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Showing posts with the label dennis hopper

SUPER MARIO BROS. - VIDEO REVIEW

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I review the Super Mario Bros. movie!

SUPER MARIO BROS. - REVIEW

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Once upon a time, Hollywood studios made an attempt at bringing Nintendo's most iconic video game character to life in live-action form. Super Mario Bros. starred Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as Mario and Luigi respectively and it was a commercial and critical failure. Adapting a game franchise as surreal as Super Mario Bros. was always going to be a challenge, especially for a Hollywood studio in the early 90's. So, instead of attempting to recreate the colourful, imaginative world depicted in the games, the directors decided to ground the characters in a more realistic, yet still bizarre, setting. The plot, which sees the two plumbers having to cross over to another dimension in order to rescue a princess, is relatively simple with Dennis Hopper's evil reptilian dictator King Koopa looking to open up a portal that would allow him to rule both his dimension and ours being the main challenge for our heroes. Not translating the games directly for the big screen was a

TOP 10 SILLIEST KOOPA LINES

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I list 10 of the silliest lines from the Super Mario Bros. movie. Courtesy of Dennis Hopper's King Koopa.

FLASHBACK - REVIEW

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Released back in 1990, Flashback was a buddy comedy about a hippie New Left radical on the run for years being transferred for a trial by an uptight FBI agent. Huey Walker, the hippie in question, is played by a perfect Dennis Hopper who has a ball throughout teasing Kiefer Sutherland's agent John Buckner, evading the law, referencing the 60's (even Easy Rider ) and saying "man" a lot. It's refreshing to see Hopper in a lighter role not playing a bad guy as he so often used to. He and Sutherland play polar opposites which makes for an amusing contrast but the film does a good job at showing that they have more in common than they realise. At first, those two characters inevitably clash, especially when Walker gets Buckner drunk and makes him believe he's been slipped some acid before switching places with him and getting him thrown in jail. Very quickly, they realise that they are both in danger of getting disposed of by Cliff De Young's dodgy Sherif

SPEED - REVIEW

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The 90's were a great decade for action films. Simple premises with dumb yet memorable concepts and loads of explosions being the key factor for many of them. Also Dennis Hopper turning in increasingly hammy performances as awesome, if cartoonish, villains. Speed , of course, stars a young Keanu Reeves as a cop who becomes the target of a madman's dastardly plan to blow up a city bus in exchange for a silly (and oddly specific) amount of money. He is told the bus can't slow down below 50 mph or it'll blow so the plan becomes to try and outsmart Hopper's cola-drinking baddie by trying to stay one step ahead somehow, despite the fact that he is keeping track of everything that's happening with his finger firmly placed on the detonator. You wouldn't think that a film about a city bus would be this entertaining and relentless but it certainly lives up to its title and we're given little time to rest in this intense race against time. Sandra Bullock