Dragon Ball Z: Wrath of the Dragon (1995)

Admirable film.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

This will be my last "Dragonball Z" movie for awhile. I guess I shouldn't have been introduced to these films with the more recent longer ones. This one came off as kind of underwhelming, but it's certainly good! If nothing else, I liked the villain Hirudegarn. He reminds me of the Marvel Comics villain Onslaught with his skull head. I guess we deserve to have Goku and friends face off against a giant monster after all these years! Taipon looks like Chrono. Yeah, I'm pretty sure Akira Toriyama worked on the designs for that character too. I thought an ocarina was just something from Zelda.So we have a Chrono like character and a Zelda item. Well, this must be one of the best video game movies ever made! I'm sad we didn't get to meet Taipon's brother. The plot was a little hard to follow, but it's still as good as any other DBZ movie. The best part was easily the final attack. Goku unleashes the Dragon Flash which is a move I only saw him use in some games. I admit it doesn't make much sense for him to suddenly use this massive attack to strangle a giant monster, but I really don't care. It's just cool. ***

I enjoy the DBZ movies, but they usually all have the same flaw...they all could have used about 10 to fifteen minutes of plot development and about five more minutes of battle time. This one is no exception to the rule. Overall I enjoyed, but I thought it could use just a bit more. Here it is nice to see they take a differing approach with the evil foe as this monster is rather large and is not the usually just smaller or just bigger than Goku villain. This monster is about Godzilla size. They also introduce a new hero character as well and he is the main focus for the story part of the movie, the time before the ultimate ending battle. The plot has him and Trunks sort of becoming friends. Of course, this also has the part of the story where our plot is established and it is rather interesting, just needed a bit more to it. Then the last bit of the movie is a rather cool battle featuring many of the DBZ warriors including Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, Goten and Trunks. The battle is rather nifty as the DBZ warriors get knocked around a bit by the behemoth foe. So on the whole it is a good movie just needed about 20 more minutes of play time to it.

Beware of Spoilers!This is a review for the recently released Funimation version. Although the Japanese version is very good. I had to say "wow" when I finished watching it. It has such a great story, and is much more deep than the other movie stories. I was amazed that it was packed into 55 minutes. There are so many great qualities about this final Dbz movie. Great story, Great animation, some character development. The story is thus, Two warriors, Tapion and his young brother, Minosha, destroyed a beast named Hildegarn(Hirudegarn in English version)1000 years ago with magic whistles and contained the whistles along with their bodies inside Music boxes so he could never be released again, and freed their planet from destruction. Hoy, the strange alien who used his powers to bring Hirudegarn to life comes to earth to find a warrior who can open his music box(which contains Tapion) so he can release Hirudegarn again to do his bidding. He acts as if he is innocent, and the z-warriors use the dragonballs to open the box. Later on, Hoy finally manages to release Hirudegarn(I won't tell how) and the Z-warriors come to the scene. Also, the movie tells the story of how Trunk's got his sword, which I think is very cool. Overall, the story is very complex, I had to watch it twice to fully understand it. The final battle sequence is fast, thrilling, and action packed and very satisfying. We get to see most of the Z-warriors fight but Piccolo does not return for this final Dbz film, which sucks. We get to see some Fusion, and SS3. One thing that sucks is Funimation changed some major names like "Dragon Fist" which is changed to "Dragon Fire" which is stupid and pointless. Also there is crappy Gt music in it which does not make it anymore exiting in the battle sequences. Funimation doesn't use bands for the music anymore but they could have used the music similar to what they used in Fusion Reborn. Which was fast paced metal which was pretty awesome. I wouldn't say this is the best Dbz movie though, which a lot of people say, I think The History of Trunks is the best Dbz movie. To conclude, This Dbz film is great in Dub and Japanese and is a great conclusion to the Dbz movies.

You know about that saying "save the best for last?" It's in the case here. There have been good ones(12 and 6) and bad ones(11 and 7). But they're all nothing compared to this one. It has Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, Trunks, Goten, Videl, Bulma, Master Roshi/Kame Sen'nin, and Kuririn of the DBZ cast. It introduces Taipon, and the plot focuses on Trunks quite a bit. I can't say any more without spoiling anything, but it does have some good character development in some of the characters. Of course, the title is Dragonball Z, so of course you're going to see a huge, destructive battle during the second half of the movie, but I'm not spoiling anything! It's too good to reveal any important plot points!BOTTOM LINE: This one's awesome!