Maybe the girls were too old for Sex & the City 3?
Here is a case of time changing the interpretation of a film. I originally watched Hardware when it first was released to VHS and while I wasn’t blown away the overriding memory for the last 20 years was that of an ultra-underground pervasive little art film which was mostly dialogue free.
Please keep in mind I was 15 or 16 at the time, I wanted everything to be ultra-underground and pervasive.
Imagine my surprise when last night I spotted it on the DVD rack and decided to revisit this little art house gem, only to discover it is really low budget, mildly creative serial killer film with perhaps altogether too much dialogue – only differing from a dozen others in that the killer is a self-repairing robot.
In yet another post-apocalyptic future (there’s more than a few of those going around aren’t there?) humanity has huddled into small confined settlements surrounded by desert – away from the ongoing war which is occurring somewhere in the distance. Disease (from radiation and poor living conditions) and crime are rife, and with everything green seemingly eradicated dust storms and punishing heat must be dealt with on a daily basis.
It seems that one of the more profitable occupations given the circumstances is that of salvaging items of value from the vast wastelands surrounding these populated outcrops. That’s exactly where the trouble starts here.
A guy dressed part sand-people, part tramp comes across a destroyed robot in pieces in his travels. He takes it to the local scrap yard equivalent where two buddies Mo (a young Dylan McDermott) and Shades (he wears sunglasses all the time!) white-ant the shopkeep, paying 50 credits for the mangled robot remains – I personally wouldn’t have paid more than 30 credits but there you go.
So once Mo buys the robo from the hobo he takes it to the home of a local woman named Jill with whom he shares an on again / off again relationship… and after a few minutes rest it’s on and off again repeatedly. Jill is some sort of sculptor or artist by trade and she immediately takes the random parts and turns them into a post modern post apocalyptic work of art, complete with the red white and blue stars and stripes emblazoned on the robot’s head.
All good right? Wrong. Turns out the robot is a Mark 13, a vicious killing machine with the power to rebuild itself on the fly so that it can continue performing its primary role – keeping the population down.
Guess what happens next?
Too late. Wrong!
USA! USA!
The Mark 13’s eyes blink into “life” and it proceeds to rebuild itself using other parts of the sculpture and god knows what else to make him look like an evil Short Circuit prototype.
The remainder of the film teaches us one thing – When you have an enemy that puts the “in” in indestructible, and this psychopathic coffee machine is hell-bent on killing you and everyone else, it probably isn’t a good idea to keep believing it to be dealt with. 4 or 5 times in the second half of the film characters pause for breath and look around as if to say “Phew at least that’s over”.
Only it NEVER is.
The tone of the film is quite dark, there is some frank and quite sexual dialogue from one character in particular, and a couple of the deaths are especially gory.
The Mark 13 looks pretty good in certain scenes, but in others is obviously a guy in a suit and at other times a guy wearing gloves pretending to be robot hands. The filmmakers must’ve noticed this too, because in the hectic last few minutes quite a bit of the action relies on quick cuts, noise and misdirection. It’s like they realized that a few good looks at the robot was enough, let’s just coast from here.
It’s all pretty silly in a macabre, dark and twisted way, and the final 15 minutes get more than a little pretentious and unnecessarily artsy-fartsy.
It is fitting in this dystopian universe that the soundtrack is largely industrial rock, even though as a genre it basically sucks balls. Fitting too that Hard Rawkers Lemmy and Iggy Pop get cameos as alterna lunatics.
Hardware is far from what I remembered since my days as an impressionable teen, and that is a shame. The film isn’t quite lousy, it’s just nowhere near as impactful as it was in my vague recollections.
Final Rating – 6 / 10. No. 5, meet No. (Mark) 13. He’s a lot less friendly, a great deal more single minded and frankly psychopathic. But hey he gets results!
