Hardware

Rating:
Summary: On the Twelfth Day of Christmas m True-Love brought to me...
Review: ...A Nasty Mark-XIII military Warbot head---in a pear tree!

Well, not exactly---but that's the plot of Richard Stanley's surreal, cyberpunk, brutal, bloodthirsty dreamscape of a sci-fi flick "Hardware", which you should do whatever you need to do to beg, borrow, or steal a DVD copy. It's sick, bloody, good stuff.

First off, know that "Hardware" director Richard Stanley is a Hollywood wild-man: notorious for all sorts of brooding, decadent fits, he was sacked on the 2nd day of filming for the ill-fated (doomed!) "Island of Doctor Moreau". He snuck back on set clad in nothing but a dog-mask. Takes guts, Richard---takes guts.

Anyway, he was 24 when he helmed this sick, sacrilegious, probably evil little flick about the ultimate Christmas present gone wrong. Wayfaring soldier Moses Baxter (the grounded Dylan McDermott, who brings a lush breeze of reality to all the hynpotically surreal surroundings) finds a severed robot head in the hopelessly irradiated desert and hauls it back to his sexy, crazy artist-lover Jill (played wantonly by the yummy Stacey Travis...yeah). Turns out it's the head of the notoriously unreliable military warbot Mark XIII, and it has a nasty fetish for a little Yuletide bloodletting. Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly, indeed.

I was relatively young and naive when I first saw "Hardware", and my young self thought the thing was positively immoral. I was shocked. The Mark XIII warbot is an angry young man: it kills viciously, indiscrimately, and then cloaks itself in the raw nuclear apocalypse reds and oranges and shadows of Baxter and Jill's little love shack. And mind you, this thing kills *brutally*. People are sliced in half and boy oh boy, the blood spills out like Franco-American carbonara sauce.

But the real treat here is the grim, brutal, low-oxygen nihilistic setting. We have reshaped the future, says director Stanley. We have modified it. We have tweaked it. We have custom-designed it. Death is now art, art is now Death. Isn't it only fair that Death gets to tweak us?

Rating:
Summary: You'll love it...
Review: ...if you can get into the tone of the film. Kinda cyber-mythic-scifi-punk with a dash of b-movie horror and post-apocalyptic trash. Great soundtrack too, by the way. When will this show up on DVD?! My VHS copy is getting pretty worn from repeated viewings.

Rating:
Summary: Hardware
Review: A rather obscure low-budget sci-fi/horror film from 1990, Hardware left the theatre as quickly as it came. And it's not difficult to understand: Hardware is heavy on style, lite on substance. The story takes place in my favorite setting: the post apocalypse, so it already recieves praise for that alone. The actual story itself seems like a low-budget hybrid of Mad Max, The Terminator, Alien and Demon Seed. A desert scavenger uncovers parts of an android, the Mark 13, and sells them to Mo (Dylan McDermott), a fellow scavenger looking for a Christmas present for girlfriend Jill, who obsessively molds metal scraps and found objects into profound artistic statements.

She uses the Mark 13 head as a centerpiece, painting it with a stars-and-stripes motif. Unfortunately, the Mark 13 rebuilds itself out of the debris in Jill's apartment, feeding off energy sources that don't seem affected by a crumbling social system. The Mark 13 turns out to be a faulty, discontinued population control device. Once again, technology is biting the hand that built it. This, of course, makes Hardware a "cautionary fable". The film works best at the atmosphere level, blending Gothic sensibilites with cyberpunk chic, plus the odd lighting and angled cinematography of Italian horror films. The pace can drag in some parts and the hyperkinetic editing get's old, but Hardware makes up for it with decent acting, suspensful moments, dark atmosphere, great soundtrack, and convincing production values.

Rating:
Summary: One of my favorites
Review: A very deep (if you really look into all the imagery of the movie) highly entertaining sci-fi movie. It definetly uses an old plot line but pulls it off in ways like never before. The soundtrack rocks too!

Rating:
Summary: Awesome soundtrack on Varese Sarabande
Review: Entertaining but derivative sci-fi movie. But ... soundtrack by Simon Boswell sets this apart. Very beautiful all the way thru, my personal favorite is the short, erie, almost frightening version of "Silent Night" (track 9).

