True Lies was the most expensive movie ever made when it came out (I remember a rumor that theaters were going to charge higher ticket prices just for this movie, but that never came to be). Unlike other big budget films of the era (Waterworld comes to mind), you can actually see where all the money went. Its action scenes are among the richest I have ever seen, the stunts are legendary, and it hurts to think we may never see actual fighter jets and helicopters interacting with actors ever again.

I’m not exaggerating here: True Lies has some seriously spectacular action. It’s disappointing to realize just a few years later Nicholas Cage was pretending to drive a CGI car while Jedi were becoming digitized dummies. You just can’t cheat your stunts and expect the audience to be wowed. The action sequence on a Florida Keys bridge blows most movies out of the water… and that’s not even the finale.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character, Harry Tasker, is a spy who masquerades as a computer salesman. His wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis) doesn’t have a clue what her husband really does for a living, but she longs for excitement in her dull life. Meanwhile their teenage daughter thinks her father’s a massive tool because, outwardly, he is. Why a boring white collar worker would have a bodybuilder’s body isn’t important. No one in the movie bothers to notice.

What’s strange about True Lies is the fact it forgets it’s an action movie about midway through. Early on, Harry and his partner (Tom Arnold) are hot on the trail of jihadists who’re attempting to smuggle nuclear warheads into the States. But when Harry discovers Helen is seeing another man (Bill Paxton) he diverts every bit of his team’s intelligence to finding out the man’s identity. Without spoiling too much of it, Helen is subjected to a cruel prank by a stranger, only to be subjected to another cruel prank by the very man she married. The morality of it all is questionable, but, uh, I don’t go to the movies to see saints. I enjoyed it even though the long, action-free middle of the movie might feel like a derailment to some.

And it’s hard to top the last forty minutes. Most movies which combine action and comedy suck at one or the other (often both, as almost every Lethal Weapon rip-off will prove), but True Lies is the rare action film with perfect comedic timing. In one scene Schwarzenegger is hanging from the reins of the horse which flung him over the side of a high-rise building. He glances up to the horse and begs it to save his life. Somehow, the filmmakers goad the horse into smiling back at him. In another scene, in which Schwarzenegger is injected with a truth serum, Helen asks if they’re going to die. He replies, “Yep!”

This isn’t just routine comedy squeezed into the film because audiences expect it to be there. This is genuinely funny stuff, and the timing of it—as well as the editing of the action scenes—reaches a musical quality. Not only was True Lies the glorious swan song of the 80s and early 90s action film, it satirizes the genre at the same time. In Terminator 2, director James Cameron took care to show why his vehicles exploded so as not to disturb our suspension of disbelief. In True Lies, vehicles explode because he’s indulging in gleeful absurdity. And my god it’s infectious.

I watch True Lies practically every time I make adjustments or upgrades to my home theater, but I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed it more than I do now.

Real-life musicians James Taylor and Dennis Wilson play The Driver and The Mechanic dispassionately, as if they’re auditioning for 2001: A Space Odyssey. While I appreciate what they did here I almost wish they took a backseat role to the mean ’55 Chevy their characters drive, which seems to be the real star of the film for the first twenty minutes or so. We get a glimpse into the boys’ street racing lifestyle shortly before they pick up a hitchhiker who’s simply named The Girl.

The Girl is played by model Laurie Bird, who probably would have gone on to become a household name if she hadn’t died at the age of 25. She only appeared in two other movies, one of which was Annie Hall, the other of which was the director’s follow-up, Cockfighter. Like Blacktop, it also featured Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton.

Oates’ character is called G.T.O., because that’s what he drives, and he likes to pick up hitchhikers so he can tell them his life story. Yet G.T.O. has a different story for each of his hitchhikers and we only get a hint of his real identity when he briefly ends up drunk in the passenger seat of the Chevy. Early on in the movie, The Driver and The Mechanic goad G.T.O. into racing across the country for pink slips, but G.T.O. is so unsuited for the race that the Chevy drivers frequently pull over to let him catch up. It’s no fun for them to get a huge lead on the G.T.O.

What Oates has done here is something quietly nutty and often humorous. He’s a big reason to watch the movie, which might be disappointing to anyone watching Blacktop for the thrills. Go into it expecting more Easy Rider than The Fast and the Furious and you’ll probably like it. I picked up the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray, but I wouldn’t have been terribly disappointed had I settled for the much cheaper DVD version… it just doesn’t take much advantage of 5.1 sound and HD.

