dir. Richard Stanley cast Dylan McDermott, Stacey Travis, John Lynch, Iggy Pop (voice)
In a (sort-of) post apocalyptic future, soldier Moe (McDermott) buys the head of a robot from a desert scavenger and gives it to his girlfriend, Jill (Travis) who is an abstract sculptor and plans to incorporate it in her latest work. However, neither character realizes that the head belongs to an ultra-sophisticated military robot that has the ability to rebuild itself from available materials, as well as being programmed to kill anyone it encounters. Soon, Jill is trapped in her loft apartment with this monstrosity.
I watched this expecting an exploitation movie. It basically is, being more or less a low-budget version of The Terminator, though mostly confined to Jill's loft and set entirely in the future. However, it seems that the filmmakers had pretensions to create a kind of quasi-art film since the film is very slowly paced and features some weird imagery that is probably supposed to be symbolic, as well as some philosophical dialogue and an attempt at social criticism. However, these elements felt ham-handed and they seemed to get in the way of the film's plot, rather than contributing to it.
The deaths in the film are notably gory and the sweaty voyeur neighbor played by William Hootkins (who had small roles in Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark) is really repellent. I guess he was supposed to be, but I fail to see what purpose his character served, other than being someone besides the main characters for the robot to kill. Hardware is disturbing without being particularly interesting or entertaining. It is undistinguished low-budget film-making, neither particularly bad nor particularly good.
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