Delta Force. When thrown by non-Delta Force personnel, they explode at exactly the point where the Delta Force members have thrown the grenades back at the bad guys.


  • Tanks can drive faster than standard trucks.


  • Militias and personal armies use the exact same chopper that the UN used in Operation Delta Force 1.


  • When a chopper arrives, a bad guy in that chopper cannot see you if you lie face-down.


  • Shooting someone multiple times in the chest will cause minor damage. Stabbing that person in the knee will kill them inside 5 seconds.


  • The Delta Force steal cars from old people to get around when in foreign countries, because the US Military do not provide them with any means of transport. This may also explain why they caught public transport.


As you can see, this is not really the finest moment in film-making, but it's good for a laugh.

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