HARDWARE

   Film (1990). Palace/Millimeter/A Wicked Films Production. Dir Richard Stanley, starring Stacey Travis, Dylan McDermott, John Lynch, William Hootkins. Screenplay Stanley, based (it was admitted after a threatened lawsuit) on a 1980 JUDGE DREDD story. 94 mins, but many prints shortened to avoid adults-only rating. Colour.

   In a radioactive city in an apparently post- HOLOCAUST near future, a dope-smoking sculptress is given a military robot's head to incorporate into a steel sculpture. It reincorporates itself using pieces of the sculpture, thereby taking the film from the technopunk- DYSTOPIA genre into the Luddite killer- ROBOT genre. The 24-year-old director, Stanley, had a track record in so-called IndustrialMusic rock videos, and the eclectic, pack-rat junk sensibility which this suggests (a bit of Andrei TARKOVSKY here, a bit of Dario Argento there, a bit of CYBERPUNK everywhere) surprisingly transcends cliche in the images if not the script. Though H is basically a simple low-budget SPLATTER MOVIE, it is unusually inventive in its design and in several of thecharacters, notably Hootkins as a rotund sadistic voyeur. The crazed robot is a Mark 13, and the film's epigraph is adapted from (where else?) the Gospel According to St Mark, Chapter 13: "No flesh shall be spared." [m2]   PN

   See also: CINEMA.