Termi-nation: A 25th Anniversary Look Back at The Terminator!

Managing editor of SuicideGirls.com, Nicole Powers, has once again dropped us a line to share a cool Terminator related article on her site. This time, they look at how the horror of Reaganomics was reflected in 80's movies.

We're living in a cultural landscape thicketed with old-growth 1980s, as stubbornly rooted in our minds as the Proustian olfactory memories of the scents of belched up wine coolers, Duran Duran-esque hair mousse, and He-Man and She-Ra Shrinky Dinks contracting in the oven. Beyond things like "Heroes" and "Metal Monday", and the fact that a Flock of Fucking Seagulls now get played on "Classic Rock" stations, there's a litany of other examples I can list: washed-up '80s icon Mickey Rourke's defibrillation back to the living as a washed-up '80s icon in The Wrestler ; millions of fanboys dampening their shorts with pre-ejaculate for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen ; new iterations of '80s slasherdom in the form of "re-imaginings" of VHS-era standbys My Bloody Valentine and Friday the 13th (yeah, Friday the 13th was made in '79, but as a franchise, it's pure '80s); G.I. Joe: the Rise of Cobra rating a Super Bowl spot for its August release; the looming advent of the alternate reality, atomic panic, superhero '80s epic Watchmen ...and, God help the crushed scrotum of our creativity, Beverly Hills Cop IV is in the works.

And the return of one of the most iconic '80s artifacts is about the rain down like fallout. This summer brings Terminator: Salvation , a humongous movie that, due to the twisty knots of time travel, will be a prequel, a sequel, and a reboot of the franchise, and the first flick in a new trilogy starring everyone's fave f-bomb-dropping Welsh wigout master, Christian Bale.

The return of the Terminator gives me comfort in this omigod-fucking-drive-a-stake-through-its-heart-already 1980s resurrection. The Terminator , was a true icon, before it was ripped off by everything from V: The Series to Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah to Wallace and Gromit In A Close Shave to the porn flick The Sperminator . And of course there were those disturbingly fascist animated man/machine hybrids that used to show up during the bumper segments of televised NFL games.

The metal endo-skeletoned man/machine was the embodiment of a specific vintage of berserk, apocalyptic terror that defined the years of the Reagan/Bush Junta. The 1980s, which saw the final frenzy of the Cold War, was a time of doom in which even a benign kiddie movie like The Monster Squad (which gifted us with the knowledge that, indeed, " Wolfman's got nards!" ) featured the special effects-y end of the world. Doomsday loomed, and the coke-driven, junk-bond-funded bacchanal of doomsday was the cultural engine behind what is now reduced to the '80s kitsch of "Heroes" and "Metal Monday".

James Cameron's 1984 film, The Terminator , is now 25 years old. In turn, it was constructed atop the legacy of films from a quarter century before: 1959's Hiroshima Mon Amour, On the Beach, and the Geiger-clicking radioactive brontosaurus of The Giant Behemoth.

The Terminator is now recognized as a historical artifact. The Library of Congress recently placed it in the National Film Registry, for its being not just "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant, but also a work of "enduring significance to American culture."

Read the rest of the article at SuicideGirls.com.

GlobalArnold Staff