Hardware
directed by Richard Stanley
1990, 93 minutes, UK
Severin Films

Falsely but understandably advertised as "The Terminator for the nineties" and loosely based on the 2000 A.D. comics (making it a precursor to Judge Dredd), South African-born auteur Richard Stanley"s cult-beloved feature debut had only a fraction of the resources James Cameron did for his Ahnuld-pocalypse. But even in its meager limitations, Hardware is both more cynical and conscious of human indignities as a horrific cyberpunk vision of the future. In this ruddy post-apocalypse, lawlessness pervades the land and Big Brother is always watching via omnipresent closed-circuit cameras, but there"s no anti-fascist revolution underway; we compliantly voted the bastards in, just as effortlessly as we decimated the environment so that only the fittest scavengers survive. Technically, the villain of Hardware (and here"s where that original comparison gets made) is a murderous combat droid called the M.A.R.K. 13, which is capable of regenerating itself with any old electrical appliances. However, what makes Stanley"s nightmare more disturbing in an age of environmental crisis and seemingly endless warring is that mankind is responsible for developing this mecha-monster (it"s not a next-gen species like the T-800, but a "population lowering" device), and in this world, we"re also responsible for destroying the resources that might allow us to defeat it.

Posted by: ahillis    Source

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