Film Ramble: Hardware

Last night I watched Richard Stanley's Hardware for the first time in about fifteen years. I stuck on my Lovefilm list because I remembered it as being pretty good and thought it might be worth another watch.

It really was. I'll go further: it was downright excellent. More than that, I think it's the only film I can remember to really nail the spirit of cyberpunk. Sure Strange Days wasn't too wide of the mark, and the first Matrix film hit a lot of the bases, but Hardware's got it all: grungy screwed up heroes, sex, death, drugs, horrible violence, pervasive technology, rust, rot, all the post-apocalyptic chic you could hope for.

There are probably about a million killer-robot B-movies out there, but Hardware strives for much more, and succeeds enough to count as a success. It's a dark, bad trip of a movie, scary and nasty and weird. It even has Iggy Pop!

You have to wonder what Stanley would have come up with if tantrumming celebrity actors hadn't wrecked his career. He has projects forthcoming on IMDB, so maybe there's hope yet...