‘Steroid’: the most insane abandoned Arnold Schwarzenegger movie of the 1980s
If you ever get a chance to see 1973’s The Long Goodbye starring Elliot Gould, and you should, because it’s excellent, then you may well spot a familiar face in a brief, non-speaking role as a muscle-bound henchman, that being none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I mention that very early appearance because, for some reason, even without the hindsight of what he would go on to do and who he would become, he stands out a mile in the neo-noir movie; he simply has an enormous presence on screen, and not even a lack of any lines to speak can diminish it. He wouldn’t fulfil that potential until the following decade, of course, but when he did, he became probably the most famous movie star on the planet.
And it happened relatively quickly, too. The Austrian jumped from bodybuilding documentaries in the late 1970s to narrowly missing out on being cast as the Incredible Hulk, to starring in the fantasy swords and sorcery epic Conan the Barbarian in 1982. It wasn’t expected to be a big hit, and critics weren’t kind, but Schwarzenegger was such a charismatic central presence that it succeeded nevertheless, making three times its budget of $20million.
It was enough to earn a sequel two years later, and catch the eye of director James Cameron, who cast him as the lead in his incredible sci-fi action flick The Terminator, and as the cliché goes, a star was born. Over the next five years, Schwarzenegger made hit after hit, operating in a violent genre that could not have been more popular in the mid-1980s alongside the likes of Sylvester Stallone.
In that period, Schwarzenegger made Commando, Red Heat, Raw Deal, The Running Man and Predator, raking in billions at the box office. He also turned down several other important roles, including Die Hard, Robocop and a sci-fi action movie called Fortress, which wound up going to Highlander star Christopher Lambert and being made in the early ’90s.
The director of Fortress was Stuart Gordon, who had made a cult comedy horror movie in 1985 called Re-Animator, about a medical student who invents a substance that can be injected into dead bodies and bring them back to life. Schwarzenegger, who usually had quite a dark side to most of his movies with a twisted sense of humour, loved the film and set to work on partnering with Gordon on another film.
Fellow director Joe Begos had worked with Gordon before his death in 2020 and told producer Robert V Galuzzo, “They were supposed to make this awesome movie together called Steroid. I was working for Stuart when the whole Chris Benoit thing happened [WWE wrestler Benoit killed himself and his family in 2007, reportedly due to steroid use], and we talked about how shocking that was. And he told me he was supposed to do a story like that in the ‘80s with Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
Begos continued, “He [Gordon] flipped through his filing cabinet and pulled out a script called Steroid. He said in it, Schwarzenegger plays a wrestler that’s addicted to steroids, and he ends up going crazy and going on a murder spree through New York City. And I’m thinking, ‘Holy shit!’”
Steroid never got made, and rather than another violent movie, Schwarzenegger, in fact, that year would make Twins with Danny DeVito, which was another success and showed that the Austrian could do light entertainment just as well as stacking bodies up.
