Flasz On Film

Imagine pulling up at a red light next to an old beat-up VW Golf Mk1, all weathered and scarred with patches of corrosion in one too many places. A car that looks as though it wasn’t supposed to be driven. Visibly unroadworthy. But something’s just not right because the sound you hear through the window doesn’t suggest an old set of four cylinders caked in carbon deposits is trembling under the bonnet. What you hear is an ominously low rumble of a truly muscular powertrain. And just as you notice the ever-so-slightly wider rear wheels upon which this poor old-timer is sitting, the yellow light turns on to complement the red and the driver of that car revs the living daylights out of it. This is a noise you experience as much as you hear it. It propagates through your body sending your sense of self into a state of temporary discombobulation and then the light turns green, and that rusted Golf is gone. Way out there in the distance. Clearly under four seconds to 60. It sprang from its haunches like a cheetah and disappeared behind the horizon because its owner made a few adjustments to it. Inside its 40-year-old chassis, under all that steel and rust this Golf was hiding a turbocharged V6 transplanted from a Nissan GT-R, a modern transmission and a quad-exhaust system you didn’t notice because you were too busy assessing the holes in the car’s wheel-arches eaten away by corrosion. That 40-year-old beater produced in excess of 800 horsepower while looking like a vehicle on its final journey to the scrapyard. It was the ultimate sleeper car.  

In many ways, The Terminator remains such a sleeper car movie to me. When it was new, it was an equivalent of a compact sporty hatchback like that Golf GTI from the same era. It cemented Arnold Schwarzenegger as the definitive action star of the decade, launched the career of one Linda Hamilton and bought James Cameron the freedom to do whatever the hell he wanted. The success of The Terminator is its own little fairy tale because on a budget of not-a-whole-lot (read as 6.4 million dollars) it made ten times the amount at the box office and spawned not only a film series, which continues to this day unabated for better or for worse, but an entire pop cultural phenomenon, which includes comic books, fan fiction novels, TV shows, anime, video games and a whole smorgasbord of assorted merchandising. 

However, the funny thing about it is that the franchise this movie started only took shape after Terminator 2: Judgment Day saw the light of day in 1991 and became the biggest movie of the year in addition to briefly holding the position of the third-highest-grossing film of all time. The cultural footprint of The Terminator disappeared overshadowed by its sequel, upon which most of the other films in the series would be based, what with the good and bad terminator coming back to the past to have it out among other things. Understandably, T2 was bigger, more audacious with its visual effects, more resplendent, complex and more of a fertile ground for extended world-building. It was a bona fide supercar equipped with a naturally aspirated V10 mounted just behind the driver, countless high-tech amenities and developments all geared towards both ultimate performance and aesthetic wow factor.  

Meanwhile, its predecessor was just a B-movie that simply didn’t look as though it had the chops to carry an entire franchise or launch all its principals into stardom. Especially on paper. I could bet a substantial amount of Monopoly money that most modern film critics wouldn’t be able to identify this movie as a potential juggernaut of the magnitude it ended up having simply by reading the screenplay. Structurally, The Terminator is essentially a clone of Halloween with a gimmick of having Michael Myers come from the future. Well, to be perfectly honest—and I have written about this already—the movie is more of a clone of Halloween II at least as far as the structure is concerned. Linda Hamilton is more of a Laurie Strode from the sequel, the villain hasn’t incidentally imprinted on her either and he actually has a built-in purpose to seek her out and destroy her. The difference is that in contrast to Michael Myers who dies in flames and whose carcass we see disintegrate as the credits roll, the T-101 comes back from the dead and stages that one final iconic act of the movie and allows James Cameron to let his special effects hog loose and emboss the Terminator iconography into the fabric of popular culture forever more.  

And to be perfectly honest, the movie has moments where its B-movie slasher vibe protrudes, and the mask temporarily slips. You see it whenever Ginger and her boyfriend are on screen as typical would-be victims of a slasher murderer with their poorly delivered lines and behavioural tics more at home in a Roger Corman universe. If you squint, the miniature models deployed in Kyle Reese’s dream sequences (and in Sarah’s dream sequence too, which is at the very least bizarre because she has no business dreaming of the future she never saw in such a vivid and accurate way) can momentarily look incredibly fake and also betray their post-Corman provenance. After all, James Cameron cut his teeth building special effects and sets for Corman in such movies as Battle Beyond the Stars before moving onto his ill-fated debut Piranha II. 

Even some lines of exposition, most of which are placed with appropriate competence to serve the characters and not merely the audience, could easily have been delivered in ways more likely to make the viewer wince with disgust than nod in acknowledgement while slipping further and further into the magical universe of this movie. Imagine hearing Michael Biehn ask that cop at the beginning what year it is without requisite conviction. Imagine hearing the “Listen and understand! That Terminator is out there! It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop… ever, until you are dead!” delivered differently and you will understand yourself how close to the sun James Cameron and his actors were flying. This could have been a disaster because most of the movie has all the makings of a terrible slasher of a B-variety. 

But it works because this B-movie Golf GTI from 1984 has a stupendously powerful engine under the hood and it doesn’t drive like a deathbox from the mid-80s. It drives like a race car and as long as you pay attention to the road and trust what you feel through the steering wheel and through your feet planted on the pedals, you will never even acknowledge this car is a rust matchbox. You can feel the raw power under your feet. You detect how well it handles. And how the car disappears from your own field of vision because all you care about is the experience driving it at breakneck speeds, not the dashboard with its era-appropriate knobs and sliders. Occasionally, you do have to lower your gaze or look in the rearview mirror, which are exactly those fleeting moments when The Terminator feels more like a Roger Corman movie than a protoplast of the modern blockbuster with appropriate sheen. This is when you briefly notice the shoddy-looking dashboard with missing knobs or the worn-out upholstery. Maybe you’ll glance at the speedometer only to emerge completely confused because the needle is just pressed against the maximum speed reading, as though to indicate this car was never meant to be driven as fast as you’re driving it now. 

There’s something truly magical about The Terminator because as you watch it you can intellectualize and rationalize the notion of it being only a B-movie and a slasher that shouldn’t have made the splash it did make. But somewhere between the nearly ceaseless succession of car chases and sieges, punctuated only with brief moments when exposition is delivered and minuscule amounts of B-movie schmaltz are ladled onto the experience, what could have been a forgettable Corman-esque oddity destined for video store shelves like Maniac Cop or a Friday the 13^th sequel the movie just works in ways no B-movie ever could. It looks cleaner. It’s filmed better.  Way better.

The Terminator almost runs like a John Carpenter movie on steroids. It is a known fact that John Carpenter never cared about anything more than the way his movies looked. The bulk of the budget of his early works (and some of his newer ones, too) would typically be spent on renting expensive camera equipment and investing in anamorphic lenses to give his movies a high-class sheen. Therefore, no wonder the Halloween connection is so readily identifiable. You probably wouldn’t be wrong either if you saw strange symmetry between the police station assault Arnie stages after his famous “I’ll be back” line and John Carpenter’s own siege movie Assault on Precinct 13.  

At the same time, the car chases and the now iconic Tech-Noir shootout indicate how much James Cameron owes to Walter Hill and Michael Mann. Somehow, an otherwise B-movie concept got classed up and heightened to truly inspired levels where the viewer has no other recourse but to become swallowed whole by the experience… while also retaining the knowledge that in other people’s hands, this very same movie could have been the worst thing they’d have ever seen in their lives. So fine was the line traversed by Cameron, Schwarzenegger and everyone else involved in putting this movie together.  

After all, building a sleeper car isn’t easy either. You can’t just slide a massive engine into an old hatchback and expect it to drive like a supercar. It takes incredible skill, expertise and luck, in addition to appropriate tools and fit-for-purpose parts, to get everything right and let this car drive like lightning, handle well and not wrap it around the first tree you see. It’s more an art than it is a science—though it still is a science, make no mistake—and if it had not been the case, then anyone with more than a few brain cells to rub together and a YouTube tutorial at their disposal could easily turn their thirty-year-old Camry into a pound-for-pound equivalent of the iconic Dodge Hellcat. Not everyone can do that, just as not every homegrown filmmaker with a camera, a few mates and a half-baked script based loosely on John Carpenter’ s Halloween (and its sequel) and vague musings on a long-forgotten episode of The Outer Limits written by Harlan Ellison can turn this veritable mishmash into a masterpiece that The Terminator undoubtedly is. Say what you want about its more successful sequel, but the 1984 The Terminator had no business working this well while also remaining as sloppy in places as any of the myriad forgotten VHS oddities of the era.  

This movie is now a forty-year-old VW Golf, all covered in rust and completely unassuming from the outside, especially to an untrained eye. But it drives like a rally car and gives whoever can grab hold of the steering wheel heaps of fun which are simply out of this world. Now, a lot can be said about a person based on what their dream car is and what they personally choose to drive. I’ve never dreamed of owning or driving a Lamborghini or a Ferrari. I like cars that are unassuming, practical and quick. In fact, I’d be the happiest man alive if I could own and drive an Audi RS6 estate or a Tesla Model 3 Performance, exactly because they do not raise an eyebrow. They’re regular dad cars on the outside. You can take your family out shopping in them, go to Ikea and then, on a Sunday night, when nobody’s looking, really put your foot down. Eat the road and fart out miles quicker than you’d ever expect.

Therefore, a banged-up sleeper is perhaps my ultimate fetish because it takes what I enjoy about cars to the absolute extreme. The case is similar with movies. I like all sorts. But I absolutely adore movies which are sloppy, imperfect and maybe cheap looking. Movies you can easily take apart and hate or maybe you can overlook because their sequels might be more slick, polished and better produced. I love John Carpenter movies. I adore early Wes Craven. I have a thing about Abel Ferrara. I cannot stress enough how much enjoyment I am able to extract from a shoddy-looking movie I feel someone put their heart and soul into. And when that shoddy-looking movie stained with blood and sweat cooks on all cylinders and produces the kind of horsepower found in top-tier blockbusters… well, that’s just something else.  

The Terminator turns forty this year. I just turned forty myself. But every time I get behind the wheel of that forty-year-old sleeper Golf Mk1 movie and floor it, I feel two decades younger. This movie slams you into your seat with the force of its acceleration, deafens you temporarily with the roar of its preposterous powertrain and reminds you that movies can be so much fun, just as driving a roided-up hot hatch would remind your jaded middle-aged self how you used to love driving, throwing the car around bends and pressing the pedal to the metal for those brief seconds of ultimate rush. In a weirdly ironic roundabout way, this movie is a time machine in its own right because every time I put it on, I get younger. Meanwhile, The Terminator itself stays timeless. Banged up. Rusted in places. Sloppy and held together with whatever DIY magic was available to Jimmy Cameron in 1984. But it’s timeless and perfect nonetheless.