10 Best Hard Rock Soundtrack Albums

3. Last Action Hero

As far as rock was concerned, the early '90s was a beautiful mess of styles clashing together. Just before grunge and alternative music would become the order of the day, the last fading glimpses of hair metal along with some of the more wild experiments in the scene seemed to all have an equal chance of getting popular on the charts. When it comes to the harder side of rock and roll, you couldn't have gotten a better encapsulation of that weirdness than on Last Action Hero.

For a traditional Schwarzenegger movie, this Arnold performance is serviceable, as he plays your typical rough and tumble...well...action hero. When you peek behind the curtain though, the pedigree of artists on here is a lot more varied than many would have probably thought. Alongside some of the remnants of the thrash scene like Anthrax and Megadeth in the mix, there are also some weird nods to hair metal, with Def Leppard contributing one of their more downtempo tunes on the acoustic Two Steps Behind.

This is also an incredibly forward-looking album for the early '90s, with Alice in Chains' What the Hell Have I signaling the sea change that rock was about to have in the next few months. While Arnold would certainly do better than this, never has a soundtrack made him look more badass.