I’m going to be honest: I loved The Last Action Hero as a teenager, having missed it in theaters but caught it shortly afterwards once it had trickled down to cable channels in 1994. At that point in my life, I wasn’t savvy enough to understand that the movie was an attempt at outright satire, a send-up of the very genre it was purportedly working in. Or maybe it’s the fact that a truly successful action satire wouldn’t have cast the world’s biggest action star as its lead, muddying the waters for people like me and making it hard to get a handle on the true tone of what was happening on-screen.

Either way, while I might have been all-in on The Last Action Hero’s antics, the movie-going public didn’t share my enthusiasm. Director John McTiernan’s big budget flick was savaged by critics and largely ignored by audiences, making $137 million worldwide against an $85 million budget. I recently re-watched the movie after not having seen it in perhaps two decades, and as an adult I now completely understand why it didn’t work at the time—and why it’s probably not in line for a critical reassessment. It’s simply a misfire, a case of going too big, too broad, and in the wrong direction for audiences at the time (and to this day).

Fortunately, the movie’s soundtrack suffers from none of the above baggage. Released in the waning years of metal’s chart dominance, it mixes legitimate hair acts (Queensryche, Tesla), with thrash (Anthrax, Megadeth), alternative (Alice in Chains, Fishbone) and even hip-hop (Cypress Hill). It’s the kind of mish-mash of music that feels like it was assembled to reflect a mood, rather than simply packaged as an ancillary product attached to an intended blockbuster, which was rare then, and is even less common now.

I was a much bigger fan of The Last Action Hero’s soundtrack than I was of the movie itself, for two reasons. The first was the song ‘Big Gun,’ by AC/DC, which was released as the lead single and which enjoyed heavy airplay on the hard rock-friendly Musiqueplus channel, which was my primary source for new tunes at that time in my life. It’s a song I still love to this day, hailing from the band’s impressive late-career resurgence that began with “The Razor’s Edge” and continued on through “Ballbreaker” later that decade.

Next up was “What The Hell Have I,” by Alice in Chains. It’s a track whose twisting opening riff features heavily at the beginning the movie when introducing both Schwarzenegger’s cop character and the serial killer who murders his son. It was probably the first Alice in Chains song I ever heard, and it sent me down a path towards discovering excellent albums like Sap and Jar of Flies.

Alice in Chains had a second song in the record, too, “A Little Bitter,” but if I’m being honest there are only two other tracks that have stood the test of time in my memory of the soundtrack. “Angry Again” from Megadeth is a straight-ahead rocker that plays under the opening credits of the ‘fake’ Jack Slater IV movie in which most of the fantasy action takes place.

Then there’s “Cock The Hammer,” which was the only Cypress Hill track I’d heard at that point other than “Insane in the Brain.” With its ominous bassline and rainy intro, it wasn’t long before I had played it to death, memorizing the lyrics, and pulling me further in that group’s orbit, too.

If it seems like the soundtrack to The Last Action Hero was a gateway to musical discovery for me, that’s because it was. It arrived at the perfect time in my life when I was spending more time watching music videos, had an actual summer job that gave me enough spare cash to buy tapes of my own (instead of listening to whatever was on the radio), and was open-minded enough to listen to tracks from nearly any genre. Everything was still new and shiny to me, and because my music budget was still pretty limited, I focused on soundtracks for a while so I could sample a wider compilation of artists without being locked in to a specific band.

To this day, I recommend giving the soundtrack a listen. As for the movie? As much as it pains young Benjamin to say it, you’re safe to change the channel