Hardware

1990 science fiction thriller

Rating: 13/20

Plot: In a post-apocalyptic future, a guy buys his girlfriend the head of a killer cyborg which reassembles itself like the Iron Giant and starts eviscerating people.

This is from director Richard Stanley whose career seems to have been derailed after his The Island of Dr. Moreau screenplay. The budget's obviously very low, but there's enough weirdo style here to set this apart somewhat from other Terminator or Alien clones. It starts audaciously enough by taking the Bible out of context, the sort of thing that most religious folk can appreciate. "No flesh shall be spared" from Mark something-something more than likely was Jesus referencing killer robots. The opening weirdly-tinted desert shots with a character who looks cool enough to deserve an action figure are awesome. From there, odd details give this that written-by-a-drooling-middle-schooler vibe. Iggy Pop's voice is in there as a radio announcer, a little fellow named Mark Northover plays junkshop dealer Alvy who gets a terrific audio-only death scene, there are close-ups of a telescope-wielding peeper's wet mouth as he masturbates while watching Stacey Travis engage in various activities in her apartment, a character has a really wacky drug trip, and that aforementioned perv sings this "wibberly wobberly" song which he punctuates with a proud "I made that up." There's some sick humor and a lot of that sort of violence where you can tell the director no only wanted to kill off characters but punish them. There's great production design along with what might be too much weirdness, and the movie seems to get a little stupider as it goes along, not necessarily a bad thing.

Oh, I also liked the killer robot and how the thing was animated.

I watched this because I noticed that Dust Devil, another Richard Stanley movie, was leaving Netflix at the end of a month and decided to watch it before it was too late. And then, I decided to watch Hardware instead and didn't end up watching Dust Devil. Is that detail important enough to include in this blog entry? Anyway, this movie was a pleasant surprise, and I kind of enjoyed it.