There are potential spoilers in this review. However, it's not the plot that is the reason to see this film. The boys at Mystery Science Theater 3000 should have put this movie on their show. It's so terrible it's fun to laugh at, and opens itself up to many opportunities to make wisecracks at the screen.
The story takes place in an uncertain future, where apparently the environmental doomsayers of the world were correct. The Earth is now a planet-wide low property district covered with desert and demilitarized zones. The entire feel of the movie is depressing and moronic. Everyone has pretty much given up on trying to save the planet from human excess and stupidity, and they're just all sort of waiting for the inevitable. However, the world is dying with a whimper instead of a bang, and the horror of human extinction isn't happening fast enough. Ultimately this is a terrible film with an attempt at a social, environmental message. We get a very bleak picture of the future of humanity.
Dylan McDermott (known more recently for his work in the tv show "The Practice") plays Moses Baxter. Known as Mo to his few friends, he used to work for 'the Corp' but we never really find out what that is. He buys some scrap metal from a desert scavenger and brings it to his estranged girlfriend for a Christmas present.
Mo's girl Jill is played surprisingly well by Stacey Travis, and she is perhaps the only saving grace of this film. One of the things I like about this film is that the female lead can take care of herself and doesn't need any saving by testosterone-filled males. Despite her self-reliance, the men in the movie come charging in at one point thinking they're the cavalry anyway, and this builds up what is for me one of the most laughable and entertaining moments of the entire movie.
Jill is a resourceful woman who has barricaded herself in what's left of her apartment. It's pretty trashed when we first see her apartment, and it only gets worse. Talented with computers and machines, Jill spends her days smoking government approved "Major Good Vibes" cigarettes, watching disturbing television, listening to Iggy Pop's voice as the deranged radio personality "Angry Bob" and in her spare time she makes depressing artistic sculptures out of scrap metal that she can't sell because nobody cares. Why does she make these scrap metal sculptures? Because if she didn't we wouldn't have a plot.
The other supporting characters include people who use drugs to pass the time, buy metal scrap because it sometimes forwards the plot along, and lusting after Jill because it doesn't forward the plot along. She only has eyes for Mo, and she often asks herself why. We often ask ourselves why too, but we get one gratuitous sex scene out of it.
The people who do die, you pretty much want them to die anyway. So in that, the film holds true to the rules of horror movies, which is rather amusing because this is supposed to be a scifi flick. Visually, the movie's an attempt at industrial surrealism. There's a lot of red filters used for the landscapes, and a lot of darkness is used interspersed with superfluous strobe lights and other strangeness. The majority of the sets look like a badly made haunted house. However, despite the low budget attempts at flashy special effects, it does have some amusing imagery. It also sounds good, with a satisfactory soundtrack and the sound effects are well done.
So anyway, back to what little plot there is. Mo gives Jill this scrap metal as a present and an apology for ignoring her most of the time, and she takes the skull of what they think was some maintenance droid and puts it into one of her disturbing artistic sculptures. She paints the skull like an American flag, which is also pretty funny. It turns out that the metal skull used to be a defected reject robot from some government project called "Mark 13." What a surprise. Mark 13 was designed to kill anything that gives off heat. Unfortunately this film doesn't register on infrared. The rest of the film involves "Mark 13" rebuilding himself and beating up on the actors and the set. It's a shame robotic puppets can't win awards for overacting.
At one point Mo talks about a dream he had about rain, which the robot repeats to Jill near the end to help her figure out how to finally take out the robot. Don't ask me. I couldn't make sense out of it either. It is however a way to conveniently put this poor film out of its own misery.
If you love to laugh at bad movies, this is a great film to pick up at a video rental store, call some friends over, tell them to bring the beer, and you all can laugh at it. A better choice however would be the 1975 movie "A Boy And His Dog" which is a film that insults one's intelligence a bit less than Hardware does, although it's not as visually striking.
The story takes place in an uncertain future, where apparently the environmental doomsayers of the world were correct. The Earth is now a planet-wide low property district covered with desert and demilitarized zones. The entire feel of the movie is depressing and moronic. Everyone has pretty much given up on trying to save the planet from human excess and stupidity, and they're just all sort of waiting for the inevitable. However, the world is dying with a whimper instead of a bang, and the horror of human extinction isn't happening fast enough. Ultimately this is a terrible film with an attempt at a social, environmental message. We get a very bleak picture of the future of humanity.
Dylan McDermott (known more recently for his work in the tv show "The Practice") plays Moses Baxter. Known as Mo to his few friends, he used to work for 'the Corp' but we never really find out what that is. He buys some scrap metal from a desert scavenger and brings it to his estranged girlfriend for a Christmas present.
Mo's girl Jill is played surprisingly well by Stacey Travis, and she is perhaps the only saving grace of this film. One of the things I like about this film is that the female lead can take care of herself and doesn't need any saving by testosterone-filled males. Despite her self-reliance, the men in the movie come charging in at one point thinking they're the cavalry anyway, and this builds up what is for me one of the most laughable and entertaining moments of the entire movie.
Jill is a resourceful woman who has barricaded herself in what's left of her apartment. It's pretty trashed when we first see her apartment, and it only gets worse. Talented with computers and machines, Jill spends her days smoking government approved "Major Good Vibes" cigarettes, watching disturbing television, listening to Iggy Pop's voice as the deranged radio personality "Angry Bob" and in her spare time she makes depressing artistic sculptures out of scrap metal that she can't sell because nobody cares. Why does she make these scrap metal sculptures? Because if she didn't we wouldn't have a plot.
The other supporting characters include people who use drugs to pass the time, buy metal scrap because it sometimes forwards the plot along, and lusting after Jill because it doesn't forward the plot along. She only has eyes for Mo, and she often asks herself why. We often ask ourselves why too, but we get one gratuitous sex scene out of it.
The people who do die, you pretty much want them to die anyway. So in that, the film holds true to the rules of horror movies, which is rather amusing because this is supposed to be a scifi flick. Visually, the movie's an attempt at industrial surrealism. There's a lot of red filters used for the landscapes, and a lot of darkness is used interspersed with superfluous strobe lights and other strangeness. The majority of the sets look like a badly made haunted house. However, despite the low budget attempts at flashy special effects, it does have some amusing imagery. It also sounds good, with a satisfactory soundtrack and the sound effects are well done.
So anyway, back to what little plot there is. Mo gives Jill this scrap metal as a present and an apology for ignoring her most of the time, and she takes the skull of what they think was some maintenance droid and puts it into one of her disturbing artistic sculptures. She paints the skull like an American flag, which is also pretty funny. It turns out that the metal skull used to be a defected reject robot from some government project called "Mark 13." What a surprise. Mark 13 was designed to kill anything that gives off heat. Unfortunately this film doesn't register on infrared. The rest of the film involves "Mark 13" rebuilding himself and beating up on the actors and the set. It's a shame robotic puppets can't win awards for overacting.
At one point Mo talks about a dream he had about rain, which the robot repeats to Jill near the end to help her figure out how to finally take out the robot. Don't ask me. I couldn't make sense out of it either. It is however a way to conveniently put this poor film out of its own misery.
If you love to laugh at bad movies, this is a great film to pick up at a video rental store, call some friends over, tell them to bring the beer, and you all can laugh at it. A better choice however would be the 1975 movie "A Boy And His Dog" which is a film that insults one's intelligence a bit less than Hardware does, although it's not as visually striking.