The Revisited series takes a look back at Richard Stanley’s 1990 sci-fi horror film Hardware, starring Stacey Travis and Dylan McDermott
Sometimes a movie can be a best horror movie you never saw candidate but there are other instances where a movie has been seen and talked about but altogether lost to time. Richard Stanley has had a long career in terms of time he has been active but a very small amount of output in terms of actual number of projects. While the saga of his journey to direct the big budget remake of The Island of Doctor Moreau and subsequent firing has been widely captured in the documentary Lost Soul and his latest success with The Color Out of Space was highly regarded but tinged with controversial allegations, he had a couple of gems before all that. Dust Devil, his sophomore effort, still very much so belongs in the Best Horror You Never Saw category and I will get to that one too, but Hardware (pick up a copy at THIS LINK) is such a unique animal that I had the urge to revisit and remember why I dug it all those years ago.
Richard Stanley started his career with a few short movies ranging from 10 minutes to 45 minutes and a couple of these short excursions led to his first two feature films. While these short films got him notices, the South African Filmmaker cut his teeth on music videos before getting the chance to make a post-apocalyptic feature length film. It was somehow shot and made for less than a million dollars, but it looks a lot better. While it excels at utilizing minimal locations, the actors in it and practical effects go a long way to give it a much bigger budget feeling. The Weinstein Brothers picked it up for distribution but not with Miramax. The movie was released in September and October of 1990 by Millimeter Films which was their earlier production company. It made back 5.7 million and had middling reviews but more importantly showed that Stanley was a director who could get a movie made and have it be successful.
The movie was called derivative of things like Alien and Terminator for obvious reasons. The central robot stalker could be right out of Skynet’s early arsenal to go after John Connor and the isolation and claustrophobia the seethes into almost every scene after the first 20 minutes wears it’s inspiration of fleeing the xenomorph on its futuristic sleeve. Going beyond that though, the movie had more inspiration to it whether it was intentional or not. While its admitted and direct inspirations were from the works of Philip K Dick, Damnation Alley, and Soylent Green, it bared a little too much resemblance to a comic called SHOCK that appeared in the weekly British sci fi comic 2000 AD in 1980. The creators sued and were successful enough to not only get the writer’s credit but also get a little based on blurb in later releases of the movie. Think Terminator having to acknowledge the great Harlan Ellison and his story Soldier from Tomorrow.
It follows a man named Mo who buys the head of a scrap robot that was found by a wanderer. Mo’s girlfriend is an artist and he gives the head to her to use in her sculptures as a gift but later finds out that the robot may have been something called a Mark 13. He goes back to his friend at the junker area but he is dead and by the time he goes back, the robot head has used the rest of the scrap to make a body and begins to wreak havoc. It kills a peeping tom neighbor and the security team among others but also one of the main characters before Jill figures out its weakness and stops it once and for all. Well, at least that one, as the government has apparently approved the Mark 13 for mass production.
The cast is filled with fun musician cameos like Iggy Pop as the voice of Angry Bob on the radio and Lemmy, who if Airheads taught us anything, is God, as a post-apocalyptic cabbie. The other actors in it include Mark Northover who you may recognize from Willow, John Lynch who would go on to show up in the TV series The Terror and 2024’s The Watchers, and William Hootkins. Hootkins would end up with over 120 credits to his name but will probably forever be known as Porkins or Red Six from Star Wars. That’s a shame as he would appear in a ridiculous amount of stuff from Flash Gordon to Indiana Jones to Batman and even play a character called John Carpenter in Death Machine. Some of his dialogue and actions here though make this his most unnerving and unforgettable role.
The two leads, not including the killer robot, are played by the gorgeous Stacey Travis, who went redhead for the role, and a young Dylan McDermott in only his 6th role. Travis’s first role would be in Phantasm 2 but she would go on to appear in other genre fare like Venom, Dracula Rising, and Deadly Dreams. McDermott would also show up in a killer episode of Tales from the Crypt but also have a good run on American Horror Story. Its 94 minutes go by fast, especially after the initial conceit for the movie kicks in and it’s a shame that its so damn hard to come by. My favorite designer label for horror movies, Severin Films, had an awesome region free Blu-ray in 2009 but it is long since out of print and the movie never streams anywhere. I hate to say this, but you need to watch this movie any way you can.
