Hated it
Who else did?
sharewell , i was probly about 20 when i last saw it , and that was 30 years ago .
But I remember going back and rewatching a few times , so must have thought it wasnt that bad.
MovieChat Forums > Hardware (1990) Discussion > Hated it
I hated it when I watched it as a kid. It was just too mindfucking for my undeveloped brain. I love it these days. One of my favorite sci-fi B-movies, second to Death Machine.
shareHated it, too. Always preferred the equally low-budget dystopian action-horror film Crash & Burn, which came out around the same time (and ironically also shared the same name as Hardware in some regions). The first half of that movie sucked, but the second half was pretty neat and it had some cool mechs and a few noteworthy action sequences.
My biggest problem with Hardware (also known as Crash & Burn) was that I only really liked the first ten minutes or so. The scavenging scene in the beginning was the best part. I loved the parts with Dylan McDermott, too. But he just wasn't in the movie long enough despite having top billing.
The other problem was that the movie just felt too seedy and disturbed throughout the middle portions, and I was waiting for Dylan's character to come back and get into a big-arse battle with the killer robot but he never did. Instead, he... kills himself?!
That was the biggest WTF moment of the movie for me, and where I went from disliking it to just outright hating it.
The other bizarro characters also ended up getting killed in some strange ways, and it was just hard for me to like this film.
It did have a great atmosphere to be as cheap as it was, and I really liked some of the cyberpunk designs and the dystopian world, but it all felt so wasted. It should have been a more traditional action film, and it probably would have been less divisive... like Jean Claude Van Damme's Cyborg, which is definitely a fun cult-classic that I can watch nearly any day of the week.
He didn't kill himself, you misunderstood the scene, but as you said - you expected a more traditional action movie. The big plus of Hardware that it is so weird, like a nightmare and dreams are rarely coherent.
And Hardware is known just as Hardware, not Crash and Burn.
And Hardware is known just as Hardware, not Crash and Burn.
That's really weird, but you're right.... just looked up its alternate titles, no Crash and Burn:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099740/releaseinfo?ref_=tt_dt_dt#akas
The bizarre part is that I originally saw this when it came on TV, and it was titled "Crash and Burn", and I thought I read somewhere that it received a different title in a different region, but I can't seem to find it. I remember watching it and being confused because I was hoping it was the other sci-fi flick also titled Crash and Burn. Must have been a mistake on the network's part.
Oh well.
He didn't kill himself, you misunderstood the scene, but as you said - you expected a more traditional action movie.
Wow, so apparently the version I watched was really butchered or altered because after the robot knocked Jill out of the window, she fell onto some wires and then fell into someone else's apartment. Mo thought she died, and after he battled the robot and seemingly thought he disabled it, he sat on the floor and slit his wrist while crying about the death of Jill.
But she didn't die, and she woke up and came back up to the apartment to find him dead, and then the final battle sequence took place with the others and Jill and the whole shower ending scene.
Now I feel I need to go back and re-watch the original uncut release of the film because it sounds very different from the version I watched. share
No, the robot has a toxin which he injects into Dylan. He is practically dead by that point. The toxin has hallucinogenic effects and Dylan has creepy hallucinations that make him tear his hand. It wasn't a suicide, nor he died from tearing his hand. It was the toxin, or at worst he died because the toxin made him harm himself.
Richard Stanley is into shamanism, magic, psychonautics, weird fiction and such. This is what he is channeling. It helps also if you watched Dust Devil (preferably the uncut edition) - the same nightmarish and surreal trip. They were never meant to be run-of-the-mill sci-fi/action/horror movies.
Ah, okay. I really need to re-watch it again.
I think the network TV edit removed a lot of the hallucinogenic elements because back then in the 1990s they used to censor drug use from movies that aired on primetime (heh, boy have times changed). Either they would blur out the drugs, add black bars, or completely remove the effects of the drugs, and I'm guessing that's what happened there.
So that's probably why I thought he committed suicide because the edit made it look like he slit his wrist as opposed to dying from the toxic injection while hallucinating.
Richard Stanley is into shamanism, magic, psychonautics, weird fiction and such. This is what he is channeling. It helps also if you watched Dust Devil (preferably the uncut edition) - the same nightmarish and surreal trip. They were never meant to be run-of-the-mill sci-fi/action/horror movies.
I've had Dust Devil on my watchlist I think (or hovering near the watch list) for nearly a decade. I'm not really into surreal shamanistic movies, given my penchant for more grounded sci-fi/fantasy/horror/thrillers. But the allure of the visuals and that awesome jacket always leads back to reading more and more about Dust Devil but never committing to actually watching the film.
I feel like you need to be in a very specific kind of mood to watch those kind of films.
One of my all-time favorite films, though, is Ghost Town, another action-horror flick. But funnily enough Dust Devil is almost always recommended next to Ghost Town. One day I may muster the courage to finally give it a watch. share
Well, it couldn't be any more different from Ghost Town. Somebody should fix the recommendation algorithm. And you really have to be in the mood for Dust Devil, because it is a very ambient movie. Stanley is fan of Tarkovsky and it shows.
shareLOL... yeah I just looked through my recommended list and there are some bizarre entries on there.
Anyway, I finally re-watched Hardware, the full thing, and now I fully understand why the original version I saw made no sense at times.
So the differences between the network TV and Blu-ray/streaming version are pretty stark.
1.) Besides the extended sex scene, Wineberg's death is far more extensive, which includes not only being injected with the toxins, but also having his eyes gouged out and also being impaled with the drill through the chest until it comes out the other side, complete with his insides bursting out of his back and onto the floor. All of that was cut from the TV version. TV edit saw the glove go towards the eyes and the drill towards his body and then there were sounds of him screaming. No gore.
2.) The biggest difference was Mo's death. Now I understand why I hated his death so much when I first saw the film because they censored the part where the needle pierced his arm. There was just the movement of the robot's needles toward Mo's body and then a cut to Mo's facial reaction.
3.) TV version completely cut out some of the gory parts when Mo was cutting up his arm and hands as he hallucinated that bugs and insects were crawling out of the wounds. Instead, it was the scene of him pulling the knife out of his boot and cutting at his wrist (but without showing the actual cuts), which made it look like he committed suicide, when in fact he made the incisions on his arm to suck out the toxin.
4.) The Chief's death was also heavily censored in the TV version, too.
I still don't like the movie, but I hate it a lot less now having re-watched it.
There was still a lot of weird scenes, and the Wineberg character was disturbing, annoying, and mostly unnecessary.
I might give it one extra star just because the atmosphere, music, cinematography, set design, and effects are still pretty cool. I also love that floating taxi that Lemmy drove.