At first glance, Richard Stanley‘s cult science fiction film may seem like a cheap hybrid of Alien and The Terminator. It has a claustrophobic location in a grungy post apocalyptic world and it features a well-realized mechanical nightmare dispatching (with much gore) anything that comes in contact with it. What sets Hardware apart from these to films is tone. It riffs a lot more cynically on the nature for people (and societies) to destroy themselves indirectly; this world seems far more nihilistic and lacking in hope. While Stanley has an eye for capturing his vision in memorable images, much as Ridley Scott or James Cameron, perhaps more violently than either of those the above quite grisly films, he also does not make you want to root too much for his lead characters – or by extension, humanity.

Kicking off with a familiar 1980s post-apocalyptic ‘desert walker’ motif, only this time under a startlingly red filter, there is the uncovering some military junk, a robot head, first by the winds (of chance) then by the walker himself. The film establishes its tone perhaps more effectively with Iggy Pop’s DJ narrator gleefully relishing in how fucked up earth is after a series of wars and environmental disasters. To the films credit, this is not done in a blunt or explicit fashion, but simply with the panning of the skyline, the weather forecast and the playing of some hard-core industrial rock as a ‘golden oldie.’ Cut to outer-zone soldier, Moses (Dylan McDermontt), and his side-kick “Shades” (John Lynch) trekking around town (Los Angeles perhaps?) running errands before Christmas.

Pawing some of his own Junk, Moses manages to purchase the robot heat from another customer (the desert walker looking all crazy-eyed and freaky, but still willing to barter) while the shop-keep is in the bathroom. He ends up giving this prize to his girlfriend Jill (Stacey Travis – all sex and sweat and grease and lips) more to get laid than out of any sense of loving relationship. Jill lives as a shut in a locked-down high-rise that has a open-market butcher shop in the foyer, a couple corpses in the stairwell and the strongest locking door mechanisms this side of a military space-ship. A post-coital conversation between Moses and Jill gives more insight to the world. Radiation has pretty much fucked human reproduction and the government, locked in perpetual war (Nineteen Eighty-four style) has decided to start chemically sterilizing the population. Despite being pretty prime specimens of the state of the human race, Jill nor Moses do not want to be Adam and Eve for fear of mutant children and the doomed world they would grow up in. Jill would rather make insectoid metal sculpture out of discarded technological odds and ends, her latest sculpture dominates the apartment like a spider making a web. She plugs the droid head into the centre and gives it a handsome all American air-brush of stars and stripes. A compelling image of with esoteric implications.

Quiet conversation or introspection becomes less of a priority however when the brain of the robot turns on and starts using the power and detritus around the apartment to re-assemble itself and continue its mission. “No flesh shall be spared.” The ominous biblical quote that leads in the film, coincides to the name of the manufacturing line of ‘bots from which the head originated (blackly comical) after Mark 13 biblical verse. In the tradition of a long line of tough heroines, Jill does battle with the metal beast, but for what? Only a few more years of shut-in time and welding bits of junk together (a purpose she herself does not understand). The rest of the supporting characters become typical fodder to the beast, including a perverted neighbor who spies on Jill in the style of Rear Window, if that film was a raunchy and peep show. All dripping tongue and intimidating silly-song (Looking with his wibbily-wobbily eyes!”) in his ‘rescue’ of Jill, the scene is a grim piece of comedy with inevitable results, as if Jill herself knows what is going to happen and offers him to the mecca-wolf. Less effective are the security guards and Asian neighbors which are ill developed and feel much more like fodder than characters. Props to John Lynch in painting Shades in equal portions of cynicism and optimism and Zen acceptance that when he finally manages to shake off his drug trip and get into action, his character feels more suited to the ‘float like a leaf on the wind’ in this environment than dense and cocky soldier-boy Moses. The final baptism of the machine (literally) and the gleeful DJ exeunt celebrating the creation of a few hundred jobs in tge mass production of the MARK 13 line would leave both George Orwell and Adolf Hitler proud.

All of Hardware is served up in handsome production design that makes the most of its tiny budget and features a very interesting alt-rock soundtrack (Motörhead, GWAR and Fields of the Nephilim join Iggy Pop in making cameos in the film) and Public Image Ltd provides a magnificent tune that feels very much a part of the soundtrack and tone of the film. Musically, probably a function of the directors previous music video career, Hardware jumped the curve a more than a bit in 1990 before this type of music began to dominate the radio. The film was hacked and edited and barely released (a foreshadowing from a young Miramax, Harvey and Bob Weinstein are producers even though it was a UK production) in the theatres. Static ridden VHS and DVDs created from those VHS tapes were the prominent way most people saw this film, which is a tribute to the tone of the story that it because a cult item. Recently, Severin Films put it out in a simply wonderful special edition (and Bluray) which underscores just how beautiful the cinematography is here. Hardware may not be too deep a film, but it excels in the visceral and the bleak, and that is what this Doomsday Marathon is all about.