MONDO EXTRAS

Arnie strolls into the Alamo Sport Shop and buys the following: a 12-gauge auto-loader, a 45-long slide with laser sighting, and an Uzi nine-millimetre. He also asks for a "phased plasma rifle," which wasn't invented at the time (or yet, goddammit). The clerk tells him there's a 15-day wait on the handguns, but he can take the rifles now. What he can't do, which Arnie is doing, is load the shotgun right there in the store. "Wrong," says the Terminator, and blows the guy away. (Remember, those of you who never saw the first movie: Arnie is the bad guy in this one.)

Still skulking about in alleyways, Michael Biehn saws off his shotgun to make hiding it a lot easier. It's the middle of the day already! What's he been doing all this time? Mankind's slim hope for future survival isn't going to preserve itself, you know!

Arnie pulls the shaggin' wagon over to the side of the street because he needs to use a phone booth, but apparently wanted to wait until he found one being used by a burly bearded guy whom he could toss aside. I'm thinking even in 1984 they could have made the futuristic killing machine a little less dependent on obsolete-in-2029 technology. It's like if they sent someone back thirty-five years from 2008 and he had to rely on telegraphs to communicate. Arnie also looks up the three Sarah Connors in the phone book. Fortunately for him, he didn't stop at the same phone booth that Michael Biehn vandalized, so the page IS STILL THERE.

Elsewhere, it's not so fortunate, however, for one of the other two Sarah Connors, who opens her door to a glowering futuristic killing machine. Arnie opts for the automatic with the laser sight, and pops her right in the forehead. By the time of our heroine waitress's coffee break, her co-workers are morbidly delighted that a murder victim has the same name as their colleague. "You're dead, honey," says her wisecracking buddy, who is...smoking and chewing gum at the same time? Do people do that?

Meanwhile, Biehn has hotwired a car (the old-fashioned way) at a construction site, his location chosen for no other apparent reason than so the giant machinery can make him flash back to the future, with the skull-crushing tanks and what have you, where he was a bandanna-clad resistance fighter, dodging laser beams and sentry helicopters and some crappy Euro-dance Gary Numan-esque instrumental music. The killer machinery doesn't seem all that efficient, providing Biehn and a female partner ample opportunity to throw some kind of explosive thermoses underneath the treads of one of the tanks, which, before it gets blowed up, manages to obliterate Biehn's buddy. He allows himself a moment to clench his teeth in manly rage, before hopping into a car with mounted artillery. He and the gunner get blown onto their side, which seems to be good enough for the killer machines. Biehn struggles to free himself from the flaming wreckage...