Do you remember that feeling where you wanted to be a character in a movie? As we grow up, that feeling goes away. Well let me tell you, I can still feel the yearning to be John Matrix that I felt as a 13-year-old. Sure, Conan the Barbarian and The Terminator made many take notice of Arnold. This is the movie that — to me — put him over the top.

Director Mark Lester told Empire, “It’s the granddaddy of action films as we know them today. And Arnold was the reason it got made.”

Who knew that it was originally a movie all about a soldier turning his back on violence? Well, that wasn’t what ended up on the screen. Instead, we have Arnold gleefully getting revenge on all manner of soldiers, thugs, mercs and habitual linesteppers for around 90 minutes of rip-roaring fun.

Yet when the movie starts, John Matrix is happy. He’s in the woods, feeding deer by hand, hanging out with his daughter Alyssa Milano and carrying trees around by himself. Then, after turning down an offer to come back in, a bunch of no-goodniks come on in and take his daughter. Even worse, his old best friend Bennett (Vernon Wells!) is their leader.

Also: Bennett dresses like, well, no one who has ever lived on this earth before. A chain mail sleeveless shirt would be enough, but then he has leather pants and fingerless gloves. It’s as if the entire design staff of Capcom, Data East, Konami and SNK all looked at the screen and said, “This is the blueprint for every fighting game we will ever make.”

Wells is legitimately unhinged in this movie. In that same Empire article, he said “.. I was so hyped to be in the movie, they could have asked me to jump off the Empire State Building and I probably would have. Making Commando was better than anything you could have smoked.”

Wings Hauser was going to play Bennett, which probably would have been awesome too.

This is a movie where Arnold murders between 81-102 people in twenty minutes. There’s a rocket launcher scene that sends me into a fit of hysteria. The hanging dudes off cliffs by their feet. All the wonderous one-liners. And oh yeah, “Let off some steam, Bennett!” You have no clue how many times that scene was rewound while we all screamed the line to one another.

Arnold made two films at Sherman Oaks and that place should have a gold statue of him that we can all genuflect in front of. This movie is a piece of cinema that no one would have the audacity to make today.

Look, when Dan Heyada is the big bad of your film, you’re doing it right.

John Lutz created the story that Single White Female was based on. The Ex is similar territory — a woman over the edge killing everyone to get what she wants. Here, that woman is Yancy Butler, who you may remember from the Witchblade TV series.

One of the people she’s menacing is Suzy Amis, who is now Suzy Amis Cameron. Yes, that Cameron.

Her husband is played by Nick Mancuso of TV’s Stingray, an actor who was once almost Indiana Jones. Here, he’s just as bonkers as the villain of the piece. Actually, everyone outside of the kid is uniformly a pretty bad person in this movie, which makes it that much more enjoyable.

The best part of this movie — and Mark Lester always finds a way, no matter what — is that the music sounds like it’s straight out of a Disney film, even when people are having rough sex or killing one another. It’s really disconcerting and I mean that in absolutely the best of ways. Outside of Mexican VHS horror, I’ve never heard music that less fits a film.

Mark Lester knows exactly what you want and gives it to you. Let me set a scene in this film for you: Brandon Lee, dressed in a natty suit, joins Dolph Lungren — who is dressed as if he walked straight off the set of a Data East beat ’em up —  to walk into a bar where old men are eating sushi off of nude models while two slightly less nude women fight sumo style atop tables. Meanwhile, on a stage that looks like the Fortress of Solitude, Tia Carrere sings “Slow Hand.”

To top that off, there’s a scene where evil Iron Claw Yakuza boss Funekei Yoshida (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) kills Angel by cutting her head off while engaging in foreplay as his underlings watch. And when they find her headless body? Yep. That’s the church from Prince of Darkness.

No movie has had meaner bad guys more worthy of being killed by two cooler cops. You have Chris Kenner (Dolph Lundgren), an American raised in Japan, teaming with Japanese/America Johnny Murata (Brandon Lee). While they hate one another at first, they soon become great partners and murder everyone who gets in their way to solve the case.

There’s also a bonkers scene where Kenner rescues Tia’s character from committing seppuku by tackling her through a plate glass window. There is no subtlety here.

