The other night I had the pleasure of watching an excellent documentary on Netflix about the infamous 1996 Island of Dr. Moreau film and the incredibly troubled production that spawned it. It was called Lost Soul and its central figure was Moreau's original director Richard Stanley. Stanley is an odd guy, one of those visionary British creatives with a lot of esoteric interests. Ok, he's South African but the point stands. Stanley became fascinating to me, especially since he's only made a few shorts since the Moreau debacle, so I was curious about his earlier work that was only briefly mentioned in the doc. Which brings us to his first film that unsurprisingly put him on the map, Hardware. And guys, it's the real deal.
The setup is pretty basic for horror sci-fi. Inspired by a 2000AD comic strip, Dylan McDermott is a post-apocalyptic scavenger scrounging the radioactive wasteland for anything of value. He stumbles across the head of a robot and brings it back to his girlfriend Jill (Stacey Travis) in a crumbling cyberpunk city. Jill is an artist, welding bits of metal into avant-garde sculptures, and incorporates the robot head into her latest piece. Unfortunately, the robot isn't dead. In fact it's a deadly new weapons droid capable of repairing itself from whatever's handy. You see where this is going. The robot repairs itself and proceeds to go on a rampage, menacing Jill and brutally murdering her neighbors. Like I said, pretty standard. But it's in Stanley's execution that Hardware comes alive and becomes fiercely original.
