Thursday, May 10, 2012

bad/awesome flixxx review: Total Recall (1990)


"You ever fuck a mutant?" - Benny


"What's bullshit Mr. Quaid? Afraid to admit that you're having a schizo paranoid episode, or are you really an invincible secret agent from Mars, who is in the middle of an interplanetary conspiracy to make him think that he's a lonley construction worker." - Dr. Edgemar


"Perfect, my ass! You pop your memory cap before we can activate you. Richter goes hog-wild screwing up everything that I spent a year planning. Frankly... I'm amazed it worked!" - Cohaagen


Now THIS is an action flick.  Twists, turns, you think you have it figured out, and then they switch it up on you at the last minute.  $100 bucks says the remake this summer is dogshit compared to this classic sci-fi gem brought to you by the mind of Philip K. Dick.  Made from his short story, "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", this is probably the best flick Arnold ever made.  Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sharon Stone, and Michael Ironside in TOTAL RECALL!!! 





This is what killer sci fi is made of my friends.  Again, I DO NOT plan to go see the remake.  And unlike a lot of my broskeetos, I don't usually have a problem with remakes.  This however is one that does not appeal to me.  Why try to remake perfection.  There are so many movies that NEED a facelift, this I do not consider one of them.  Some may say, well isn't this vloggg dedicated to BAD movies, and I say, no, this vloggg is dedicated to BAD/AWESOME movies.  There's an inherent difference.  Now, down to the nitty gritty:  Douglas Quaid dreams that he's on Mars every night with this hot brunette chick.  He wakes up freaking out in the bed with a hot ass blonde (Stone).  He's a construction worker on Earth who wants to do more with his life.  His blonde chick is holding him back.  The shit is going down on Mars.  There are "terrorists" there who are fucking shit up because the people don't have enough air.  There is a guy there who controls the fans, and Quaid wants to go work on the Pyramid Mines up there.  After a while, they shut down the mines because they say they found some kind of alien artifacts.


Quaid decides since his old lady won't let him go that he may visit this place called "Rekall" that will implant memories in your head of a killer vacation you've taken.  His buddy from work tells him not to do it and says a friend had to get a lobotomy from it.  Quaid acts concerned, but is still psyched on easing his desire to go by convincing himself he's already been.  So he goes and opts for the spy package.  When they go to sedate him, he has a fucking freakout and the technicians call in the head dude to help subdue him.  He screaming that they've blown his cover, and the head dude is calling his technicians idiots, that obviously he's just reacting to the spy program, and the one chick tells him that they haven't even given him the program yet, and that she believes his memory has already been wiped, and they figure they shouldn't be fucking with him.  The head dude says, fuck it, erase his memory of even coming there, and throw his ass in a cab.  So they do, and Quaid wakes up in a robocab not knowing where he is.  He gets out and his buddy from work tries to assassinate with some other dudes and Quaid just murders all of them.  He runs home freaking out and his wife tries to soothe his freakout, and he goes to pee.  When he comes outta the shitter, she tries to kill him confirming that his whole life is a cover that someone has built to hide something from him.  He kicks her ass, and then some dudes that are obviously bad guys are sent to get him and he sees them on a screen and splits.  He ditches them in the subway, but they've got a bug on him.  In a hotel, someone gets him a briefcase.  The briefcase is a computer with a recorded message from himself informing him that his name is really Hauser and he tells himself how to pull the bug out of his nose.  He tells himself to get the fuck to Mars in a hurry, because the main guy Cohaagen is his old boss, and they wiped his memory because of some secrets he knows.
So Quaid goes to Mars, dressing up like a weird old funky mom.  His cover is blown when the suit's voice box starts studdering and he has to bolt outta there.  He goes to a section of town where the rebels hang out and is taken there by a cabbie dude who keeps showing up.  The brunette chick is there and is his old lover named Melina.  She is pissed at him cuz she thinks he split on her and was a double agent.  He tries to explain but she ain't having it.  He leaves to find his old wife and a guy who says he's the director of Rekall and that he has to take a pill so that he can come back to reality.  They tell him he's having a freakout and if he doesn't take the pill, he'll be stuck in his own mind forever.  He sees sweat beading on the doc's forehead, says fuck it and shoots the guy in the brain.  BADASS.  Him and Melina go back to the rebel hideout and she takes him to see the rebel leader, the mysterious Quato.  In retaliation, Cohaagen has the vents turned off so that the rebels begin to run out of air.


Quato ends up being a little midget growth mutant off of one of the dudes.  The mutants are just a bunch of the sons and daughters of the first Earthlings who moved to Mars were exposed to radiation pretty much caused by Cohaagen.  Quato does some Jedi shit on Quaid reading his mind.  Then Benny the cabbie turns out to be a bad guy and he shoots Quato in his brain and lets the other bad guys in.  Too late though, Quaid knows his secrets.  The alien shit they found in the mine is a giant reactor that the aliens built to melt the ice in the center of Mars so that the atmosphere would be like Earth's, and it looks like it's supposed to be Quato's hand that starts it.  Cohaagen knew all about this shit, but he's in the 1% and doesn't want the 99% to be able to breath or pay back their loans or basically have anything to show for a life's worth of work and misery.  Turns out Hauser was in the whole thing and to prove it, Cohaagen shows Quaid and Milena a video of Quaid/Hauser acting like a total dickhead and laughing at how he tricked himself.  So Cohaagen orders them to turn Quaid back into Hauser, but Quaid doesn't want to be a dickhead anymore, so he breaks free, rescues Milena, and they kill a bunch of the bad guys, and head for the reactor.  Coohagen is up at the reactor and tells them not to touch it because if they do, they'll kill everyone.  Quaid knows he's full of shit and tries to anyway, but Cohaagen says he'll blow up a bomb.  Quaid blows it up on purpose, opening a hole to the outside which starts sucking everything outside.  Cohaagen gets sucked out and his tongue and eyeballs explode and he dies.  Quaid tries and tries and finally touches the reactor to turn it out, but is still sucked out.  Him and Melina are sure to die of the same fate, but - (and this is a HUGE stretch of the imagination) the air starts shooting violently out of the pyramid mountain and exploding gas into the air.  This bursts the windows in the Mars colony, and SUPER RAPIDLY changes the atmosphere into one that humans can breathe in.  This is the most completely suspect part of the flick essentially because let's say this could actually happen, there is no way in hell that the air would change to oxygen so fast that right before their eyes they'd see everything turn to blue skies, and Quaid and Melina would have time to NOT DIE.  I call bullshit on that part, but other than that, this is the good shit.  Should you see it?  You already should have dudes (and dudettes).  DID I FORGET TO MENTION THAT THERE'S A CHICK IN THE MOVIE WITH THREE TITTIES????  THERE'S A CHICK IN THE MOVIE WITH THREE TITTIES!!!!  THAT'S BASICALLY THE BEST PART.


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