Hardware (1990) - I still don't get it

I'm a huge 'Terminator' fan and I remember seeing this video in the store back in the early nineties.  The front cover features - what might well as be - the skull of a T-800's endoskeleton and that was it, I handed over my money and took the movie home for the weekend.

I only watched about half of it.

Weirdly, the basic premise has always stuck by me over the years.  It's set in another post apocalyptic wasteland of America, but this time it's more sandy than filled with lasers and killer cyborgs.  A drifter finds what looks like the basic torso and head of a robot (yes, again, think a T-800 endoskeleton) and brings it back to what's left of civilisation.  There, a space marine who's home for shore leave buys it as a present for his artist-girlfriend.  

However, he probably should have just stuck with flowers as the robot starts rebuilding itself until it's a full-size metal monster with two pokey little needles on one hand that he quite likes injecting people with (his favoured method of despatching victims).

This basically is how the second half of the film transpires... the machine stalks the lead girl in her flat.  Yes, just the flat.  She gets away.  Rinse and repeat.  Now, if you asked the question: how does a machine built to kill humans manage to keep losing the only target in a pretty small hunting ground?  Then you'll have asked the question that made me turn it off all those years ago. 

However, it's possibly just me.  I watch a lot of B-movies and YouTube top ten videos where we hear about all these 'cult classics.' And, sure enough, 'Hardware' is among them.

So I gave it a watch all the way through this time.  Okay, so the pace does pick up in the final act, but it's still all just set in the one location.  I guess the older me can now pick up on how good the set design was and overall world-building looked.  It's just all set in a flat.  I always figured is something similar happened to me I could always just walk out of my house and just run off before I got poked with the robot's two needles.

A lot of people like it, so maybe check some high-rated reviews out before you decide to invest an hour and a half of your life into watching this.

4/10 You can watch this film while you're doing the ironing (you'll still get the general gist of it)