Producer Ronald Shusett purchased the rights to science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s 1966 story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” for $1,000 after reading it in the April 1966 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Renaming it to Total Recall, he wrote the script with Dan O’Bannon to write the script. After studios considered their script filled with too many special effects to be filmable, they went on to make Alien. The script was sold to Dino De Laurentiis’s De Laurentiis in 1982 and went through nearly a decade of developmental hell.

All manner of directors were suggested — Richard Rush, David Cronenberg, Lewis Teague, Russell Mulcahy and Fred Schepisi — and the script was written and rewritten as the budget went up and down. Cronenberg wanted to make a movie like Dick’s story; Shusett and De Laurentiis wanted “Raiders of the Lost Ark goes to Mars.”

At some point — probably while working on Raw Deal — Arnold Schwarzenegger became aware of Total Recall and wanted to be in it. Following De Laurentiis’ bankruptcy, he convinced Carolco Pictures to buy the rights. Arnold had substantial power: he retained Shusett as a screenwriter and co-producer alongside producer Buzz Feitshans, and oversaw script revisions, casting decisions and set construction himself, taking home $10 million and 15% of the profits (it made $261.4 million on an $80 million budget, so Arnold did more than fine).

Schwarzenegger hired Paul Verhoeven as the director and there were thirty rewrites before filming started. All in all, there were sixteen years in development, seven directors, four co-writers and forty script drafts before shooting began. The filming was filled with injuries and illnesses, as nearly everyone dealt with dust inhalation on set, as well as food poisoning and gastroenteritis.

To keep things from getting too rough, Arnold was a prankster on set, arranging water gun fights and throwing parties for the crew who were all working long six day weeks. Co-star Michael Ironside had a sick sister; Schwarzenegger helped him stay in regular contact with her using his personal phone in the days before everyone had mobile phones. He later discovered that Arnold was also regularly calling his sister to check on her health.

Douglas Quaid (Schwarzenegger) is a man stuck on Earth who dreams of Mars, a place that he can finally see thanks to Rekall, a company that sends people on VR vacations thanks to implanted memories. But then what is reality? Is it what Quaid sees in his dreams? Or is everything after Rekall — his wife (Sharon Stone) being an evil agent and his true love actually being a Martian freedom fighter named Melina (Rachel Ticotin ) — just part of the vacation? I’ve wondered that so many times since I first saw this and like to experience the movie in different mindsets.

Between Ronny Cox playing another rich old man — Vilos Cohaagen — and Michael Ironside as Richter, his main soldier, this movie has a great collection of bad guys who are fighting to keep all the air from the people. And when it gets to Mars, there’s a really interesting world waiting.

It also feels like a Cannon movie because its politics — you can see it as an anti-corporation and revolutionary story — are muddled with the idea of Mars getting Arnold as its white savior. It has so many agendas along with a huge body count. I think too much about movies and the theory of Neal King — Quaid learns that he was living a lie, that he can change his life and yet because any good deeds that he performs are the result of who he was programmed to be, his free will is an illusion — obsesses me.

Like all Verhoeven movies, what appears to be escapist and empty ends up being filled with questions and revelations.

Arnold’s commentary on this movie is the best thing he’s ever created:

EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally appeared on the site on February 24, 2020.

Arrow Video put out José Ramón Larraz’s Edge of the Axe earlier this year and I loved every minute of it. While Deadly Manor isn’t quite as good, it’s still plenty strange. Just when you’re lulled into near-sleep by the numbers slasher plot, something absolutely and wonderfully bizarre happens, like the flashback to the bikers causing the accident or shocking nude photos of living, dead and perhaps not so dead people that show up throughout the film. Seriously, if nudity bothers you, this is not the movie for you.

On their way to a lake that no one can pronounce, some kids pick up a drifter with a dark past — don’t they all have those — and head to an abandoned mansion that has a car shrine up front, coffins in the basement and a closet full of scalps. And oh yeah — the same gorgeous yet evil woman has a photo up every few inches.

Everybody is soon about to be snuffed, but you knew that just from the first few seconds of the movie.

Greg Rhodes is in this movie and Ghosthouse, which would make a great movie to pair this up with if you’re looking for a fun evening. Jerry Kernion, who is Peter, has had a pretty nice career after this debut. And Jennifer Delora, who is pretty fun as the killer, was the second woman in Miss America history to be dethroned after her nude scenes in Bad Girls Dormitory became fodder for those easily upset. She’s also in all manner of genre favorites like Robot Holocaust, Suburban Commando, Bedroom Eyes II and Frankenhooker.

Seriously — hang out for the first hour or so of this movie. You’ll be rewarded with something really special when it comes to the final girl and the last twenty minutes or so.

As always, Arrow has gone all out for a movie that not many people were all that concerned about. So what! This features a new 2K scan, interviews with actress Jennifer Delora, Brian Smedley-Aston and Larraz (archival, not new, as he died in 2013) and a trailer for the Savage Lust VHS release. There’s also a commentary track with Kat Ellinger and Samm Deighan.

