Like a lot of guys, I love movies where stuff blows up. That's a pretty standard thing, I would think, for most guys. I have yet to run across to many guys who look for movies with moving love stories where a man and a woman meet, struggle and, ultimately, come away successfully in love. Sorry, but the fact is that most of those movies are "chick" movies and that is just a fact of life. However, there are certain things that, if you put them into a movie, you are more than likely to get me hooked.

I am not sure if these are things that are universal to all men. Yes, I like action movies. I love a good horror movie (something I, personally, don't think they really make much anymore). I love a good thriller. I love westerns. I love gangster movies. I love "heist" movies that involve elaborate means of stealing things from people.

For me though, I love a movie that has ordinary stuff that gets turned into weapons. Of course, this means the James Bond series is made-to-order for me. In the second movie he gets a briefcase that has a throwing knife hidden in it, gold pieces hidden in it and tin of talcum powder that is also tear gas if the briefcase is not opened correctly. Just imagine trying to get that through airport security in this day and age.

At times the James Bond movies got ridiculous. In "Moonraker", for example, James wanders around a woman's room. Her perfume is a deadly acid. The pen he uses has some kind of needle with poison in it. Her diary, when squeezed, shoots a dart into the wall. James, after demonstrating all of this states "All standard CIA issue." Really? That job must be a lot cooler than I ever heard.

However, for me, my all-time favorite for James Bond was "The Man with the Golden Gun." The infamous hit-man Scaramonga, has a gun made of gold. It only contains one bullet because, he is so good, he only needs one. Anyway, the gun is three pieces. It is a cigarette case, lighter and pen. When assembled correctly it becomes the deadly Golden Gun.

There is a movie called "The Day of the Jackal" where the assassin, hired to kill French President Degault, creates a hidden weapon. He has a special crutch created. He then masquerades as a war veteran with one leg, using the crutch as a crutch. When he gets into position he assembles the thing and it's just one of my favorite scenes in all of movies.

In "The Sword of Gideon" the story of the revenge squad formed by Israel is told, long before Speilberg used the same source material to create "Munich." The assassins use bicycle air pumps that have been converted into guns. They also have bullets where much of the gun powder has been removed so the bullets are quieter. How cool is that?

In real life there have been a few of these weapons known to exist. A man who defected from the Soviet Union was killed in London when a man jabbed him in the leg with an umbrella. It turned out the umbrella contained a pellet loaded with the poison ricin and the man died. The KGB was also known to have created "electric" guns that used electricity to fire bullets short distances. Of course, there have been reports of devices that look like pagers that, in fact, are guns.

Still, you put something like that in a movie and I am likely to be hooked. I love that stuff. For me, that's what's fun in movie spy capers. The real world version are often very boring. They tend to use regular guns, if they use guns at all. Real spies seldom have arsenals anywhere, really. In the movies, though, anything they touch can become a weapon.

The other thing I love in movie are large animals or creatures on a rampage. Hollywood knows this and it tends to go in cycles when these movies are popular. My all-time favorite movie is "Jaws." That was when these movies really were everywhere. However, most of them were crap movies. Despite this, I still love these movies. For every "Jaws" there were a dozen "Alligators" or "Piranha."

I don't know what it is about these movies that I find so fascinating. I know that I even enjoyed the movie "Orca" when I was younger. Of course, watching that movie these days is painful, but I have a soft spot for bad movies too.

There is a new one coming out soon called "Primeval." What I love about this one is that it is based on an actual event. You see in Burundi there is a crocodile known as "Gustave." He is believed to weigh around one ton. He is also believed to be about sixty years old. Legend around the villages there is that he has killed and eaten somewhere around 300 people. All attempts to capture or kill Gustave have failed. This is in part because the nation is under constant civil war, which makes hunting for a giant croc difficult. Anyway, now they have made a movie about him and it will be coming out very shortly.

I have seen "Anoconda" and I must say the advent of CG effects has kind of spoiled the monster animal genre for me. There was just something so cool about that fake-looking mechanical shark in Jaws. These days, if that movie were remade, the shark would be crated by a computer. I have seen computer-generated sharks such as in the "Deep Blue Sea" and they just aren't as cool as "Bruce" the mechanical shark from "Jaws."

There is a movie called "Razorback" about a giant killer pig that I have not seen. I think there is one about a giant buffalo, but that may not be true. There is a movie out there called "Squirm" about a gigantic hoard of slithering deadly worms. Yes, slithering deadly worms. Let's not forget the infamous "Skeeter" about a deadly swarm of mosquitoes.

Now, if there was just a way to combine these two elements, I think I would be in movie heaven. Perhaps a giant animal attacking some community somewhere that has to be killed by a guy who has a pen that is also a gun or something. Hollywood, get working on that.

Finally, there are the movies where various machines come to life and become killers. The first one I remember seeing was a made-for-TV schlocker from the 70s called "Killedozer." It's about a giant bulldozer that gets possessed by some kind of alien and drives itself. It terrorizes workers on some small island. What's so funny in this movie is the horrific sound effects, cheesy special effects and the fact that this giant, loud, noisy lumbering machine manages to get the drop on so many of the workers. Someone out there needs to remake "Killdozer" and do it now.

Then, of course, there's the James Brolin starring vehicle called "The Car." It's about a car possessed by Satan. You have to love that. Stephen King must owe "The Car" a little bit of a nod as inspiration for his novel and subsequent movie "Christine." King also revisited this theme in his short story "Trucks" which became his dreadful directorial debut "Maximum Overdrive."

Anyway, those are my favorite things in movies. Not all of them, mind you. I also like a good story and characters. However, I am willing to overlook those things if you include some of those listed above. Do it for Bry.

Bryan W. Alaspa's novel Dust is available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com. He now has two short stories available for download at www.amazon.com as well.