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And so, today, we close out our look at the Lions Gate four part Schwartzenegger Collection, a massive array of testosterone-laden shoot-em-ups and assorted ultraviolence, not to mention hours of sheer gleeful fun.  The final nugget in this grandiose collection of firepower and madness is Red Heat, a movie that proves that if you put a second-tier funnyman alongside a first-tier action hero, your end result is best described as a pretty good movie.

In Red Heat, Schwartzenegger plays a diehard Soviet cop (the Soviet Police Department motto: We beat more people with rubber hoses by ten am than most people beat in a lifetime) named Ivan Danko, whose preferred method of getting information seems to be:

1. Beat the hell out of whatever moves
2. Scream instructions at it
3. If it doesn’t move, beat the hell out of it until it does
3a. Once it moves, refer to Rule 1.

Anyway, our diehard Soviet cop is out to find a Russian mob figure by the name of Viktor Roska, only to discover, much to his dismay, that his mob target has gone the way of so many Russians and Eastern Europeans and Western Europeans before him and bugged out for America.

Enter Danko’s newfound partner and American contact, Art Ridzik (James Belushi).  Art’s a tough cop, sure enough, but definitely no match for the sheer automoton rigor Danko’s putting out there.  The two of them find themselves together, hunting down the mob boss and discovering there’s a whole lot more to the situation than either one expected.

Okay, sure–no one’s ever going to mistake this for a documentary on the subject of cooperation between the then-Soviet Union and the Chicago Police Department.  In fact, for when this was shot back in 1985 it was about as ludicrous an idea as they came.  Getting the Soviet police to work with elements of the Unted States was about as easy as keeping Heidi and Spencer out of the tabloids for more than twenty minutes at a stretch.  But what we’ve got here is one of the original buddy cop movies.  They may not be buddies when they start out, but by the time it’s all said and done, they’re buddies, such as it is.  Watching these two, the very definition of cold Soviet order and the very definition of tough American g0-getting tenacity is a surprisingly thrilling experience that will, almost in spite of itself, add some laughs.

We also get that nice, humbling “everyone has something you can learn from” lesson that happens in movies every so often–Denko will teach Art a few new tricks of order and maximum intimidation that Art never even thought possible, while Denko will discover that, sometimes, if you work around the rules you can actually get more done, and more effectively done.

Truly, if you want a movie that’ll not only have you glued to the action and explosions and even a little rear nudity from Schwartzenegger for the ladies, you could do wildly, WILDLY worse than Red Heat.  It’ll offer everything you expect–everything you want!–in an action movie and it’ll do it all in a fashion that will leave you glad you watched.

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Easily one of the biggest movies of the 1990s, indeed, of my childhood, had to have been Terminator 2: Judgment Day.  I personally saw this one several times, and to find it included as part of the four-DVD Schwartzenegger collection was a great and joyous surprise.

Part of the grand, grandiose and steadily growing Terminator saga, Terminator 2: Judgment Day brought us squarely to a sticking point.  With Sarah Connor locked up in Pescadero Mental Hospital, Kyle Reese very dead and John Connor, future leader of the Resistance, currently living with foster parents in Reseda, things don’t exactly look good.  And things only get worse when Skynet decides to pull a little more time travel chicanery and drop a fresh terminator, the T-1000, into the fray to try and take out John Connor.

But all is hardly lost, as a new ally is sent back in time to help out–a T-101 terminator, the classic Schwartzenegger terminator, is sent back to be placed under young John Connor’s command.  And so, John and the terminator must go forth and spring Sarah from Pescadero, but at the same time also repel the T-1000 and survive. Further, they have the highly difficult task of removing every trace of terminator technology from the present day, and that’s going to involve busting into the developers’ headquarters, Cyberdyne Systems, and blasting it to kingdom come.

Sure, it’s not exactly much of a plot, but where Terminator 2: Judgment Day really shines is in its explosion count.  Things are going to blow up so big and so often in this movie that you’ll scarcely notice they don’t actually, you know, DO a whole lot.  There’s not a whole lot of time to bemoan the fact that they didn’t put much into advancing a plot or developing any characters or anything like that because you’re entirely too busy watching Robert Patrick and Arnold Schwartzenegger pound each other.  You’re too busy watching Arnold take on a whole slew of cops with a GE Minigun.  Oh, sure, there’s some plot here, but it’s not like that’s what anyone came here for, a lesson that would serve filmmakers well into the FOURTH installment, and probably in the fifth and sixth installments, too.

This being a special edition of sorts, even going so far as to bear the name “extreme DVD”,  it will not surprisingly come jam-packed with all sorts of nifty extras, including things like a “Skynet Combat Chassis Designer” in which you get to build your own war machine and send it forth in battle,  some photo morphing software and much more normal featurettes and deleted scenes and such.

There’s not a whole lot in this movie that might make anyone regard it as a BAD movie, but then, there’s not a whole lot in here that’d make anyone regard it as a particularly deep and rich movie either.  In fact, this is essentially the beginning of the end for the Terminator franchise, and it’s all downhill from here.  So yes, if you’re into action movies, into science fiction, and just can’t get enough of stuff go boom, then you’re definitely going to love this one, with all it entails.

