Verhoeven’s immediate follow-up to RoboCop takes his sci-fi appreciation to the next level. Working from a script co-written by Alien series scribes Dan O’Bannon & Ronald Shusett and based on a Phillip K. Dick short story, Total Recall continues the director’s signature blend of pulp violence, sex, and satirical musings on class. Cresting into the heights of his international notoriety, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Quaid -- as everyman the actor can be –- prefigures a trend in film narratives later in the 1990s and early 2000s in which the protagonist’s identity is as shrouded from the audience as it is form him. Did I forget to mention you get Michael Irsonside screaming? Like a lot. -- Andy Helmkamp