The Terminator and Michael Myers

I recently found a copy of the original Terminator movie on VHS at the local Goodwill Store for 99 cents so I grabbed it. Netflix has Terminator 2 but not the original movie. Not having seen it since it first came out on video, I didn't remember much of it so I needed to see it before Terminator: Genisys comes out. I remember at the time (1984) the special effects and computer graphics were amazing and something we hadn't seen before on the big screen. It seems pretty lame now, of course. But it was great to see it again as though it was the first time. 

Linda Hamilton was so young and had some serious Joan Jett hair going on! At the time I thought she was kind of old and plain. I didn't remember Bess Motta as her roommate either, not that she had a very big part. I religiously followed Bess Motta on the 20 Minute Workouts back in the mid 80s on a Boston TV channel. She instructed us to keep going during the commercial break which usually consisted of at least one ad for the Boston Bruins. She was also on the remake of The Monkees in the later 80s and then disappeared from my TV except for my 20 Minute Workout VHS. 

When the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) was driving the stolen police car in pursuit of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) did he resemble Michael Myers to anyone else? His eyebrows were shaved off and he had really pasty-looking makeup on his face and all I could think of was Michael Myers from the original Halloween movie. The two killers were also just as obsessed with killing and just as relentless in their pursuits. 

Where the Terminator was a cyborg created to kill, Michael Myers was the embodiment of evil, where in our culture, killing seems to be the most unforgiving and serious of sins and/or crimes.The first car the Terminator steals in his search for Sarah Connor is a station wagon very similar to the one Michael Myers steals from the sanitarium.  Michael Myers might just as well have been a cyborg the way he kept rising from apparent total destruction to create another sequel. 

The similarities were erased when the Terminator started wearing sunglasses to hide his naked laser eye after crashing the police car. He also traded in the cloth blazer that made him look like Herman Munster from the back to the leather jacket, better for riding a motorcycle. He could definitely give Michael Myers a lesson in fashion.