Joe Bob Briggs' review

Speaking of the wasteland of the future, "Hardware" is the best nucular-radiation twisted-metal jubilee since the original "Mad Max." Things are so bad in New York City that, before you have sex with somebody, you say "Not before I put a geiger counter on your Mister Microphone." Things are so bad that Iggy Pop comes on the radio every morning to scream "And now for the good news--THERE IS NO F------ GOOD NEWS!"

And then we've got your basic burned-out warehouse apartment units where guys in dirty T-shirts live with their rusty microwaves, and dark streets where one-armed guys with slimy razorhead do's walk around with bionic diving helmets, and security guards walking around with baseball bats, and dirty babies lying in the alleys, and the whole thing looks like . . . well . . . it looks like New York City.

A couple guys are out trolling through New Jersey, which now looks exactly like the Sahara Desert, looking for old Sony Walkmans they can salvage, when they find the helmet of a "Mark 13," the government robot invented for "population control." One of the guys takes it home to his girlfriend, who makes sculpture out of 58 Buick mufflers and old swingsets, and pretty soon she clamps it on a steel body and the "Mark 13" whizzes into action, revealing how it got its name out of Mark 13 in the Bible: "No flesh shall be spared." (Bring your Babtist friends. This is the first maniac out-of-control robot monster with a RELIGIOUS motivation.)

Pretty soon we go from sci-fi to horror as Mark 13 starts frying eyes with lasers, twisting heads off, jerking out eyeballs, and dirtying up the kitchen.

Two breasts. Five dead bodies. Eye-frying. Steamy bionic shower sex. Radiation-free reindeer steaks. Exploding droid. Elevator-door body slicing. Poison syringe gouging. Self-amputation (yikes!). Sci-fi Empty-V (when they say death-metal, they mean DEATH-metal). Excellent "Wizard of Oz" ripoff scene. Buzzsaw Fu. Baseball bat Fu. Aerosol Fu. Sukiyaki Fu. Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Iggy Pop, as the deejay, for screaming "Kill! Kill! Kill! Today's death count is 578"; Stacey Travis, as the blowtorch sculptress, for drinking Lactoplasm and saying "It's stupid, sadistic and suicidal to have children right now"; John Lynch, as Shades the sidekick, for worshipping the cocaine god and saying "It's my heart--it feels like an alligator"; Dylan McDermott, as the techno trash collector, for saying "Machines don't understand sacrifice--neither do morons"; and Richard Stanley, the South African writer and director, for the beginning of a great drive-in career.

Four stars. Joe Bob says check it out (but only in the "Unrated" version).


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"The wisest man is therefore he who loafs most gracefully." ~ Lin Yutang