Demolition Man is a movie I watched so many times on HBO, I started watching it in the network’s secondary audio program to mix things up a bit. (I think that probably taught me more Spanish than the class I took, too.) It’s been at least a decade since the last time I saw it, so I was surprised to discover all the lines were still bouncing around in my head. I was also surprised it was a little more clever than I remembered it.

This isn’t to say Demolition Man is a brilliant movie, only that it isn’t mindless. John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, which shares similar frustrations with the fact Americans prefer safety to freedom, feels a lot more genuine by making its lead character an apathetic anti-hero. Stallone tends to get on a soapbox when he’s not delivering questionable one-liners. It’s not as heavy as it was in Cobra, and Stallone has mellowed out a lot since that film, but it’s still apparent. Speaking of forgoing subtlety: not only is Brave New World flat out mentioned, but Sandra Bullock’s character is named Huxley.

The movie opens four years in the future—1997 to be precise—and Stallone plays a bad ass, door-kickin’ policeman by the name of John Spartan. When we first see him, he’s hovering in a helicopter high above an urban war zone in the middle of Los Angeles. Just before repelling down to the scene, he adjusts his beret and mutters, “Send a maniac to catch a maniac.” The ensuing stunt is good, as are most of the film’s stunts, but the way the editors cut it together would have broken any human’s back… not that I mean to suggest Stallone is merely human.

The maniac Spartan wants to catch is Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes) who manages to murder a group of hostages before framing Spartan for manslaughter. Both men are arrested and, since this is the future, they get placed in cryogenic storage which has replaced traditional prisons altogether. Fast forward to the year 2032, in which crime has been reduced to the point policemen don’t even know how to arrest people anymore. Phoenix manages to escape the cryo facility during a parole hearing, at which point John Spartan has to be awakened to stop his murderous rampage. A smarter science fiction story would have explored the implications of sentencing a human being to cryo-prison, but Demolition Man just wants to entertain. It does a good job of it, too.

Never mind the fact the setup is stupid. The setup doesn’t matter because it’s a conceit to see two 20th century men in a future setting where most people listen to shitty music, eat shitty health food, outlaw everything they don’t like, and bury their heads in the sand rather than acknowledge the inconvenient truths underlying their superficial lives. And yeah, the film’s message wallops you over the head, but you probably won’t find a modern action film even beginning to lift a corner of that veil.

Another surprising aspect of the film is that it actually deals with Spartan’s culture shock quite a bit. Yeah, it chooses to do it with a lot more humor than drama, but it’s there. There is one scene about midway through in which Huxley begins to look up Spartan’s daughter and he stops her. He stops her because he knows what kind of world his daughter grew up in, and it’s a world that’s completely incompatible with someone like him. Something about that short scene strikes me as honest, and it’s another reason I would have preferred a story that dove headfirst into the implications of freezing criminals.

And then there’s the three seashells, also played for laughs, that demonstrates just how weird the future might be to someone who ended up there against their will. No, I don’t think the filmmakers were shooting for anything more than a cheap laugh, but the character’s conundrum did stimulate me in exactly the way I want to be stimulated by science fiction. I’m not entirely sure we won’t do away with toilet paper by 2032.

Even though it came out near the fall of the Tough Guy Movie, Demolition Man is a pretty good example of the subgenre. It feels like Joel Silver’s attempt at a John Carpenter film, at least in terms of subject matter. And all the principal actors are great, in particular Snipes who obviously had a blast filming his scenes. Also good here is Dennis Leary who more or less does his stand-up routine, but hey, he’s good at it and it works, so I ain’t complaining.

No, Commando isn’t as good as Terminator, Predator, or Total Recall, but it’s better than just about any Schwarzenegger vehicle which came out after True Lies. It’s better than his comedies, too, but I’m biased because I’m not a huge fan of Twins or Kindergarten Cop. (I appreciate the effort, but I get it already: he’s playing against his masculine image… is that really funny enough to carry multiple movies?)

All you really need to know about Arnie’s role in Commando is he’s a special forces type whose daughter (Alyssa Milano) has been kidnapped by Dan Hedaya, who plays a pretty good bad guy. In fact, most of the bad guys in this movie are pretty good bad guys. You won’t believe any of them are appropriate matches for fist fights with Schwarzenegger, but that’s beside the point. The point is Schwarzenegger’s going to kill them all and that’s enough for me.

It’s been so long since I’ve seen the original cut of Commando I’m not entirely sure what the uncensored cut reinstates. If I had to guess, it’s probably the brutal scene in which a handful of henchmen trap Schwarzenegger in a garden shed and he comes out hacking and slashing with circular saw blades and a sling blade. It’s a flurry of insanity and Savini-level gore effects which seem to be taken straight out of a Friday the 13th movie. Brief as it is, I doubt I’m going to see anything as awesome from any movie which comes out in 2017.

