Hardware

Sold as a stalk and slash, Richard Stanley's Hardware instead excels as a piece of world building. Hardware takes place in an unnamed city that reads like a transatlantic mishmash of London high-rise poverty and LA emptiness. People are ferried about on canals by rock star cab drivers, pop-up butchers appear in concrete basements, and everybody talks wistfully about fleeing to salvage scrap in what's left of New York. Stanley's idea of a post-apocalyptic civilisation is utilitarian and faintly miserable. 24 hour TV stations pump out blurry atrocity images and 90s goth rock pop videos. It's as if this terrible future nurses a raging hard-on for anything pre-bomb, endlessly screening absolutely any surviving video footage. Everything feels worked over and damaged. The people themselves are reticent and ruthlessly self-sufficient.

Kill quarry Jill Berkowski locks herself away in an apartment with bank vault security while she weaves together brutalist metal sculptures. Her nomadic boyfriend Mo is a grunt with a metal hand that fights in some vague interstellar conflict. They're so close Jill wands him with a Geiger counter before she even considers admitting him into her home. Elsewhere, Stanley's experience documenting the Soviet war in Afghanistan seeps into the film. Beyond the city is a vast radioactive desert full of rotting military equipment, ripe for re-purposing. A trade exists around gathering pretty tech fragments and selling them on as trinkets. Shell-shocked survivors self-medicate with foil packed jazz cigarettes and drink from boiled nettle stews. There doesn't seem to be any localised form of law or order, instead tribes huddle in and around tower blocks armed to the teeth. Stanley's doomsday society isn't just the usual desperate scrounging, instead it's oddly functional. Away from the city there even seems to be an overworld in place, fighting unseen wars and rationing out anti-procreation propaganda packaged as populist media.

Unfortunately this is all just set dressing. The slight plot, lifted from a back-up story in a Judge Dredd annual, digresses from robotic murderers to include an extended sequence involving a moist lipped perv who spends his days spying on Jill. There's an idea in there about the kind of agoraphobia you'd have to cultivate to survive in a wasteland, but really this peeping tom intrudes simply to sex up the body count. The MARK-13 people smasher itself isn't particularly exciting either. Aside from a glaring metal skull decorated with Old Glory, the android looks like a half-finished college art project. The body it cobbles together for itself, although realistically low-rent, never really stress inhuman lethality. Instead, thanks to its tiny, waddling legs, it just seems pathetic.