Hardware

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. Like other movies of its genre (TERMINATOR, MILLENNIUM, etc.), HARDWARE is set in an oppressive, post-apocalyptic future world dominated by debris and clunky hardware. Because the environment is contaminated, human life is confined to overcrowded, claustrophobic dwellings. Synthetic nutrients have replaced now-inedible real food, and an emerging mutant population is growing at such...