Hardware | | Cast : | Dylan McDermott, Stacey Travis, John Lynch | | Director : | Richard Stanley | | Studio : | Buena Vista Home Vid | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned | | Released Date : | January 11, 1990 | | DVD Released Date : | April 22, 2003 | | Language : | English (Dubbed) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | July 15, 2005 | | Summary | The worst movie I have ever seen | Content
 | I wish I could select "0 star." On a friend's suggestion, I saw this movie in the theater in 1990 and the memory was such that it took many years of therapy to be able to cope in society once more...
I realize that hard-core sci fi fans do not care much for realism or continuity but let's consider the plot here (SPOILER alert).
The movie starts out in this hot red desert like world. We're not sure if there's been some apocalypse or it's just your run- of-the-mill sci fi dystopia. No explanation is given for why some things look like a wasteland and some things are built up and modern.
Moses is a Marine or some kind of soldier but he never seems to report for duty. He gets this robotic head from a scrap dealer for his live-in girlfriend Jill, who's an artist. They talk about children and Moses says that he's "given up" on that idea a long time ago. There's the suggestion that some calamity has made people sterile. Despite this, I seem to remember a reference in the movie about the government sterlizing people. Say what?
The robot head manages to build itself a body from Jill's artistic scrap supplies and procedes to go on a killing spree. It seems that the government has created the "MARK 13" android to hunt down the populace to stop overcrowding. Say what again? People are sterile or being sterilized, the world outside their city is a wasteland and overpopulation is a concern?
Moses has a friend, some sort of space jockey named Shades. With the world so dystopian, it's a bit odd that people are still going into space. Anyway, it's up to these three to try to stop the MARK 13.
As overdone as this plot is, you might say it's okay for a late night TBS movie but then suddenly there is a sideplot of this pervert who likes to spy upon Jill. He calls her up and says he wants to do something rather pornographic with a string of popcorn. When this line was uttered, everyone in the theater about gasped or laughed in embarassment. What the point of this was, who can tell. Of course, the MARK 13 blasts him in short order so who really cared.
Bullets and shotgun pellets have no effect on the MARK 13. Worse, the robot kills off the main character Moses. Okay fine. But Moses dies with a big chunk of the movie left! Shades? Well he's too busy getting wasted on some sort of drug. That leaves Jill. Mind you, all kinds of small arms don't work on the thing but Jill's baseball bat slays the beast. My friend dubbed it "the emotional baseball bat."
One of the songs in the movie was a repetitive track with the lyrics "This is what you want, this is what you got."
As we left the theater, one of the group I was with got up and said "This is what we wanted...and this is what we got."
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| Rating | | | Date | June 30, 2005 | | Summary | A gift. | Content
| Real fun... at a time when less was expected... real fear... now the joke has gone unheeded. |
| Rating | | | Date | March 23, 2005 | | Summary | Ultra-Stylish Science Fiction | Content
| The key thing about this movie is its atmosphere. Desolation and gloom pervade everything. The characters in this post-nuclear dystopia are making do with all that is left to them; fashioning machinery, livelihood, and culture out of the detritus scattered all around. The desert outlands, through which travel is sometimes necessary, are glaringly bright and lifeless and radiation swirls in the air. In contrast to this are the dusky, jagged, and metallic tones of the city where most of the story takes place. And finally, the sountrack music ( especially the hauntingly synthetic Public Image Ltd. song ) is very fitting and it perfectly reinforces the industrial harshness of the landscape and the overall sense of doom.
Now the story itself was criticized at the time of its release for being derivative. And rightly so, since its a pretty obvious combination of "Terminator" ( a seemingly unstoppable machine that's built to kill ) and "Alien" ( claustrophobic enviroment ). Yet despite these familiar elements, this film has a unique feel all its own and is just as enjoyable as the ones it borrows from. It really stands up to repeat viewings ( try to catch it on Showtime Beyond ) not only because of the aesthetics, but because of the warmth and affection between the main characters ( the artist, her boyfriend, and her boyfriend's best friend ) despite the omnipresent gloom. This type of human connection seems to be missing from most sci-fi ( Star Trek excluded ) and its refreshing to see. Now what about that DVD already? |
| Rating | | | Date | December 13, 2004 | | Summary | Incredible SciFi Thriller | Content
| Mix "Terminator", "Pitch Black", and "Silence of the Lambs" and what have you got? "Hardware". This movie is not only a great SciFi movie, but an excellent thriller as well. Fans of other genres should enjoy this one. It offers a good deal more than a futuristic society on the brink of destruction. The unusual character personalities and the psychotic nature of the machines takes it a notch above many movies it is sometimes compared to. The camera work and visual effects are excellent. A great soundtrack makes it all the better. I recall when I saw it I thought Iggy Pop's was incredible. The story takes time to evolve but what starts out at a "Mad Max" level rapidly evolves to "Road Warrior" status. I highly recommend it to SciFi fans and non-fans alike. |
| Rating | | | Date | December 01, 2004 | | Summary | On the Twelfth Day of Christmas m True-Love brought to me... | Content
| ...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? |
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