Somehow, the Iron Claw has united the Crips, the Mexican gangs and the Hell’s Angels. And if you wondered, where is Professor Toru Tanaka? He’s right here.

This is a movie self-aware enough to have Brandon Lee’s character say, “You have the biggest dick I’ve ever seen on a man,” while also having the most over the top action sequences to ever be released straight to the shelves of your local video store and a body count of 58.

After being disappointed by Warner Brothers taking over this film and cutting eleven minutes, Lester started to finance and sell his movies himself to keep control over them. Good for him.

While a sequel to Class of 1999, none of the storylines cross over from that film. There is, however, flashback footage on hand to help pad out the running time and give some vague remembrance of what has gone on before.

This movie is the very definition of a “the store’s closing, you better grab something” VHS rental era pick.

John Bolen — no relation to my old roommate and TNA Gut Check winner — is the new substitute teacher in Bend, Oregon. He beats up some punks for skipping class and when another teacher threatens to narc on him, he breaks the guy’s neck. John is played by Sasha Mitchell, who was Cody Lambert on Step by Step.

While obviously one of the androids from the last movie, John can still fall in love with a fellow teacher and go to war with a museum currator played by Nick Cassavetes (The Wraith).

There is also much paintballing and a year before Monica Lewinsky mention that Clinton had been indicted.

Originally called Class of 2001: The Substitute, this was directed by Spiro Razatos, who is still doing stunt work on this day on movies like the new Fast and the Furious and the Marvel films.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The beginning of this movie takes on an Escape from New York feel, informing the audience that violence in American high schools is out of control. With most major cities being controlled by gangs, schools have shut down or become basically military camps.

Yes, Class of 1999 does something few movies have ever done. It takes a mostly realistic first movie and then goes completely off the rails, placing the sequel in a near-post apocalyptic future.

Seattle’s Kennedy High School is in the middle of a free fire zone, a place that the police don’t dare to intervene. So the Department of Education Defense (D.E.D.) and MegaTech head Dr. Bob Forrest (Stacy Keach, magnificent) have decided to use the school to test their new breed of teachers: Coach Bryles, Mr. Hardin and Ms. Connors (Pam Grier!). With delinquents being allowed back into the school, these android teachers are fully prepared and willing to use deadly force to keep horseplay to a minimum.

This is the story that hero Cody Culp (Bradley Gregg, Fire In the Sky) must conquer. Or at least survive. His love interest is played by Traci Lind, who was also in Fright Night Part 2. She retired from acting at a young age and made claims that was abused by her ex-boyfriend Dodi Fayed. Yes, the same man who died with Princess Di.

Between the Razorheads and Blackhearts gang war, robotic teachers unleashing flamethrowers and trying to protect his old friends, Cody has a lot of work on his hands. I mean, his kid brother Angel (Joshua John Miller, Homer from Near Dark) gets killed and there’s a letter in blood written on his trademark basketball.

Every single person in this movie is ridiculous and I say that in absolutely the kindest way. This movie is entertaining from the moment it starts. Punk rock future gang wars? A Terminator version of Pam Grier? Malcolm McDowell as a school principal? An albino mad scientist Stacy Keach? Yes. This movie has that and so much more.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The magic of a Mark Lester movie is that they start with a typical set-up — Lou Diamond Philips is a young cop who becomes part of a vigilante unit — but ends up being way better than it seems like it could ever really be.

Think movies getting delayed are a COVID-19 thing? The LA riots kept this out of theaters and it finally debuted on HBO all the way back in 1993.

The best thing about Lester’s films is that he knows how to cast. Sure, he’s pretty much remaking Magnum Force, but in addition to Phillips, he’s got a berserk Scott Glenn talking to a photo of his dead wife while pointing a gun at it, Yaphet Kotto dressing in what I can only assume are his own sartorial choices, former Solid Gold dancer and Teela actress Chelsea Field (yes, she’s also in Lester’s Commando, as well as Prison, Death Spa, Dust Devil and Sleeping Dogs Lie, a movie that dares to team the drummer of Rage Against the Machine with Ed Asner), Andrew Divoff (The Djinn from Wishmaster!), Stephen Root (one of my all-time favorite character actors) and Ed Lauter (Death Wish 3).

