Eye Candy #259 - "Hardware"

Hardware:  Billed as “Terminator for the 90’s” when it first came out (even though T-2 came out a year later and blew this one out of the water), “Hardware” was mostly known for being graphic.  Graphic violence.  Graphic sex.  And viewing it now on DVD almost 20 years later, time has not been kind to it.  Directed by Richard Stanley and set in a future where much of America is an irradiated, arid wasteland, the plot revolves around Mo Baxter (Dylan McDermott), his on-again, off-again girlfriend Jill (Stacey Travis), and the hunk of scrap metal he buys off a drifter that happens to be the control unit to a killer robot prototype called the Mark 13 (as in the Gospel of Mark - “no flesh shall be spared”).  The control unit reactivates, reassembles itself from scrap in Jill’s apartment (she happens to be an sculptor who works in metal, so that’s awful convenient for the robot, plot wise; thank goodness she didn‘t paint or we wouldn‘t have a film), and then tries to kill any and everyone it can find, including Jill’s neighbors.  Lifted without credit from a 2000 AD comic book story, it’s alternate parts gory, grungy, and loud.  It’s only 93 minutes long but feels interminable.  The special effects, even for 1990, aren’t anything to right home about (in fact, the Mark 13 functions a lot like the original Terminator robot).  The highlight of the film is its soundtrack, which includes Ministry and Motorhead (Lemmy also has a cameo as a cab driver), and Iggy Pop has a small part as a deejay (heard,never seen).  But other than that, not much to see here.  Woodchuck sez, “Cutting edge…20 years ago.”