No, I’m not here to lament about how awesome movies were in the 80s because, overall, they really weren’t. Commando, like so many of the other movies I feature here, is an exception to the rule. I’m perfectly happy that we still get great exceptions like Ex Machina, Arrival, and The Witch—three movies I think we’ll also remember in thirty years. Every decade has exceptions in the overwhelming pool of shit and I happen to think this decade is the best for exceptions in a long time.

Having said that, you just can’t dispute the fact Commando contains an absurd amount of entertainment value, which makes me all the more likely to watch it again instead of the movies I mentioned above. And I’m not even ignoring the fact that Commando is a dumb movie… really dumb. In one scene, Schwarzenegger is tackled by a dozen security guards who he casts off of him with Superman-strength. He rips seats out of cars, carries trees on his shoulder, and easily rights flipped sport cars. Bad guys who clearly have the tactical advantage conveniently can’t shoot worth a shit, even when they get the drop on him, and when one bad guy finally manages to clip him, it’s only a flesh wound. Then you’ve got Rae Dawn Chong’s character, who has absolutely zero motivation and proves completely pointless until she has to fly a plane, but she’s actually pretty great at doing nothing.

It’s easy to look past the movie’s faults because it’s is an unstoppable machine with one function and it performs that function very well: dazzling its audience with great explosions and decent stunts. Legendary producers like Joel Silver hadn’t yet figured out Schwarzenegger could carry smarter roles (perhaps he couldn’t yet), but he was getting better with almost every movie he made and it’s always fun to see him at the various points of his career.

I’ll be first in line for John Wick 2, but that’s just a throwback. Commando is the real deal.

Let’s not gloss over the real reason people went to see The Specialist: the love scene between Sly Stallone and Sharon Stone was hyped through the roof shortly before release… and the hype is real, my friends. The filmmakers don’t gloss over it with blurry images or bullshit dissolves, either—it’s where they really earn the R-rating. I love memorable screen couples and this is a surprisingly great one, hampered only by a cheesy montage and some poorly worded dialogue, both of which feel like leftovers from Cobra. Doesn’t matter. The scene itself is the kind of stuff you’d expect to see roped off in a museum. It’s as if they filmed The Vitruvian Man and The Birth of Venus getting it on.

Around this time last year I featured Chuck Norris’s Invasion U.S.A., a gloriously stupid Cannon film which takes place around Christmas. This year I’m featuring Cobra, another gloriously stupid Cannon film which also takes place around Christmas. I’m not going to lie: I fucking loved this movie growing up. To this day I still think chewing on a match looks kind of cool.

Here’s the story, if you can call it that: a cult of maniacs, whose motivation is not explained well at all, are going around killing people at random. One day Brigitte Nielson’s character, a supermodel, sees the bad guys’ faces and now they’ll stop at nothing to kill her. (It’s important to point out she never actually saw the bad guys committing a crime and thought nothing of the incident until after they targeted her.) Never mind the number of witnesses increases the more they try to kill her—they’re not the brightest, these maniacs. By the end of the film, it’s implied they have to murder an entire town of witnesses because their last ditch effort to take her out involves at least a dozen conspicuous motorcycles.

And I’m not complaining. If you’re a filmmaker and your villains don’t ride motorcycles, what the hell is wrong with you? (Double points if they’re bike-riding ninjas.)

Enter Marion Cobretti (Sylvester Stallone), better known as Cobra, a member of the police department’s so-called Zombie Squad. What’s the Zombie Squad? Since Cobra is pretty much the only member of the squad we ever get to see, I assume it’s a unit of plainclothes police officers who can get away with everything from vehicular homicide to assaulting reporters and other cops. In the cold opening, Cobra manages to deliver the worst one-liner (“Go ahead, I don’t shop here” in response to a maniac’s threat to blow up a store) shortly before delivering one of the best: “You’re a disease and I’m the cure.”

Stallone, who recycled ideas he had when he was attached to Beverly Hills Cop, has written a script which acts as a big fat soapbox for some extreme ideas about how crime should be handled in the United States. I’m sure all of the big action stars at the time shared similar stances, but Stallone’s sincerity as he spouts this naive bullshit is a hilarious good time. Naturally, his script has the hot chick agreeing with him while all the strawman characters (Andrew Robinson in particular) oppose him.

I still enjoy this movie a lot, but it just doesn’t cross the line nearly as gratuitously as Invasion U.S.A. did. Still, Brian Thompson makes a great villain and Brigitte Nielsen is hotter than a firecracker here. It is what it is.