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I can’t help but be just a little amazed by the special edition release of Total Recall on DVD, thanks to the Schwartzenegger Collection from Lions Gate.  I was downright surprised to see that science fiction from the really early nineties, like as in 1990, can actually still look like science fiction and not like horribly out of date sludge.

This time, Arnold plays a construction worker on Earth who’s always wondered about Mars.  Though Mars is a war zone of rebellion and corruption, Douglas Quaid has always longed to go.  One day, he sees an ad for a company called Rekall, which promises the best vacation you can ever remember having by implanting the memory directly in your mind.  When Quaid goes to Rekall, he starts a series of events that’ll take him back to Mars, where he discovers that he’s not the person he believes he is, but that the person he once was isn’t the person he wants to be any more.  And along the way, he’ll root out conspiracies on a planetary scale and fight to save a planet from enslavement and suffocation.

There’s a lot to like here–plenty of action and halfway decent science fiction, plus some drama and a few laughs along with some really great mindgames.  I have to respect a movie that’s willing to play a game or two with its audience’s minds–that means they think enough of us to make us THINK about what we’re seeing, nice and objective-like.  It’s really interesting to see what you can do with a spy thriller set on another planet.

That having been said, I’ll advise you that I’ve never actually read Philip K. Dick’s piece We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, so I have no real knowledge of how close the movie is to the book.  From what I can tell, however, up until about the last ten, twenty minutes or so the two are at least fairly similar.

Time may have been inordinately kind to Total Recall, but nineteen years make a difference to just about anything.  For instance, take a look at a lot of the electronics around the futuristic Martian base–they’re not made by Toshiba or Sanyo or even Sony.  No, Mars bought American, and bought heavily from Curtis Mathes.  I can’t recall the last time I saw a Curtis Mathes item available outside of a garage sale.

The interesting thing is, even those things which would date Total Recall don’t really get in the way.  The videoconferencing telephones look believable enough, the digging machines look EXACTLY like the kind of things that would bore through large quantities of rock, and I can completely buy that this kind of sleazy activity would be going on on a mining colony operation. The special effects aren’t really that dated, not even Ahhh-nuld’s gutteral random cries of his early career really aren’t that bad.

Total Recall is a great reminder of what we used to enjoy in science fiction, and an excellent object lesson in the kind of science fiction we can still enjoy to this very day.  The special edition version, of course, comes with all sorts of featurettes and assorted whatnot–including a commentary track recorded by Schwartzenegger himself, which is a really rather rare thing.

Rent it or buy it, Total Recall will leave you glad you came.  And it’s definitely worth remembering.

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So only recently, the folks out at Lions Gate released a set of old Schwartzenegger films in a big box set called the Arnold Schwartzenegger collection.  The California governor was in a LOT of movies, so I guess it was really only a matter of figuring out exactly which ones to put in the set.  This is the first of a series of four we’ll be discussing, The Running Man.

Set in a futuristic, heavily dystopian 2019 Los Angeles where the government has pretty much thrown the Constitution clean out the window and no one really cares about things like “rights” or “civil liberties”, TV is king.  And no king is higher than Damon Killian, the host of America’s number one television show, The Running Man.  Set in a massive underground arena created from the big earthquake of 1997, anyone the government doesn’t much like (including hackers, schoolteachers and cops gone rogue) are turned into Runners and dropped therein where they are pursued by agents called Stalkers.  Heavily armed and permitted to kill whoever they find in the maze of tunnels and set pieces, the Runners almost never survive.  Those who do are given incredible prizes, including but not limited to exotic trips and their own freedom.  But as you might well expect, the game isn’t exactly on the level.  Thus, when a group of Runners who have the side goal of taking down the entire goverment are plunged neck-deep into the frenzy that is The Running Man, they discover that it may not be just a fight for their lives…but rather the chance they’ve been waiting for.

First off, this was a Stephen King book.

I say “was” of course, because the resemblance between that and the movie is pretty much purely coincidental.  This is not what Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman) had in mind, so any attempt to judge this movie on the book’s standard will meet with catastrophic failure.

Thankfully, though, despite the fact that they’ve made a butchery out of the translation, what’s left behind is a compelling dystopian sci-fi / action hybrid that doesn’t strain the suspense of disbelief very hard and definitely entertains, albeit in a very much over-the-top fashion.  There’s also some extra relevance here, in a post 9/11 society, not to mention a society that’s increasingly obsessed with reality television, asking some really deep questions like how valuable are our rights and freedoms, and how much of “reality TV” is actually all that real to  begin with?

Philosophical issues aside, there’s really no doubt that The Running Man provides plenty of thrills and action to spare, and despite the fact that it’s well over twenty years old now (twenty TWO, as a matter of fact–ABC used to LOVE this thing for Sunday night movies in a deeply edited form), it still doesn’t even really look that dated.  That may be the biggest surprise of the whole thing, in all honesty–even after twenty-two years, The Running Man still manages to deliver the goods.  If it’s still good after twenty-two years, I can’t help but think it’ll be good for ANOTHER twenty.

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