Hardware (Special Edition)

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

Music video director Richard Stanley made his feature debut with this apocalyptic, post-industrial nightmare set in the distant future. Dylan McDermott stars as Moses "Hard Mo"' Baxter, a washed-up ex-soldier who spends most of his time in "The Zone" -- a scorched, ochre-colored desert littered with the radioactive debris of an unspecified war (or wars). Mo's recent Zone foray with war-buddy Shades (Jon Lynch) turns up an interesting find -- a pile of droid parts he purchases from a spooky "Zone Tripper" (Carl McCoy, frontman for goth-rock's Fields of the Nephilim), which he carts home to his reclusive artist girlfriend Jill (Stacy Travis) to serve as raw material for her latest work. Unbeknownst to them, the dismantled robot is the prototype of a controversial new battle-droid dubbed the Mark 13, which is designed to reassemble itself from available materials if damaged in combat. In short order, the Mark 13 proceeds to do just that, tapping into the power grid in Jill's fortress-like apartment and targeting her for death. ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi

DVD FEATURES:

• Region: All
• Number of Discs: 2
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 (Theatre Wide Screen)
• Audio: Dolby Digital 5.1, Dolby Digital Stereo
• Encoding: NTSC
• Screen: Color, Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV
• Features:
  • No flesh shall be spared - exclusive documentary featuring all-new interviews with cast and crew
  • Incidents in an expanding universe - early super 8 version of Hardware
  • The sea of perdition - 2006 Richard Stanley short film
  • Rites of passage - early Richard Stanley short film
  • Richard Stanley on Hardware 2
  • Deleted and extended scenes
  • Audio commentary with director Richard Stanley

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Director:

  Richard Stanley

• Producer:

  Nik Powell, Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein, Stephen Woolley, Trix Worrell, Paul Trijbits

• Screenwriter:

  Richard Stanley

• Cinematographer:

  Steven Chivers

• Composer (Music Score):

  Simon Boswell

• Editor:

  Derek Trigg

• Production Designer:

  Joseph Bennett

• Co-producer:

  Joanne Sellar

• Associate Producer:

  Ray Corbett

• Executive Producer:

  Nik Powell, Stephen Woolley, Trix Worrell

• Costume Designer:

  Michael Baldwin

• Special Effects:

  Image Animation

• Special Effects Coordinator:

  Barney Feffrey

REVIEW:

• A nightmarish, post-apocalyptic voyage into man's deepest-rooted natural and technological fears, director Richard Stanley's bid for stateside success resulted in a jarringly disturbing film unfairly dismissed at the time as a rip-off of James Cameron's better-known and similarly themed The Terminator (1984). While those comparisons aren't entirely unfounded given the subject matter, Stanley seems to have been going for something entirely different here. Nowhere is this more evident than in the inclusion of one particular element that Cameron's sci-fi classic neglected to adequately address, nature. While the characters in The Terminator were attempting a last ditch plea to save humankind from extinction solely at the hands of machines, Stanley establishes early on that the human race has already marked their days due to their callous treatment of the Earth itself; technology and killer robots only serve to compound this fact. Stanley's argument regarding nature and technology seems to be that once mankind has destroyed their world and stripped it of its natural resources, they will have no place to escape to once a more adaptive life form rises. In addition to the external factors which threaten man (or, in this case, woman), Stanley also makes a strong case that as a result of such natural horrors, the human race would suffer internally as well. From the sexual predator that the heroine must evade to the fact that cannabis has been legalized so that humans can have momentarily escape from their moribund existence, it's obvious that humankind's rape of the Earth has had significant negative impact on their mental well-being. Frequently disturbing and unsettling in its unflinching, beautifully horrific view of a race on the brink of extinction due to its own reckless excess, Hardware may not have broken any new ground in terms of originality, though the stylized manner in which it's told and its harsh sense of desperation truly set it apart from the pack as an effective and horrific view of what may be in store for humankind if we don't pause to reconsider the effects of our actions on future generations. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi