Total Recall

Every night, Douglas Quaid dreams of Mars: of affairs and intrigues among the endless barren lands of the Red Planet. To alleviate this, he turns to a company that provides its clients with artificial memories. It comes to light, however, that he has already undergone such a procedure there and that he actually is an agent from Mars. This loose adaptation of a short story by Philip K. Dick was originally planned as a great adventure film. In the hands of Paul Verhoeven, however, the most predatory of genre filmmakers at the end of 1980s and in the early 1990s in the United States, it turned into an orgy of sex, violence, and visual extravagance. A woman endowed with six breasts, an exploding mechanical head, monstrous conjoined twins, bloated bodies in the Martian atmosphere – these and other images were created using advanced analog special effects: miniatures, animatronics, and make-up. Total Recall was one of the last films to use these techniques on such an epic scale.

Piotr Mirski