"Here is Sub-Zero, now plain zero!"

Earlier this month, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced he would be leaving The Celebrity Apprentice. President Trump tweeted he'd been fired. The two obscenely wealthy and powerful men then bickered about it for a bit, but for me the real question isn't why Arnold won't be on the show any more, it's, what the hell was he doing there in the first place?

It's not like he needed more money or accomplishments. The Richest estimates his net worth at $300 million. He sat for seven years as the chief executive of the world's sixth largest economy. That all pretty much makes him the most successful lifter of heavy objects in all of human history. A lot of things would qualify as a step down, but a reality show?

I guess he just needed to get out of the house.

Back when he was Hollywood's premier ass-kicking tough guy, Arnold was in a movie that somehow satirized reality TV before it had even been invented.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Running Man.

I can hear you whining already. "Dark One, that's not even a horror movie. It's action/sci-fi if anything."

Look, a guy's head explodes. Another guy uses a chainsaw as a weapon. It's violent as all get out. It suits my needs just fine. Plus, you get a lot of what Arnold does best, deliver corny one-liners as he dispenses horrific death to one enemy after another. I should also point out, in his total career, Arnold has more on-screen kills than Jason Voorhees. 

This 1987 Paul Michael Glaser film is based on a story by Richard Bachman, aka Stephen King. It's set in the far-off future year of 2017. Society is such a dystopian mess, the movie has to open with crawling text to tell you exactly how hard the shit has hit the fan.

Arnold plays Ben Richards, a helicopter cop who refuses to kill unarmed civilians in a food riot in Bakersfield, CA. The other cops take control of the mission, kill the rioters, and Richards takes the fall for the massacre. He goes to prison but escapes with the help of fellow inmates. He gets caught at the airport.

Nowadays, they might put Richards back in  prison, but in 2017, they put him on America's number one television show, The Running Man, hosted by Damon Killian (Richard Dawson).

Richards and his fellow fugitives have to run through a 400-square block section of the city without being killed by whimsically themed stalkers. The guy who uses the chainsaw is called Buzz Saw. Jim Brown plays a guy who uses a flamethrower. His name is Fireball. If the prisoners survive the run, according to the rules of the game, they will be given full pardons. Not likely, though, as that's only happened three times in the show's history, and no one's ever killed one of the stalkers.

But then Arnold hasn't played yet.

You could call it a spoof of American Gladiators if it hadn't predated the show by two years. I'm not sure if it's a big-budget Death Race 2000 or a low-budget Hunger Games, but I do know that The Running Man is a lot of fun and it streams on Amazon Prime.