According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, the producers of this movie were the subject of intense surveillance by the Special Investigation Section during the making of the film. They used a real cop bar and the real logo of the cop group, but the SIS continues to earn a high-profile arrest record without incidents like this movie.

In any other movie, Phillips and Glenn’s battle would be the dramatic close, but here it’s out of control, with Glenn coldcocking our hero’s wife before getting launched through a plate glass window. I screamed at the TV I was so excited. You may do the same.

This was Bob Shaye’s — and New Line Cinema’s — first full-length production after a decade as a pure distribution company. Director Mark Lester would tell The Pink Smoke, “They were distributing Truck Stop Women to college campuses and they already had a script, so I was hired to direct it. We hired Robert Forster because he had done Medium Cool. Don Stroud was supposed to star in it but he got into a motorcycle accident the night before shooting.”

The film starts with the death of one of Greg Wilson, one of its stuntmen, who was set up. His brother Glen (Forster) arrives on the set, along with B.J. Parswell (Fiona Lewis!), a reporter who wants to write about the danger of the stunt game. The minute Glen gets there he gets hit on by the producer’s wife (Candice Rialson, in one of her last roles; she’s also great in pretty much everything she ever did, like Chatterbox, Hollywood Boulevard and Moonshine County Express).

Glen joins the stunt team of the film, who all promise one another that if anyone gets hurt, they’ll always pull the plug for one another, predating Dr. Kevorkian by several years. Screw the law. We’re stuntmen!

One of the people that have to get the plug pulled on them is Chuck, played by Bruce Glover, always a welcome sight. He’s married to Joanna Cassidy, who is — again, you’re going to get this a lot with this cast — astounding in everything I’ve ever seen her in. In this one, more than aardvarking with Crispin’s dad in a waterbed in the back of a custom van, she’s punching the faces of an entire bar of rednecks.

The death keeps coming, as Paul (Ray Sharkey? This is like a B&S About Movies dream cast and it gets even better) gets trapped in a burning building. That means that our hero has to finish the film, figure out who the killer is and get some revenge.

Former pro wrestler Hard Boiled Haggerty shows up, as does Richard Lynch. And you know how I feel about Mr. Lynch and the fact that he can make any movie better just by walking on set. Suffice to say he does way more than saunter on here.

This is why we’re doing an entire week of Mark Lester’s films. He knows how to get a story told, gather the right people to help tell it and get out of the way. He’s never let me down yet.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime or YouTube.

“When does a dream become a nightmare?
When do we learn to live with fear?
When we cry out for some salvation?
Why is it no one seems to hear?”

When your movie has an Alice Cooper theme song and exudes punk rock menace, you get my attention. Mark Lester’s 1982 kids against teachers drive-in epic boasts a Tom Holland story (he co-scripted as well) and a truly no future mindset.

Andrew Norris (Perry King) has come to a new school to teach music, but he’ll soon learn that this is a war. That fact is continually taught to him by Terry Corrigan (Roddy McDowall, always perfect), an older teacher who carries a gun.

The teachers are more babysitters and cops than educators. When they’re up against the gang led by Peter Stegman (Timothy Van Patten), there’s really no way that they can win.

These kids are absolutely the worst human beings ever, like movie serial villains in punk fashions. Things reach a climax when Terry’s beloved animals are murdered, sending him into a suicidal rage. And then, somehow that is topped when the gang assaults Andrew’s wife and places a polaroid of it on his podium right before a band concert. Can it get more insane? Sure. Terry and Peter fistfight on the roof, ending with the offending young person goes crashing through a window, being hung as the entire band concert watches.

Let me explain how crazy that is in real life, because the wife who gets so abused is played by Merrie Lynn Ross, Lester’s wife.

This movie is packed with stars. And by stars, I mean people only I care about like Stefan Arngrim from Fear No Evil, Keith Knight from Meatballs and My Bloody Valentine and Lisa Langlois from Happy Birthday to Me and Deadly Eyes. Oh yeah. Some guy named Michael J. Fox is in this too.

By the way, if the police station seems familiar, that’s because it was the same one as Black Christmas. And Van Patten was a renaissance man on this movie, as he wrote the concerto his character performs and even made Drugstore’s graffiti-covered shirt. He still is, as he’s the director making the new Perry Mason series on HBO.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi.