Total Recall (1990)

With the lady out trying on wedding dresses or putting in some hours at work or something, the lonely bachelor's life continues for me right into Saturday. After spending a couple hours whipping this apartment into a respectably clean man cave - dishes, tidying, trash, laundry, A/C window unit removal, and throwing all sorts of shit we don't need away (don't tell her!) - I settled down with a beer and Total Recall. Did you guys know I'd never actually seen Total Recall until now? The recent remake's release made me realize that I'd never seen what is either the last great action movie of the '80s or the first great one of the '90s (depending on whether you're going by when it was made or when it was released). My hunch is that everyone else out there reading this has seen Total Recall, but just in case that's not true, allow me to chime in with some brief thoughts.

First of all, hey, that was a pretty interesting premise. A hundred years in the future, we've colonized Mars (but we're still using cathode ray TVs and monitors - oh, how I love dated visions of the future!) and we've also perfected the science of adjusting people's memories. What all of this leads to is Arnold Schwarzenegger abandoning his fake wife to head to Mars (for the first time? or has he been there before? who knows!?) for reasons that seem to be partially based on thrill-seeking, but also partially based on a sense of duty of some kind. When he gets there he meets a prostitute in a red light district full of mutants (including the famous three-boobed alien girl) and the prostitute turns out to be his old flame. So, yes. Yes, Arnold's been to Mars before, and he was brainwashed into thinking he hadn't been! The plot ramps up into a typical but still entertaining "stop the evil man from implementing his evil plan!" story where Arnold and his hooker flame blow bullet holes into the foreheads of like three dozen henchmen before finally confronting the big bad himself, atop some giant pyramid mine structure. The result? Death to the bad guy, love for Arnold and his whore, and... the terraformation of Mars? Hey, it was 1990. I'll let it slide.

I'll leave you with this ten-minute loop of the main villain's death scene, in which he gasps for air and undergoes instant decompression sickness on the surface of Mars. Look, I don't need to see the remake to know that nothing in it can live up to this:

(The video won't embed, so just click here. You won't regret it.)