Oh We All Walk The Wibberly-Wobberly Walk: HARDWARE (1990)

HARDWARE: Mark-13 (1990)

Rating: ****

Starring: Dylan McDermott, Stacey Travis and John Lynch 

Isn't it funny how some peeps actually believed the world's gonna end in 12/21/2012? Well, in celebration to our world's "end", I will be reviewing a piece that I think best fits this preposterous claim, all the while getting in touch with the yuletide spirit, HARDWARE: Mark-13!

While not the most holiday-esque looking horror flick, HARDWARE's radiation-ridden, post-apocalyptic setting actually takes place on Christmas Eve, starting the scene with a zone-tripping scavenger picking up robotic remains in a radiated desert and wandering back to civilization with hopes of selling it. Just so happens, returning soldiers Moses "Hard Mo" Baxter and Shades are there at the scrap shop and spot the scavenger's haul; Moses decided to buy the scraps as a present for his artist girlfriend, Jill, who is waiting back home for him.

Unbeknownst to Moses, the parts belong to a government-released cyborg project M.A.R.K-13, a cancelled production seemingly made for a mass genocide. Capable of repairing itself, the MARK-13 builds a new body from the tools around the apartment just as Moses leaves Jill for an urgent meeting. Now trapped in an apartment room with a homicidal robot, Jill is forced to fight back and survive a seemingly indestructible killing machine, all the while Moses races back to her place once he knew of the danger he unknowingly brought to his lover.

Based on a short comic from a 2000 AD comic book (beating Judge Dredd to the big screen by about 5 years), HARDWARE is an amalgam of cyberpunk, post-apocalypse sci-fi, and slasher film elements with its barren mood, mechanically eldritch villain and a decently-numbered bodycount. While its limited budget does show around the film's almost one-location story, I find HARDWARE's creatively suspenseful, surrealistic, and underlying religiously-apocalyptic tone to be a charming note.

The movie isn't hard to follow; I could best describe the majority of the action to be likened with that of the stalk-and-attack last half of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), as the leading female character gets attacked by the monster after around the first thirty minutes wherein it took the time to build around the casts and its premise of a beautifully detailed yet grungy post-apocalypse wasteland. It's a mood piece, that's what it is, relying on the dark overtones for a full effect dread to make-up for its own short comings, done quite well with the sun-baked visuals of decay and poverty, pollution and desperation in a futuristic slum world. Lay a tense and claustrophobic story over those themes and you got yourself a powerful B-flick that will win the hearts of some.

I'm not big in regards to sci-fi trappings, but the idea of a self-repairing killer robot sounds like a real winner for my book. I'm partially disappointed, however, that the kill count is lingeringly low, all that cool killer cyberpunk upgrades and it just manages to waste three guys, with an additional accidental death and an offscreen killing for a total of five measly murders. It's a fair count, but I really wanted to see this thing in full action. Other than that, the borg's main weakness is too generic and a bit rushed to be considered original, but at least it's intimidating while it lasted though, with a lot of its stalking scenes really worth the watch as it plans its moves, learn about its victims and really lay out the gore when gore is called for.

While it has the shell of a post-apocalyptic nuke flick, or the plotting of a sci-fi thriller, HARDWARE also leans more as an art movie with its reliance on visuals and imagery, which may as well be a double-edged sword. There will be people who will get it, and those who will not. I got a bit of an artistic taste, so I guess that's where some of the movie's Dario Argento-esque imagery charms its way to. That, or I'm just a sucker for killer robots since it's such a rare tackle for a horror flick.

So this Christmas, if yer feeling bleak, stuck and utterly sullen, why not let somebody else be miserable than you and watch them be terrorized by a killer bot? If you would like a good swing of that action, and don't mind an mid-budget arthouse horror flick, why not try HARDWARE?

Bodycount:

1 male found poisoned

1 male had his eyes gouged, gets a drill through the chest

1 male injected with poison, slashed his own wrist

1 male cut in half by a mechanized door

1 male shot on the head

Total: 5