You can buy Deadly Manor from Arrow Video, who were kind enough to send us a review copy. You can also watch this film on Tubi.

Sean Thompson (Chad McQueen) and Billie Blake (Cynthia Rothrock) have come up against drug runner and car smuggler Dalton Rhodes (David Carradine), who may also be killing all of his competition with his deadly kung fu death touch known as dim-mak. Complicating matters? Sean’s brother Michael (Andy McCutcheon) is working for Rhodes.

Director Steve Dalton was on second unit for Invasion U.S.A., The Midnight Hour, The Goonies and I, Madman before directing ten Billy Joel videos. Richard Brandes, who wrote this, also wrote Party Line so I’m instantly a fan of whatever he chooses to make.

Rhodes has some memorable associates and criminal contemporaries like Professor Toru Tanaka, John Fujioka (Shinyuki from American Ninja), Tony Longo (who teamed with the Undertaker in Suburban Commando) and Vincent Craig Dupree (the boxing Julius from Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.

It also has Chad McQueen undercover as a Domino’s driver, so it has that going for it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

How — when movies have the opportunity to do reshoots and change angles and not be live — do films make wrestling look cheaper and worse than it is in real life?

Directed and written by Beverly and Ferd Sebastian (the makers of The Hitchhikers, ‘Gator Bait and Rocktober Blood), this movie stars Jan MacKenzie from ‘Gator Bait 2: Cajun Justice as Luscious Lisa, a rookie wrestler due to go up against Magnificent Mimi (Mimi Lesseos) after being trained by Pattie (Sue Sexton) for the very real world of pro wrestling.

MacKenzie is also Beverly and Fred’s daughter and their son Ben also wrote the script with them, so I wonder what exactly they were thinking when they had a scene inserted — pun intended — of their daughter’s character working a naked no holds barred post-match match with promoter Diamond Dave.

If you loved 90s women’s wrestling, MacKenzie was really Luscious Lisa in GLOW, where Trudy Adams (Pam) also appeared as Amy the Farmer’s Daughter. Other GLOW favorites like California Doll, Tiffany Million, Envy and Big Bad Mama are also on hand, while Sexton and Black Venus were both long-time wresters. And if you watched WCW Nitro, you definitely recognize Lee Marshall’s voice.

Meanwhile, Lisa’s grandfather (Robert D. Bergen) was once a wrestler named Killer Kane whose finishing hold “The Snap” killed a man just like Ox Baker’s Heart Punch. So yeah, there’s a lot of drama in this and even more cheesecake, which the born-again Sebastians tried to square up reel by having a sermon at the end of the movie, which is quite a juxtaposition but God does move in very mysterious ways.

Speaking of mysterious things, who did the absolutely berserk audio mixing in this movie?

More remake than sequel, Alligator II starts with rich villain Vincent Brown (Steve Railsback) dumps some of the Future Chemicals into the sewers which goes right to the baby alligator from the end of Alligator.

Detective David Hodges (Joseph Bologna) and his wife Chris (Dee Wallace, forever battling against eco horror) realize that all the parts of people are coming from an alligator and try to get a big party at Brown’s casino on the lake cancelled, but you know how it goes. When your mayor is Major Healey from I Dream of Jeannie (Bill Dailey), these things happen. Actually, watching movies where small minded governments ignore ecological terror and shout down people and ruin lives really feels on topic. Maybe a bit too much.

With Hodges and Officer Rich Harmon (Woody Brown) on one side and alligator hunter “Hawk” Hawkins (Richard Lynch!) and his team, which includes his brother Billy (Kane Hodder!) on the other, you know that there’s going to be a lot of people torn apart and wolfed down.

What I did not expect was the lengthy pro wrestling scene which is filled with movie and wrestling crossover actors, like Professor Toru Tanaka, Alexis Smirnoff, Chavo Guerrero, Count Billy Varga, Gene LeBell and Bill Anderson. The man who would be the next Hulk Hogan, Tom Magee, is also here as a strongman that gets launched by the alligator’s tail.

Director Jon Hess made Watchers, while writer Curt Allen wrote Bloodstone. This movie is pure junk in the best of ways, just scene and people chewing, Richard Lynch breaking down over the loss of his crew and rocket launches against a monstrous alligator. Watch it in the pool.

Shakma was played by a baboon named Typhoon and I should really just end this article here because I can’t top that.

Christopher Atkins has left The Blue Lagoon behind and now has a pet baboon named, well, Shakma. For some reason, he trusts his college professor Sorensen (Roddy McDowall) enough to inject his pet with some hormones to limit its aggression. This goes horribly wrong and Shakma goes, well, ape shit. I know, I know, baboon shit. Sorensen then tells Atkins’ character that he will euthanize Shakma.

