Hardware (1990)

Elevator Pitch: Jill is a sculptress in a dystopian future, who accepts the gift of a lot of bits of a cyborg from her boyfriend Moses who has scavenged the parts in the wasteland that is earth. But  the cyborg is a deadly military prototype which can re-assemble itself. Jill’s activities are observed by a peeping tom who sees her having sex with her boyfriend through a telescope, and after cunningly getting Jill to allow him into her fortified apartment, becomes the cyborg’s first victim.  Thereafter it is Jill versus the cyborg. Who will win?

Content: Jill and Moses have sex and a naked Jill is observed by the neighbour with the telescope. So a bit of blodgy nudity. There is a lot of time spent showing us how the security systems for her flat work, and we have no idea until most of the way through the film that her apartment is high up in a granite building. At this point she is hanging from wire above the street. Many scenes through the eyes of the cyborg, which seems to see things in infra-red. Before the end people are cut in two by Jill’s flat’s armoured hydraulic doors.

A View: This film is sort of famous as a low budget horror and I was not surprised to find that it has a cult following. A commentator said that he had gone to a late night showing;, there were only five people in the cinema and three of them walked out. That sums it up pretty well.  In order to keep the costs down you seldom see anything very clearly which makes it wearing to watch and had I been in the cinema I might have walked out as well. So not a view for me But I bow to the popular view, so if you have read this and still want to see it, good luck.

Additional Info: 2000AD, the British comic in which the original story appeared also featured the famous Judge Dredd.