Hardware

Hardware is the best nuclear-radiation twisted-metal jubilee since Mad Max. [05 Oct 1990, p.11]

A little slow and vastly outdated now, but nonetheless very watchable. Read full review

This is grim and violent but well-acted, cleverly made and full of suspense. [14 Sep 1990, p.F16]

To his credit, writer-director Richard Stanley, a South African native now living in England, brings his own bloody specialties to the banquet, and Hardware, although neither original nor especially thought-provoking, does serve its intended purpose by sending the hungry horror film fan away from the table satiated and nauseated. Compliments to the chefs. [12 Oct 1990]

The first half of Hardware has it all - sly camerawork, eerie score, nasty sense of humor, genuine tension. For 40 minutes it feels as if it could follow in the steps of Blade Runner, Alien" or Road Warrior. Unfortunately, that leaves the second half: a Japanese monster-movie homage that's a fiasco. [14 Sep 1990, p.22]

An energetic, low-budget Pandora's Box of delights, tailor-made for the disposable '90s. Read full review

Hardware veers loonily out of control and becomes a black comic exercise in F/X tour-deforce that’s ceaselessly pushing itself over the top. Read full review

The chief trouble with Hardware is that it doesn't seem to contribute anything uniquely its own to the genre, although it works hard dismembering bodies and otherwise crushing and tearing them apart with its circular saw and drill-bit arms after homing in on them with its ruby laser eyes. [14 Sep 1990, p.40p]

Though it does know how to hammer home a point, Hardware doesn't always have matching nuts and bolts. It has an anarchic quality, a jolting, disorienting rhythm that makes us unsure of time frame in certain stretches and of motivation in others. [14 Sep 1990, p.I]

It's one of those movies made by hard-core techies, meticulous about the "period" details and utterly neglectful of pretty much everything else, including such nuances as plain old plot. [15 Sep 1990, p.E6]

Although billed as a sci-fi film, HARDWARE is unquestionably a horror. In his calculated enthusiasm to shock, first-time writer-director Richard Stanley has filled the screen with gratuitous violence and psychosexual perversion but failed to present a plausible, reasonably coherent plot. Read full review

First-time director/writer Richard Stanley hammers together chunks from films past to form a clunky horror show that never rises to the level of its source material. [14 Sep 1990, p.4D]

While it's obvious that Stanley has seen a lot of genre films, he's not yet learned how to make one, though his shortcomings are less visual than dramatic and narrative; things look fast, but happen s-l-o-w. This Hardware needs a grease job. Read full review

Had the killer droid been conceived as a charismatic demon, Hardware might have delivered some B-movie kicks. As it is, there’s nothing particularly scary or awesome about this low-tech walking junk pile. It’s as if someone had remade Alien with the monster played by a rusty erector set. Read full review

Hardware isn’t long on ideas, emotions or character; it degenerates into a mindless slaughterhouse crescendo. Read full review

There's run-of-the-mill bad, and then there's a movie like Hardware. [14 Sep 1990, p.E3]

Hardware is a sci-fi-horror film of such dopiness that it seems certain to become a cult classic somewhere. Movies that are so insistently silly often have the effect of seeming to expand the mind after midnight, which may have something to do with metabolism if not with controlled substances. Read full review

Hardware runs more precisely, it crawls aimlessly as the robot, pieced together from household appliances, attempts to slice, dice, drill and saw Jill to death. There's no tension, no suspense, no climax. [14 Sep 1990, p.7]