Total Recall
Dir: Paul Verhoeven
1990
*****
It really didn't take long for Paul Verhoeven's Sci-fi action Total Recall to become regarded as a bonafied classic and for very good reason. Total Recall should really be classed as a guilty pleasure but when a film is this universally loved, there doesn't seem much point feeling guilty or pretending it's not your thing. Sci-fi snobbery will have you believe it to be an inferior impostor in the genre, purely because it is very loosely based on a Philip K. Dick short called We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. I'm a huge Philip K. Dick fan and while this is pretty far from his original idea, it's still pretty damn good and actually that little bit more exciting. It is cheesy as hell, exactly what you'd expect from a Paul Verhoeven/Arnold Schwarzenegger team up. It's got brilliant special effects, animatronics and make up, it's got a midget with a machine gun, a woman with three boobs, a robot taxi driver, a man with a face on his chest and all the one-liners you could ever want in a movie. There is a cool scene where Michael Ironside looses another limb too, but actually that's pretty standard for him and probably in his contract. It's action at it's most colourful and Sci-fi at it's silliest, impossible not to love.