Movie Trick #1:

Torque star speeds through desert on sports bike.

Reality check: It was a dirt bike with fake panels

Movie Magic #2:

Charlie's Angel star avoids bullet mid-summersault

Reality check: It's a computer-generated special effect

I was infected with the biking bug early in life and I don't think there's a cure for it. My parents think I am a lost cause.

When I got my first motorcycle, they ordered me to return it. I refused, saying I would be a responsible biker.

There was nothing my parents could do to save their son.

I'm not the only sufferer, as other bikers will probably have similar stories to relate.

I remember watching the movie ET in primary school and deciding then that I was going to lead a life on two wheels.

The stunts performed on Kuwahara BMX bicycles in that movie are still fresh in my mind.

Perhaps ET riding into the night sky with the moon in the background was a little exaggerated.

But back then, I couldn't tell which stunts were real or which had been staged.

Now I'm getting better at telling them apart. I realise that as my biking knowledge increases, I'm able to weed out fact from fiction.

In the movie Black Rain, there was a scene in which Michael Douglas, playing a disgraced cop, chases a Yakuza boss. Both men were riding two-stroke dirt bikes with the tell-tale smoky silencers.

So the 'vroom-vroom' from the cinema's speakers didn't gel with what I was seeing. The two-stroke machines were supposed to sound like buzzing mosquitoes, not roar like voracious four-stroke V-twin motorcycles.

Another movie worth mentioning is Torque, which starred Martin Henderson and Ice Cube.

In it, the leader of a bike gang (Ice Cube) vows to kill the man (Henderson) he thinks killed his brother.

In one scene, Henderson, on a sports bike, is chased across a desert by Ice Cube's gang, also on sports bikes. The scene looks convincing.

But any biker worth his spark plug knows a sport bike's suspension would never be able to absorb the punishing bumps of a desert terrain.

When I asked Henderson about this in an interview for the launch of the film in Singapore, he seemed surprised.

He said something like: 'Oh yes, we had to use dirt bikes dressed with fairings to make them look like sports bikes. Do you work for some motorcycle magazine, man?'

Henderson knew I had caught his bluff. But I realised this movie was not to be taken too seriously.

To free to be true

Free-style motocross (FMX) stunts are making their presence felt in many movies these days.

Movies like Charlie's Angel Full Throttle and Triple X feature stunts that would thrill FMX enthusiasts.

But half the stunts performed in Full Throttle's coal pit scene, in which motocrossers race against each other, were comically far out. One of the Angels avoided a bullet by summersaulting onto another motorcycle - while airborne.

The guy firing the gun was also upside down in the air.

Yes, it's entertaining.

But what you call thrilling I call comedy.

Local FMX boys will tell you that it's basically impossible to perform such stunts.

You could end up killing yourself.

Yet, what you see on the big screen may inspire an adrenalin junkie somewhere to think up a totally new jaw-dropping stunt.

A few years ago, nobody thought a double-back flip on a motorcycle was possible.

Last year, FMX rider Travis Pastrana made motocross history and proved everyone wrong when he executed one up at the X-Games XII at Spokane, Washington.

Making stunts look believable in movies requires riders who are talented - and special-effects guys to digitally make it appear seamless.

Most movies that include bike scenes contain a blend of both raw stunts and clever digital manipulation.

It's when computer power dominates that the stunts lose their credibility.

Now, let's hope that new riders don't mistake movie magic for reality.

On the big screen, the heroes who immediately crash get up and still look like a million dollars.

On real roads, they may not survive.