So after all that, after a man killed his baboon, Atkins’ character Sam, his sister Kim (Ari Meyers) and his friends Gary, Bradley, Richard and Tracy (Amanda Wyss) all LARP with Sorensen in his real life roleplaying game and wait, this guy just — let me highlight this — killed the hero’s pet who is just a few steps down evolutionary-wise from being human.

These morons then trust a man way too old to be playing games with them to take out the fire alarms and lock them in the same building where a not-so-dead — and even more red ass enraged — Shakma just wants murder.

A movie filled with some of the absolutely most brainless characters ever, Shakma wipes out everyone. You’ll yell stuff like “Shakma is an animal, how can it cut the power?” and watch this with the knowledge that they made the baboon legit mental by continually saying its name, like some weird pro wrestling heat, and Amanda Wyss was quite rightly afraid of even being close to the belligerent baboon.

I can’t even oversell the main fact of this movie: every human in it is the dumbest human you will ever see. God bless Shakma for having the sense to take them down.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Shot at the same time as Killer Crocodile and directed by Giannetto De Rossi (who also directed Cy Warrior but is mainly known for special effects on films like Zombi, The Humanoid, Dune, High Tension and more than sixty other movies. He co-wrote the film with the producer — and director of the original — Fabrizio De Angelis and Dardano Sacchetti.

Ennio Girolami is back as the hunter known as Joe and Richard Anthony Crenna is on hand again as Kevin, the environmentalist turned croc killer, as a second mutated reptile starts eating everyone it can get its jaws on.

They’ve come to the swamps of the Caribbean with reporter Liza (Debra Karr) as she investigates bad businessman Mr. Baxter, who doesn’t see why radioactive waste is a detriment to the holiday resort he’s just opened.

This one is filled with padding — lots of flashbacks to the first movie — but it makes up for that by having the titular monster go through the wall of a house to get at people, then eat a nun and top that by snacking on a whole bunch of kids. Nobody is safe and the body count comes in at 21, which is pretty respectable.

You can get this with the original movie from Severin or watch Killer Crocodile 2 on Tubi.

With a subtitle of Yo Soy La Ley (I Am the Law) — a title it was re-released under a year later — the fourth Siete en la Mira film moves away from the gang on gang violence to just featuring two killing machines. Roberto “Flaco” Guzman (a man with more than 200 credits, mostly from the VHS era in which he poses with a revolver on the cover; he also directed 1989’s Pánico en el bosque, a movie that ups the video box ante by having a woman with long white hair holding a machete in one hand and a man’s severed head in the other) is Tulio Rodriguez, an absolutely ruthless murderer who teams up with Lorena Herrera’s female assassin. Herrera was a model who won the famous “Look of the Year” content in Mexico, then became an actress in movies like this, Policía Secreto and Octagon and Mascara Sagrada in Fight to the Death before finding her way to being a pop singer and telenovela star.

They’re opposed by Jorge Reynoso (Siete En La Mira 2: La Furia De La Venganza) who is one of those tough Mexican guys who shrugs off multiple bullets and keeps on coming. Both the heroes and usually the main villains of these violent Mexican films are able to do as if they were Miguel Myers.

This movie has some harrowing — and therefore entertaining — moments, like when a man about to be lynched has the stage beneath him destroyed piece by piece or when a child interrupts Tulio assaulting his mother and shoots him in the eye with a BB rifle. Tulio then shoots the mother — who he’d just been inside — once to drop her and then another time in the head before unloading an entire clip into her now dead body. There’s also the sight of the short and somewhat chubby 56-year-old Guzman making sweet love to the 23-year-old  Herrera who is quite literally a statuesque vision. Maybe there’s hope for all of us.

There’s no hope for most of the people in this movie, because everyone gets shot repeatedly and that’s the ones who were lucky. The end has the three leads exchanging gunfight before Tulio gets shot in every appendage, kind of like some wild Catholic saint painting that you’d stare at and wonder why religion often indulges in such bloodlust, all before he dies and falls directly into an already dug grave.

Damián Acosta Esparza, who also made the third movie in this series, made El Violador Infernal, a movie that still makes my heart race, and thirty other movies with words like trágico, sangre, muerte and venganza in the title.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Bikers battle punks with Fernando Almada as the authority figure caught in the middle. Yes, his character was dead in the second movie in this series, but I get the feeing that this is a sequel in name only.

One of the gangs even goes to a high school where they make their money selling drugs to students. Two brothers, Raúl and Humberto, get involved, with Humberto dedicated to staying in school and Raúl joining the gang in their battles against other toughs as well as robbing trucks. Then, Humberto is killed, and his brother must reevalute his ways.

At the end of this movie, a bad guy keeps shooting Almada who keeps getting up and gritting his teeth like he doesn’t have time to bleed. Once, I saw my grandfather get stabbed — and another time he was in an accident in which most of his back was burned to a crisp — and the guy didn’t register the day or cry or even make much of a noise.

He would have loved Fernando Almada.

You can watch this on YouTube.