Rating:
Summary: HO-HUM
Review: Face it people...This movie stunk. This movie should be titled Dumbware. I got absolutely no entertainment from this movie. I was so bored with it I didn't even make it 20 minutes into the movie. Whats so cool about finding a piece of Junk out in the desert and scraping it back together and some how it mysteriously rebuilds it self and reck's havoc once again. How old is that. Don't waste your time with this. Life is to short.

Rating:
Summary: dark intelligent sci-fi
Review: First of all great soundtrack - Ministry and PIL, and not just for the musical content, but for when they chose to use it. It's so beautifully fitting to the scene which it is playing in. The death scene use of fractals just spurs you to wonder what really goes on in the brain during shutdown. Bottom line is this is a great low-budget flick with huge talent in the way of photography and score. And of course no film would be good without acting talent. Chomping at the bit for a dvd version, hopefully digitaly remastered and unedited

Rating:
Summary: Low budget cyberpunk gem
Review: Hardware is a small, atmospheric and moody science fiction film set in a post-apocalyptic future where everything seems...orange.

It opens appropriately with Carl McCoy of gothic music greats Fields of the Nephilim scavenging in the Outer Zone for junk he can sell back in the city. His eerie appearance and presence set the forbidding tone early on. Dylan McDermott, playing Moses, a soldier back from wherever, scours the junk shops looking for a Christmas gift for his girlfriend. She builds sculptures out of disgarded cyber-junk in her high-tech, super-secure apartment that she never ventures out of.

Moses buys what looks like a Terminator head from the dealer that McCoy sells to (before McCoy makes just as eerie an exit) and figures it's a perfect gift for one of her eclectic pieces.

Little does anyone know (or rather, they know too late) that the junk Moses bought is in fact part of a sophisticated M.A.R.K. 13 droid, a "population control" (re: killing machine) bot. After spraypainting the head like an American flag and mounting it on the wall fixture, the couple get down to sex and now-legalized drug use before Moses wanders back out. M.A.R.K. 13 begins to rebuild itself using the junk in the apartment, powering his new limbs and creeping around hunting for fresh targets.

The film has a very deliberate pace that is not quick--this is not a slam-bang action film by any mean. Its main strengths are the themes and the production design and the overall tone. Photographed wonderfully--a thick orange brown haze covering everything in a radiation screen, Hardware succeeds in being a tough statement about technology (once again) biting the builder's hands.

Apparently this film had to be cut by around half a minute for gore, though I'm not sure if this is cut in the VHS version. The film isn't too bloody really, and we also never get a really good look at the whole M.A.R.K. 13 droid (though he is just rebuilt from junk.) Given the lesser budget and resources Hardware succeeds in not falling into any kind of standard Hollywood formula. Technology is not friendly or cute here, and the outside of Jill's apartment is completely uninviting, thus her hermit-like artist's existence.

High on style, lower on substance, this is highly recommended for Blade Runner fans and those who like thier sci-fi tough. It also has a highly recommeded Simon Boswell score. The disc include the classic Ministry track Stigmata as well as PIL's The Order of Death.

Rating:
Summary: Simply Devestating
Review: HARDWARE is a suspenseful sci-fi flick with a small cast of characters and a superb storyline. I smell the start of a Cult-Classic :), buy this movie today people. i own it, and im darn happy! heh. :)

Rating:
Summary: One of the greatest sci-fi films ever on DVD
Review: I can't wait to see this film on DVD for 2 main reasons:

1) The soundtrack is incredible, and will hopefully be Dolby encoded.

2) The amazing use of reds in the color of the images always seems to bleed on VHS and a digital rendering is most welcome.

Hardware is one of the most stylistic films to ever be released into the mainstream. It resembles an art film that you would expect at Sundance much more than it does something that would come from Hollywood.

Forget the rather lame plot and look at the ingenious presentation and atmosphere. The cinematography and editing on this film are breathtaking. Hardware should be studied by film students everywhere to learn how original execution and creativity can be melded with a major studio release to create something extraordinary.

I've said it before and I'll say it again...those who don't like it simply don't understand it. It also helps to have an appreciation of industrial music as there's nothing quite like seeing GWAR perform as you hear Ministry's Stigmata.