Disc Reviews
Hardware 25th Anniversary DVD Review
Before there was Steampunk and with Cyberpunk becoming popular in cinematic terms with Blade Runner in 1982 there emerged a UK variant in the form of Hardware, a low budget, much maligned but cult success of a horror and science-fiction cross over. Made for a relatively small budget of $1.5 million this film is not as bad as critics made out and has surprisingly not aged too badly. The film is due to be released on the 23rd February on the Three Wolves label as a 25th Anniversary edition. However it is short on any background material, extras, and trailers or otherwise and comes as a very bare bones package. The film itself, as already stated has stood the test of time as a cult science-fiction horror film. The films opens (with shots of a rather Tattooine-like Moroccan shot landscape) of a wanderer going through a desert. This is a post-apocalyptic world with various (Mad Max-type) rogues wandering the landscape. One wandering nomad walks across the desert to New York with a robot head he has discovered which he sells to a former marine (Dylan McDermott) who gives it to his girlfriend (Stacey Travis) as a present. She proceeds to repair the head and robot in her apartment but the machine locks into a computer mainframe and proceeds to build itself until it becomes a hacking, stalking killing machine, attacking the inhabitants of her apartment.
What follows is a typical alien/robot out of control premise which pursues its human prey mercilessly. The robot itself seems innocuous apart from its skull warrior like head, but it is really nothing more than the robot in Short Circuit gone psycho. The overall look of the film is something akin to a 1980s rock video with its strong use of steam and red gelled lighting (Duran Duran’s ‘Wild Boys’ video springs to mind) and a red haired lead actress who bears more than a passing resemblance to Nicole Kidman. Elsewhere it borrows from many other genre films with Alien being an obvious reference as well as other more obvious films such as the focussing infra-red lens of the robots eye in the Terminator films along with other Arnie Schwarzenegger sci-fi classics The Running Man and the original Total Recall. This fusion of science-fiction with horror and action films was quite popular through the 1980s on and this is a low budget example of that.
The soundtrack and the support players lend it credence as a cult film with its Ry Cooder style score in the desert and Lemmy of Motorhead making a cameo as a taxi pilot blasting out ‘Ace of Spades’ in his river taxi. Iggy Pop also has a cameo appearance at the beginning of the film while singer of The Fields of Nephilim, Carl McCoy also makes an appearance as the Nomad at the film’s opening. After a fairly slow start the film does move at a good rate and it is a shame that the disc comes with no extras but ripe for re-evaluation.
Chris Hick