The 1990 movie that taught Seth Rogen there’s no such thing as going too far: “Just fucking rad”
Very few people who grew up on the Judd Apatow comedies of the mid-2000s would ever have thought watching Seth Rogen that he would become a major Hollywood power player, but here we are, and thanks to The Studio, he’s now doing stuff like directing Martin Scorsese.
Rogen has come a long way since playing an out-of-breath cop in 2007’s Superbad and running from the law while high as a kite in Pineapple Express a year later, but he seems to have reinvented himself in his 40s, all fashion specs and leather jackets and Vogue centrefolds rather than just that deep guffaw we all know.
But then he is two decades on from his stoner peak now, so that makes sense, and the fun thing about Rogen is that he’s used his early success in order to pretty much work on whatever he likes, from exploring his love of comic books in co-developing the supernatural hit series Preacher starring Dominic Cooper, to superheroes by executive producing Prime Video’s The Boys, to making his absolutely unhinged animated movie Sausage Party in 2016.
For anyone who hasn’t seen the madness that is Rogen’s food-based cartoon, it pushes almost every conceivable boundary you could think of, getting away with it solely because the characters onscreen happen to all be items you’d find in a supermarket.
Famously, it climaxes, so to speak, with a jaw-dropping orgy between all of the characters that goes on for more than two minutes and includes almost every possible sexual act, and yet it still managed to only have a few seconds cut by censors on its way to bringing in a staggering $145million at the box office.
Despite quite obviously being the product of Rogen and his long-term writing buddy Evan Goldberg simply thinking ‘wouldn’t it be funny if we tried to get this made’, Sausage Party was so successful that they even made two seasons of a spin-off show about it. But when you examine some of Rogen’s influences, perhaps it’s not that surprising that he tried to see what he could get away with.
One movie he has spoken about being a big inspiration is the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone action sci-fi from 1990, Total Recall, a film that, while very much a mainstream blockbuster, also featured some very dark comedy and outlandish touches to say the least, from three-breasted alien women to heads exploding on the surface of Mars, to Arnold killing scientists with a spike to the neck.
Rogen told Rotten Tomatoes about his love for the film, saying, “Total Recall‘s just fucking rad. And super violent. That movie is a good indicator that you can take things much farther than you think you could. And they will strike a chord with the mainstream, I think. That movie goes really far. It’s pretty crazy. I love [director] Paul Verhoeven. He’s the man.”
Based on a short story from the 1960s, Total Recall was the chaotic tale of a man who tries to have a trip to Mars implanted in his memory, only to get dragged into a battle between secret agents and a despotic psychopath. It was a huge hit for Schwarzenegger, bringing in $260m on a budget of just a fifth of that amount, and some of the memorable special effects went down equally well, winning an Oscar. 2012 saw the release of a particularly needless remake with Colin Farrell, which failed to replicate any of the magic of the original.
