Let's all climb aboard my red velvet covered time machine (yes, I try to go in style) and travel back shall we?Oh look! It's 1984 and I am sporting some calf strangling knee socks along with a full mouth of metal, hair that defies gravity and heavy purple Cover girl eyeshadow.
I'm now a total movie buff due to the advent of the mini bus which is sort of on the same level as the holy grail for young teens. It has handed us the ability to get to the theater minus parental constraints or interference and it's the first real taste of freedom any of us have ever had.
We are drunk on the heady mix of independence and debauchery and we are watching films faster than the studios can put them out.
Our choice today?
The Terminator.
We don't understand yet, but we are in store for edge of your seat action, a tight well executed script, spot on acting, thousands of catch phrases and for us girls... a love story.
So as we sit there watching the future governor of California trying to exterminate Sarah Connor, all of a sudden... there he is.
The white hot guy from the future.
And as an added bonus, he's naked. Low budget, gritty, sci-fi action has never looked so good.
He's a mystery to us, this strong, quiet, chiseled specimen of masculinity that pumps a shotgun as artfully as he impregnates the mother of the savior of the human race.
And so has begun our love affair with intense brooding men who travel across time to PROTECT US FROM UNSTOPPABLE KILLING MACHINES.
Who will ever be able to live up to that?
Looking at the spindly, sniveling little man boy next to me at the movies, all I can think is "loser".
The actor who portrayed this godlike Adonis?
Why it was the thinking man's action hero of the '80s and '90s: Michael Biehn.
He's a rare breed, proving that you don't have to be a brawny meat head with a catchphrase to get the job done.
Although I suppose "EAT THIS!" is kind of close to a signature line.
He's turned in some truly memorable performances (Aliens, The Abyss, Tombstone, Navy Seals, The Rock, Grindhouse, etc.) during his career and I still follow his IMDb page obsessively to check what he's working on.
I'm loyal like that.
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