Hardware – 1990 | 93mins | Science-Fiction | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Richard Stanley first shot Hardware in 1983 while a film student in his native South Africa. After moving to London, he directed two award-winning shorts and went on to make pop promos before Hardware was chosen to become Wicked Films’ first feature. Stanley was twenty-four when he directed this SF/horror hybrid in only eight weeks in 1990, with a shoestring budget of £1 million. Although dismissed by most critics as cut-and-paste exploitation, the film became the most successful British independent production in America at the time of its release, taking £4 million in its opening fortnight. Described by one critic as ‘the first movie made in this country with a definite fanzine mentality’, it remains one of Britain’s most notable forays into the science fiction genre.

An anonymous nomad (Carl McCoy) finds the helmet and torso of an android in the desert wastes of the Outer Zone and takes these to a scrap-dealer called Alvy. Soldier Mo (Dylan McDermott) drops by on his return from space to buy his girlfriend Jill (Stacy Travis) a last-minute Christmas present. As he makes his way to her apartment with the droid’s remains and his side-kick Shades (John Lynch), we are given a view of a shantytown future world complete with goats, fires and medieval costumes. As Mo and Shades make their way past a crowded slum dwelling, Mo remarks, ‘Somebody ought to help these people. Or clear them out.’ It’s the latter option the government has decided on in the form of the Mark 13, the android Mo unwittingly carries with him. The Mark 13 is a multi-limbed metal nightmare with a humanoid skull, developed to implement the government’s ‘Emergency Population Control Bill’- the next stage of a ‘voluntary’ sterilisation programme described by the President as ‘a clean break with procreation’. The pollution caused by a ‘constant war state’ has taken its toll on humanity, and the government’s solution is fascistic and final.

Shut away in high-tech security solitude from the masses, Jill has a job on the side ‘customising consoles for up-towners’, with chainsaw and blowtorch functioning as the tools of her trade and her craft. The Mark 13, whose fangs drip with cell-destroying toxins can be seen as a literal war machine, combining paramilitary technology such as heat-seeking weapons and chemical warfare. Jill’s apartment functions as a technologised womb within which the Mark 13 gestates. It lies in a jumbled heap waiting to be reborn. Jill and Mo’s love-making marks an act that no longer signifies. Invaded by technology via pervert neighbour Lincoln’s infra-red telescope, Jill’s image is appropriated by photographs taken with a gloved hand: the epitome of private space rendered obscene and pornographic. It is at this point that the eyes of the Mark 13 are first triggered, as if witnessing a primal scene and recognising its purpose and prey. It bides its time as Jill sets about the shattered fragments of the android with blowtorch and chainsaw, welding together her latest creation. Christmas Day marks the advent of a new ‘messiah’ as the droid reconstructs itself from the various pieces of hardware in the apartment.

That droid waits until Jill is alone before trapping her in the apartment. After its eyes meet his across the surveillance, Lincoln arrives at the door intending to actualise fantasy into action: a sick twist on the slasher’s male ‘helper’ tradition. This provides a ‘double monster’ dilemma, with Lincoln’s attempts to override the security system delaying the tape for narrative tension. Yet his conceit fatally underestimates the Mark 13 and by way of poetic justice he is stabbed through the eyes while attempting to open the blinds. The threat he posed, however, is merely increased by the droid. The Mark 13 subjects Jill to more than a quick kill, attempting to fulfil Lincoln’s misogynistic lust through the ultimate means of displaying male power. A disturbing simulated rape sequence, in which a drill moves between Jill’s forcibly opened legs, and the worst of the ‘stalk and slash’ tradition.

Another stock horror cliché follows as Jill is saved in the nick of time by Mo, who blasts the Mark 13 out of the window. Seeing the world outside her broken window her relative isolation is made clear as Jill gasps: ‘Jesus, it’s beautiful’, before being pulled out of the window by her relentless adversary. Technology again separates Jill from Mo as she clings to an electrified pole outside her apartment, forming a deadly unbreakable circuit between them. Unable to hold on, she falls crashing into the apartment below. Inside, the Mark 13 injects Mo with a deadly narcotic. Rendered defunct by the latest technology, Mo’s mechanical hand takes a knife and slashes his human wrist as his last thoughts are recorded by the Mark 13: a haunting image of the man/machine interface taken to its ultimate conclusion.

At this point the film undergoes an interesting gender reversal as Jill is resurrected from her fall and returns upstairs with a baseball bat. Jill understands not only the purpose of the droid but also why she is a threat to it, able to kill male characters with ridiculous ease; the Mark 13′s pursuit of her is difficult and prolonged. Although capable of perpetual rebirth, it is unable to compete with the human female’s ability to generate new life, and sets out to destroy it at source. Jill’s technological environment has contributed to her entrapment in the apartment: her surveillance system is turned against her, the metal doorway malfunctions, and there is the Mark 13 itself. Yet humanity wins out against technology when Jill learns to use it against itself and gains access to the Mark 13′s programme via her computer console. Mo is but a ghost in the machine during this software/hardware interface, a disembodied voice possessing the vital clue to the Mark 13′s fatal flaw. Hearing Mo’s dream of rain played back through the terminal, Jill grasps its significance for the first time: it indicates a defect in the droid’s moisture insulation. Water, symbol of goodness and purity, is the droid’s Achilles’ heel. Jill lures the Mark 13 into the shower and smashes it to smithereens.

In winning the battle and slaying the beast, Jill not only confirms her will to survive but also stakes a claim in the future. Yet victory is only temporary. The final image shows Jill looking at the droid’s remains as we hear that the Mark 13 is about to go into production.