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Total Recall
: essential video:This science fiction blockbuster from 1990 began its production life as a very different movie than the one that was released. An adaptation of the Philip K. Dick short story 'We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,' Total Recall was originally conceived of with Richard Dreyfuss starring as a Walter Mitty-like character who experiences a variety of artificially induced fantasies. The movie we know is a mega-budget action epic set on Mars. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a normal working man who discovers that his ...
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Escape From New York
: :In the future, crime is out of control and New York City is a maximum security prison. Grabbing a bargaining chip right out of the air, convicts bring down the President's plane in bad old Gotham. Gruff Snake Plissken, a one-eyed warrior new to prison life, is coerced into bringing the President, and his cargo, out of this land of undesirables. Kurt Russell put his Disney days behind him as the nicest bad guy in the picture. All comic-book sensibilities and macho posturing, this is ...
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Running Man
: :In this action thriller based on an early story by Stephen King, Los Angeles in the year 2017 has become a police state in the wake of the global economy's total collapse. All forms of entertainment are government controlled, and the most popular show on television is an elaborate game show in which convicted criminals are given a chance to escape by running through a gauntlet of brutal killers known as 'Stalkers.' Anyone who survives is given their freedom and a condominium in Hawaii, so ...
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Rollerball
: :In the year 2018, violence and crime have been totally eliminated from society and given outlet in the brutal blood sport of rollerball, a high-velocity blend of football, hockey, and motor-cross racing sponsored by the multinational corporations that now control the world following the collapse of traditional politics. James Caan plays Jonathan E., the reigning superstar of rollerball, whose corporate controllers fear that Jonathan's popularity has endowed him with too much power. They begin to pressure him according to their own ruthless set of rules, ...
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Mad Max
: :The Road Warrior is already a classic, sans condescending genre distinctions like 'sci-fi' or 'action.' But the story of Mel Gibson's stately antihero begins in Mad Max, George Miller's low-budget debut in which Max is a 'Bronze' (cop) in an unspecified postapocalyptic future with a buddy-partner and family. But unlike most films set in the devastated future, Mad Max is especially notable because it is poised between our industrialized world and total regression to medieval conditions. The scale tips towards disintegration when the Glory Riders ...
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Escape From La
: essential video:Fifteen years after John Carpenter squandered a great idea on a mediocre movie (Escape from New York), he does it again--this time on the Left Coast. Kurt Russell is back as the terminally cynical one-eyed action hero Snake Plissken who, this time, has been coerced into saving the world in Los Angeles. It's 2013 and L.A. is now an island maximum security prison off the coast of California. Snake has 10 hours to find a doomsday weapon that's fallen into the hands of ...
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Fortress
: :The story of Fortress takes place in drastically overpopulated America of the year 2017, where each woman is allowed only one pregnancy. John Brennick (Christopher Lambert) and his wife Karen (Loryn Locklin) flee to Mexico when she becomes pregnant after the death of their first child. They are captured by border police and sent to the Fortress, a subterranean high-security prison owned by the Men-Tel corporation and operated by 'Zed-10,' an omnipotent computer system, and a sadistic, genetically 'enhanced' warden (Kurtwood Smith) who has nefarious ...
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Fist of the North Star
: :One of the first anime features, Fist of the North Star was based on a popular manga series set in the not-too-distant future, when Earth has been devastated by a nuclear holocaust. The scattered survivors huddle in ruined cities, awaiting an enlightened warrior-hero worthy of the title of 'Fist of the North Star,' who will start the planet on the path to recovery. That mythic hero arrives in the person O, who looks like a caricature of Sylvester Stallone drawn for an American Saturday morning ...
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Demolition Man
: :Searching for new directions, Sylvester Stallone starred in this farcical, 1993 SF piece about an ex-cop (Stallone) freed from 36 years of forced hibernation to help catch a criminal (Wesley Snipes) who released himself from a similar incarceration. The futuristic story finds Los Angeles a sea of Taco Bells and enforced peace, and within that satiric overview Stallone's character becomes a gun-toting fish out of water. The film plays like a live-action cartoon, and while there is nothing particularly wrong with that, Demolition Man is ...
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Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
: :Although Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the third part of George Miller's post-apocalyptic Mad Max trilogy, is certainly the least of the bunch (Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is the undisputed masterpiece, and maybe the best action movie ever made), it has still got a good share of imaginative industrial-wasteland-pastiche imagery. And casting Tina Turner as Aunty Entity, the queen of Bartertown, was a masterstroke. Mel Gibson's character Max is pitted in a battle to the death against the bizarre Master Blaster in the Thunderdome, ...
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