Hardware (1990)

Early 90s overly-computerized techno-space-sci-fi starring Dylan McDermott, dad in American Horror Story: Season 1. The opening is an outdoor desert shot with a deep, dark red filter over the whole thing, a calm, twangy southwestern guitar, and a post-apocalyptic gas-masked wanderer. Cool framing, cool shots, cool environment, cool costumes… it starts off much better than the IMDB reviews suggest it will become.

Scene two has dialog, and it immediately loses 3 stars. Looks like they took every stereotype of Dune, Mad Max, and Escape from New York and smashed them together. George Lucas was frantically taking notes for the upcoming Star Wars: Episode One. A computerized coffee pot robo-vocalizes its intent to boil while the Firefly soundtrack plays. We're following at least six characters, but it forgot to introduce any of them.

Dylan is a nomadic space-junk trader whose friend and business partner, Shades, calls him "Bax", and who putters around madly in a ramshackle murder boat driven by the lead singer of Motörhead. He buys a junk space helmet from the first scene's unidentified desert wanderer and gifts it to his girlfriend Jill, from Phantasm II, and she thanks him with gratuitous nudity. The helmet on the floor wakes up and watches them have sex through its Terminator vision, and her sweaty, obese neighbor takes spy photographs of them through the window with a long lens. No privacy in post-apocalyptic New York.

The acting is bad and the script is worse, but the cinematography and music are pretty rad. A Ministry song blares over a montage of Jill decorating her new helmet with an american flag and melted barbie heads, interspersed with clips from a videodrome knockoff and music videos. Bax is mad at society and hoping for some post-apocalyptic free-for-all warfare. He's one mad Bax, alright.

Forty minutes in to the 1.5 hour movie, they haven't gotten around to introducing the plot yet. Instead of getting around to doing so now, it has a scene of the sleazy neighbor sexually harassing Jill over the phone, and then a scene of her flipping around the TV channels. It was established forever ago that this helmet is going to self-assemble and go all Terminator, but they're really resistant to actually letting that happen. It does finally decide to do so with a long-but-entertaining stop-motion escapade.

Mad Bax figures out that the Terminator is reassembling, and calls Shades for help. Shades is tripping on acid for some reason, which makes him unhelpful and this scene unnecessary. It takes an absolutely incredible amount of unnecessary buildup for the sexual harassment neighbor to come by and get terminated by a mixture of serpentine cables, needles, and stomach drill. Every light in the building turns into a red strobe light, and Jill runs around in a pointless but spectacularly well-lit chase scene while the Terminator breaks dishes. The Predator Terminator hunts by heat signature, so she hides in a fridge to become invisible, which isn't how refrigeration works.

Mad Bax comes home and rings the doorbell, distracting the Terminator long enough for Jill to punch it with a circular saw and spray paint its eyes closed. That's all it takes to defeat the robot uprising. Dramatic synth music plays for much too long as Jill walks in slow motion to answer the door, and Mad Bax blows the suddenly-alive-again Terminator out of the window with a surprise shotgun.

Jill and Bax exchange idiotic dialog until the still-not-dead Terminator hops back in the window, and Bax fires his shotgun wildly in the wrong direction. This doesn't help, and the robot defeats humanity. Shades, who had been tripping acid in the room with them, is inexplicably absent while the Terminator does an interpretive victory dance in the apartment's strobe lights. Beetles eat Bax's bleeding hand, for some reason. Fractals drift across the screen, the Terminator keeps dancing, and Bax dies far, far too slowly.

Oh, despite ending, it's not over. Jill is suddenly not dead, and charges back upstairs to battle robots. The front door cuts her security guard in half, causing him to shoot the other guard in the gut. Shades stands around watching, tripping balls. They were all just hanging out downstairs while Bax lost the robot battle alone, I guess. Now Jill is solo, armed with a baseball bat, and not paying any attention to her surroundings. The Terminator fires up its chest chainsaw while Jill… hacks into it from a computer terminal? She hacks into its brain somehow, and talks to the dead Bax somehow, and then whacks it with a baseball bat, none of which turned out to be useful.

The Terminator willingly walks into the shower, gets wet, hallucinates, and powers off for good. It was saw-proof, fire-proof, explosion-proof, shotgun-proof, hack-proof, bat-proof, and pistol-proof, but they forgot to make it waterproof. A Public Image Ltd track plays and the voice of Iggy Pop announces that we should all get jobs.

Well, it looked cool and sounded cool the whole time, so who am I to complain? Double-feature with Mad God (2021).