06. Total Recall (1990)

Based on the short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale by Philip K Dick, Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall takes the basic premise and goes its own way. Telling the story of a bored construction worker who decides to spice up his life by going in to Rekall Inc a company specializing in implanting memories of vacations to places people could never afford to go. Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) runs into problems when during the course of the procedure to implant memories of a trip to Mars as a super spy,  the technicians find that he already has a memory implant and he may very well have already been to Mars. What follows is a chase based adventure as Quaid goes to Mars, hooks up with a group of resistance fighters trying to usurp the power of the evil Cohaagen (Ronny Cox) and his henchman Richter (Michael Ironside). The trick with Total Recall is you are always off balance and are never sure what is real and what is part of an implant. The twists and turns revolve around double crosses and no one is to be trusted, not even Quaid himself. The action and special effects are awesome and were cutting edge for the time and generally still hold up today. That would be enough to make this worthwhile but the complex plot with the mind bending twists elevate it from being just another sci-fi actioner into a genre classic. It also has awesome mutants like the dwarf with the pointy forehead, the hooker with the three tits and whatever the hell Kuato was. Seriously, how do you get better than a hooker with three boobs and a little fetus looking guy popping out of another guy’s stomach?

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