Why am I writing about Schwarzenegger and Stallone?

To get the obvious reasons out of the way: two universally famous A-listers, locked in a feud so unseemly that both of them were still harping on about it decades later. Only with enough omissions and inconsistencies to suggest something worth digging into for a fun little project that may just have some commercial prospects.

But let's rephrase the question: what's the nature of my personal connection to Arnie and Sly?

The first movie of either of theirs that I recall watching was Predator; an illicit underage viewing at my friend Alan Walters' house when I was 14. It was my inauguration into the gory splendors of the VHS era, when rumours of the eye-cutting scene in The Terminator and Bruce Campbell chainsawing his own hand off in Evil Dead II were prime playground currency. So I walked away on a high, the act of witnessing Jesse Ventura's cauterised ribcage somehow an instant boost to my street cred.

I was just a middle-class kid from Hull, a run-down port city on the east coast of England. Short-sighted, with curly hair I wished was straight, and nerdy teenage tastes in most things: the polar opposite of virile. And with not a lot of interest in the kind of physical culture, or most sports, embodied by the two baby-oiled behemoths (though I played enough football to know that Stallone was not exactly a convincing player in Escape to Victory).

But let's not pretend the appeal of either man, or their movies, is rooted in identifiable reality. The opposite, really. I imagine my experience was fairly universal: pencilneck kid is blown away by scenes of masculine wish-fulfilment and omnipotence. Also, Schwarzenegger's movies especially were amusing – not just in the callous quipping style he'd nabbed from James Bond, but in their unrepentant, exaggerated violence. In that regard they were almost ironic or self-aware – if you can apply those terms to the work of a man firing a machine-gun with one arm.

Why am I still drawn to these knuckle-headed antics 35 years later – enough to research a whole book on them? I suppose it's nostalgia for the pureness of that teenage enthusiasm, generated by how simple and straightforward those 80s action movies were. How freely and unapologetically they served up the lizard-brain pleasures: gratuitous eviscerations, overturning petrol tankers, waterfall-spanning explosions. The stars radiated a kind of satisfaction amid this mayhem: Schwarzenegger joyfully, Stallone grimly. But in the digital age, when plots have become bloated and explosions computer-generated, that kind of full-frontal impact feels so much harder to achieve. At first Dwayne Johnson seemed to have the joie de badass befitting Schwarzenegger's heir apparent – but the over-complications and over-expectations of the modern franchise business seem to have leeched the love out of him.

I'm not trying to Make American Movies Great Again, or hark back to throwback archetypes of masculinity that I'm not sure were meant to be taken entirely seriously in the first place. But I do feel that something has been lost – some kind of confidence or economy of expression – in Hollywood. The Schwarzenegger-Stallone-Van Damme action axis was the blunt end of an inner cultural confidence that let original movies thrive on the basis of a killer concept alone. Time-travelling teenager prevents his own parents from falling in love. A dog pound, but for ghosts and ghouls. Australian bushman goes walkabout in Manhattan. You know what I'm talking about, because we don't have it anymore.

So for me – and I would hope anyone interested in the power of cinema and stardom – studying a clash of the titans in that age of excess is hard to resist. And an opening to wonder where today's giants are to be found.