While Stanley hasn’t done that many movies, he certainly has a flair for storytelling and visuals with an emphasis on the last part. The colors overwhelm at times with the wasteland being a brown dreamscape of fuzzy textures and sounds and when the building of the main characters loses power, the red color is oppressive in its danger. There are a lot of views from the robot’s point of view or the pervy neighbors’ night vision cameras that ensure very few shots and angles will be the same even with the previously stated use of very few locations and environments. One thing that I don’t think gets enough attention is the score which is done by Simon Boswell who also did movies like Santa Sangre, The Crying Game, and Stanley’s own Dust Devil from a couple years after.
As I said, there are a bunch of reasons why the movie works so well including the actors, score, direction, and overall story but there are three things that really stand out. The first one is how gory the movie is. It was almost an X rating due to the violence and boy does it still deliver on this. The kills in the movie don’t happen as frequently as other horror movies but when they happen, they are glorious. Or maybe gorious. The first one kind of tricks you here too as the shop owner doesn’t get more than some poisoning before he dies. From then on though, its pretty brutal. The pervy neighbor played by Hootkins goes over to open the blinds so he can continue his perviness and the kill bot is waiting for him. It injects him with poison, or acid its kind of hard to tell, removes his eyes and then drills into his midsection. I tell you this because my editor probably won’t be able to show you much of anything here. Our hero is next an even if his actual death isn’t as violent, it’s still harsh and we get some good arm gore. Finally, the two security members for the building get ripped apart and shot when they try to stop the robot.
The second thing that stood out to me, and I already spoiled it so I’ll lean into that, is the creative decision to have the art sculptor be the hero and not only kill of Dylan McDermott before the final fight but also not have him be involved in much of the action. It’s not reinventing the wheel but absolutely sets itself up as a more traditional hero complex with the guy saving the girl. She holds her own in less of a Sarah Connor in T2 and more like Ripley from Alien. Jill may be a sculptor in the beginning of the movie, but she also isn’t dumb or helpless. She uses her quick thinking and whatever she has in her apartment to go on both the defense and the attack of her pursuer. She more than holds her own and in fact figures out a way to stop the thing permanently in what turns out to be a fairly easy trick in line with War of the Worlds aliens being stopped by the common cold or the invaders from Signs not realizing that the planet they invaded is 71% covered in the thing that can kill them. Whoops.
The final thing that gives this movie so much damn charm is what it isn’t. The movie, possible plagiarism aside, doesn’t do a whole lot new but it does do it differently which means something. Unlike his second feature Dust Devil which I didn’t fully get when I initially saw it, this movie appeals to nearly anyone looking for a good time, especially a teenager who thought this was kind of forbidden fruit. It has a dash of sex and nudity, a post-apocalyptic setting that speaks to gamers and sci fi aficionado’s alike, more gore than you expect after the slightly sleepy first act, and just fun characters and concepts. As a first feature film it shows a lot of promise for a young filmmaker with a ton of ideas. The gore had to be trimmed to get its R rating and Stanley had a sequel planned that would follow Jill as she tried to stop the remainder of the robots from being used and potentially taking over the world. Sadly, much like many of Stanley’s projects that were planned like a trilogy for H.P. Lovecraft, this wasn’t to be.
Hardware is a great time and it’s a shame that it isn’t easier to find. Sure, you can get a used copy of that Severin disc that I talked about but $100 can be a hard pill to swallow even if the thing was brand new. It’s possible that we could get a future physical release, or you could always import a copy from another region if you have the means and, if you’ll excuse me, Hardware but for now I’d say if you can catch it somewhere then consider yourself lucky. It’s the type of movie that rarely gets made anymore and while that’s a bummer, it’s nice to know these still exist and maybe inspire filmmakers in the future.
Two previous episodes of Revisited can be seen below. To see more of our shows, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals channel – and subscribe while you’re at it!
