"Actor: Alex Daniels"

• Beyblade : Volume 3 (Giftpack) | DVD | (31/03/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Beyblade is an animé tie-in to the high-tech spinning top toys. It has some of the standard faults of the cheaper Japanese animations--such as static backgrounds and overly perky facial design--but it makes inventive use of the idea that the competitions of the Beybladers are the outward manifestation of more occult conflicts in another realm. Young Tyson is a keen and inventive Beyblader--in the first episode, he works out a way of quadrupling the speed and force of his top--but it helps that his Beyblade is inhabited by the spirit of an ancestral dragon. Thus equipped, he moves through one round after another of an international competition, sometimes in alliance with the haughty Kai and his gang and sometimes opposing them, and always helped by Kenny and Dizzi, the spirit beast that inhabits Kenny's laptop. How much of this you want to watch will ultimately depend on how many duels between spinning tops you are going to be interested in, but the byplay between physical and spirit realms, and the conflict of characters is moderately interesting as well. --Roz Kaveney

• Cyborg | DVD | (19/06/2000) from £20.00   |  Saving you £-7.01 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Jean-Claude Van Damme, aka "the Muscles from Brussels", had only a few movies to his credit when he played the hero in this lame post-apocalyptic action flick from 1989. It's really just another martial-arts movie, dressed down with near-future trash and dirty sets that have "low budget" written all over them. Van Damme plays the protective escort for a half-human, half-cyborg woman whose programming contains a possible cure for a plague that is threatening to wipe out the entire population of Earth. But the woman is kidnapped by Van Damme's evil nemesis (is there any other kind?) while they are en route to her Atlanta headquarters. That leads Van Damme right into a lion's den of sadomasochistic torture and torment. If you've made it this far (and if you have, why?), you are probably a founding member of the Jean-Claude Van Damme fan club. To everyone else: don't say you weren't warned--this is the kind of movie in which naming characters after electric guitars (Van Damme's character is named "Gibson Rickenbacker") qualifies as clever screen writing. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com