Not even brief cameos by Lemmy and Iggy Pop can save this abysmal mess.
This picture had so much potential but was a severe let-down. Check out a review of the new Severin DVD @
http://reviewfix.com/2009/10/hard-to-swallow/
Oddly enough, I think that's a pretty good review of the movie, and I'm a fan; it is a bad movie for the reasons he mentions, but I still like it despite that. The setting is interesting, the soundtrack is good, but the characters are rather bland and the acting (and dubbing) is not the best... as someone else said, it's more of a mood piece than a movie.
BTW, I'm just watching the Blu-Ray and the picture is far better than I expected for an old, relatively low-budget movie like this.
The movie is certainly a mess, but it satisfied my need for an intense, grisly horror film. The characters serve no purpose other than to give director Stanley a venue for some weird religious themes that never amount to anything enlightening or even interesting. His cold, bleak rock-and-roll video approach is off-putting and well, icky. But he does a great job with building up tension and making us feel totally trapped with this nutso killer-robot and for a good twenty minutes I really enjoyed the movie. It all goes out the window towards the end when his lack of solid writing and over-abundance of pretension take over.
So yeah, I liked when the film became an over-the-top horror film, but hated most everything else about it.
I know who I am! I'm the dude playing a dude disguised as another dude!