Super Movies! The one with a killer robot vs. a baseball bat

 

Title: Hardware aka MARK 13

What Year?: 1990

Classification: Improbable Experiment

Rating: Ow, My Brain!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

As I write this, I’ve been doing a Halloween lineup, with some of the best and worst movies I have ever considered at all. I have also been debating the future of this feature in particular, which has finally been closing in on the kind of numbers where I have considered retiring a feature. This brought me to one particular movie that I have had backlogged for a long time, in part because I never quite decided where it belonged. My very belated decision was that it belonged here, and conversely, that I needed to cover this one before I could count this feature complete. With that, I present Hardware, one of the strangest movies I have ever encountered, and one I still can’t say if I consider bad, good or just over my head.

Our story begins with a masked wanderer returning from a desert wasteland to a very cyberpunk city. We learn he is a soldier named Mo, who collects various debris as a sideline. His latest find is a robotic skull that he decides to keep as a gift to his lady friend Jill, an artist who makes sculpture from scrap. She’s happy to take it for her latest work, but it turns out there are problems. First, the creepiest of an impressive rogues’ gallery of disreputable characters has bugged her apartment. Second, the skull is actually a functioning prototype of an advanced combat robot. In short order, the bot manages to summon or reassemble its remaining parts and restore itself to functionality. The machine stalks the lady through her apartment, seemingly prolonging the cat-and-mouse antics while efficiently eliminating any males who try to enter or intervene. It all comes down to a showdown between a damaged bot and the lady. Can she prevail, or has technology finally outmatched the wooden baseball bat?

Hardware was a 1990 British/ American sci fi film written and directed by Richard Stanley, funded by executive producers Harvey Weinstein. Similarities to a 1980 story from the comic 2000 AD led to a copyright infringement suit by Fleetway Comics, which ended with the comic being acknowledged as the basis for the film in later releases. The film starred Stacey Travis as Jill and Dylan McDermott as Mo, with William Hootkins, best known as Porkins in the original Star Wars,  as a voyeur known as Wineberg. The film earned an estimated $5.7 million in a limited US theatrical release, against a budget of $1.5M. Richard Stanley became inactive after the failure of 1996’s Island of Dr. Moreau, which he was originally chosen to direct from his own script. In 2017, Stanley confirmed that Travis had been a victim of harassment and retaliatory blackballing by Harvey Weinstein. The movie went on to be a “cult” film, despite (if not because of) negative contemporary reviews and legal issues that limited its availability on home video. Its most significant authorized disc release was by Severin Films in 2009.

For my experiences, I first caught wind of this one from one or two very favorable reviews. On further investigation, I was able to obtain it for a decent price by ordering from Europe (see also Allegro Non Troppo and Zombi/ Dawn of the Dead). By happenstance, I watched it for the first time with a friend. By the end, I was ready to apologize, except my friend apparently liked it well enough. At that point, it went to the “maybe” pile. I considered it regularly, both for this and other features, but I didn’t try another viewing until this review. After that, I was very close to throwing it in a quickly growing feature on “worst” movies, not because of my opinion of its quality but for its wild and willful disregard for narrative convention and coherence. On very close consideration, I concluded that this would simply be giving the wrong impression, so I reverted to my existing plan to cover it here. One more thing I will get out of the way off the bat is that this is the most unpleasantly scandal-plagued movie I have encountered after Brainstorm, and the rematch got even more uncomfortable when I more carefully considered the character of “Wineberg”. The only thing I will add on this vein is that Ms. Travis did have a decent career after this movie, mainly in TV roles, proving that scum can’t keep people down entirely.

Moving to the movie itself, what truly settled its place here is that it does indeed look very much like a comic book, perhaps more than any movie I have covered outside of The Punisher, Creepshow and maybe Lady Snowblood. This shows in any number of bold, jarring visuals (including a surprising amount of religious imagery), and also in a deceptive attention to detail. The ultimate result is that the movie’s world is for long stretches at least as interesting as the story and characters. The desert landscapes, filmed in Morocco, are bleak and desolate, yet purer than the grimy, crowded cityscape. There’s extra entertainment in the in-universe TV and radio broadcasts, highlighted by Iggy Pop as “Angry Bob”. What’s less fortunate is that there’s still not much here that you couldn’t have found in a late 1980s/ early ‘90s comic book. Then the biggest problem of all is that if this was a comic, it could easily be knocked out in 10 or 20 pages, where the movie keeps straining to turn a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode’s worth of good material into 94 minutes of running time.

Then the centerpiece is the lady and the robot, and they are truly equal. Jill/ Travis is spunky yet nuanced, without needing to intimidate or abuse men. What’s most impressive is that she truly feels at home in an apartment full of gadgets and junk, further suggesting that the TV format was always best for the actress and perhaps the director as well. As for the robot, what’s both most intriguing and increasingly frustrating is that it doesn’t really “look” like anything. A point in the thing’s favor is that there’s some ambiguity how much of what we see is original specs, damaged components or bits and pieces assimilated from Jill’s junk pile. That sets off the thought in my mind that this could have been better if the thing actually turned her own power tools against her. When the pair match wits, there’s plenty of very believable tension further aided by an unmistakable sense of malign intelligence and possible sadism from the machine. The one part where one must suspend disbelief or write this off is the ludicrous final battle, which honestly, seriously sees Jill armed only with a bat. The weapon is so obviously ineffective that she would surely be better off trying to stab what’s left into an eye or one of the visible joints, but the storyboarding follows the absurd premise through right to the end.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and what I’m going with is the demise of Wein Wineberg. After Jill’s first encounter with the bot, she very grudgingly accepts the creep’s help. They quickly realize that the machine has somehow disappeared. Eventually, Wineberg thinks to open the blinds. Even though Jill has specifically said the bot couldn’t have left the apartment, its glowing eyes are looking straight back at him from the other side of the blinds. What follows is easily the most gruesome and prolonged kill of the movie, and I can’t avoid taking it as a sure sign that the filmmaker was already fed up with the Hollywood “mainstream”.

In closing, I come back to the rating, which is one more reason I chose to keep this one in this feature. At the proverbial end of the day, I simply don’t like this movie. On the other hand, I certainly can’t say it’s “bad”, and I certainly respect those who do like it. Ultimately, I’m not going to judge any further, especially after giving a good review to Dr. Moreau, which I still consider among the very best I’ve reviewed at all. (If it comes to that, the very best are probably here in this feature.) If my forewarnings haven’t turned you off, and if you can find this damn thing, by all means give it a look. It deserves that much, and even if you’re disappointed, you certainly won’t forget it.