No Flesh Shall Be Spared: Richard Stanley's M.A.R.K. 13 (aka Hardware)

I saw Hardware for the first time right when it debuted on home video. I was probably fourteen years old and needless to say, it scared the shit out of me. Since VHS movies were not available for purchase until they had been out a while, I was forced to make a copy of the one I had rented, which I proceeded to wear out. At the point of its release, I had never seen anything quite like Hardware before; the look of it fascinated me, as did the bizarre characters, and the climatic suspense continued to unnerve me with each viewing. The picture was ignored when it came out in the fall of 1990; sadly, most folks labeled it as a rip off of The Terminator. I heard for years that there was an uncut version floating around, different mostly because it restored the gore removed from the U.S. cut. Thanks to Ebay, I acquired a copy; in other words, I paid $15 for a cheap bootleg.

To this day I still haven't seen the movie, called M.A.R.K. 13 overseas, in its original widescreen format (one can only hope Anchor Bay will eventually rescue it). I guess it hasn't bothered me too much because watching it on DVD with a crappy full screen transfer is the way I grew up with it (don't get me wrong...I'd still love to see it restored and reformatted). Re-visiting M.A.R.K. 13 for the first time in a number of years was a rewarding and odd experience. It's not scary anymore, but it does still manage to provide a number of solid jolts, due mainly to writer/director Richard Stanley's effective camera setups. Interesting he's able to get so much mileage out of the action considering the camera hardly moves at all. There are a good number of current directors who could benefit from studying Stanley's work.

Richard Stanley is definitely a better director than he is a writer. The dialogue and basic story of M.A.R.K. 13 (apparently based on a comic book called "Shok") are quite routine and empty of surprises, but Stanley is so gifted with his visual storytelling it's sometimes hard to notice. There are some apparent themes flowing throughout the piece, some of them well handled while others are a bit confusing. The movie sets up its obsession with eyes at the opening when it shows a closeup of the heroine's face, eyes closed. In a sense, this is an early indicator she's going to survive, given that the characters' need to see things is what ultimately leads to their deaths. Even more crucial though, is the fact that many of the movie's victims all have a desire to look at bare flesh, an idea that can tie in with the Bible verse that shares the picture's title.

Flesh is a dangerous thing in M.A.R.K. 13, not just in a voyeuristic context, but also in regards to how much of it gets pierced and destroyed. A key image in the picture shows Moses (Dylan McDermott, in a role originally intended for Bill Paxton!) in the shower with his girlfriend, Jill (Stacey Travis). One of his hands is made of metal, and when it starts to explore her body, the camera moves in to capture how rough the texture of the hand is on her skin. Equally as thorny is the fact the first thing the movie's killer, a robot, sees when its eyes open is two people having sex. It's at this moment that we realize how strong the eyes/flesh/metal dynamic is going to be. Virtually every metal object in the movie is given a phallic shape, especially when pertaining to the robot's weapons (in one scene, the robot stalks the heroine and it literally looks like it's going to rape her to death with a drill).

The picture features several shots of characters staring into the eyes of the robot, each one shown from the latter's POV. It's as if the robot is as uncomfortable at being stared at as the humans are, a theory that develops relevance when Jill's neighbor (William Hootkins), a disgusting and slimy pervert who spies on her through a long, phallic telescope, comes over to her apartment and notices her blinds are closed. He naturally re-opens them, the resulting punishment occurring when the robot gouges his eyes out. In the end, the only character to not suffer is Shades (John Lynch), Moses's friend. First off, he wears sunglasses, and when the light does make his eyes visible, they're closed. Also worth noting is the scene where Moses and Jill reunite. They begin to get intimate, but instead of sticking around to see what happens, Shades wisely leaves and locks the door behind him.

Amidst the absorbing subtext is a story not worth caring about. The movie takes place in a post apocalyptic wasteland where all the buildings are either factories or power plants and metal is the greatest commodity. Of course, the city is surrounded by endless miles of desert, known here as "the zone," and the few people who make a living do it by selling scraps or sculpting metal parts together. Moses buys a bag full of robot parts from a creepy drifter as gift for Jill, not knowing of course that his newly acquired prize is a failed government experiment capable of reassembling itself and causing total chaos. Aside from being armed with a number of weapons, the robot also carries deadly substances in its fingertips. If that's not enough, there's also a good bit of talk about a new population control plan that's supposed to keep people from having children (the robot, as expected, is the answer to this problem).

The movie attempts to cover up the familiarity of its setup with critiques on America and religious imagery. Moses plays himself up as a military hotshot, complete with big guns and a menacing knife. In his eyes, this makes him superior to Jill, and he treats her as if she is incapable of taking care of herself. At one point, he makes it known that he is "divinely protected" due to his military involvement, a statement that is seen as naive given his fate. The American flag is referenced when Jill decides to spray paint it on the robot's head. It's a disturbing image, especially since the movie is saying this non-discriminatory killing machine is a representation of the flag plastered across its face.

The religious undertones are hard to pin, as they never seem to have any real context. Sure you could say the state of the world hints at the absence of God's presence, but that's as deep as it gets. The robot is named M.A.R.K. 13 after a Bible verse, which Moses reads out loud at one point, but it's simply used as a mirror for a man made creation. Inexplicably, Jill and the robot as both shown in Christ poses, Moses has an injury in the center of his hand before he dies, and, in the same scene, the robot takes on a God like stature complete with rays of light coming from behind it (which I'll make another point about in a moment). All these scenes are visually arresting, although it's hard to connect with them if they're in the movie simply for show.

The action is remarkably tense thanks in part of Steven Chivers's cinematography. The whole picture is shot in a dark red tone that is so bland it feels like color is a luxury the world can no longer afford. Given that most of the movie takes place in Jill's sparse apartment, it's a wise decision, more than anything because it makes it difficult to see where the robot is hiding. There are a number of standout sequences between Jill and the robot, but nothing tops the surreal sequence where Moses is dying. In addition to a series of trippy hallucinations (which could help explain why the robot looks Christ like), there's a surprisingly effective moment in which Moses comes to terms with the consequences for his decisions.

There's hardly a moment of M.A.R.K. 13 that doesn't hold some kind of appeal (it helps that almost every scene is accompanied by a terrific music score courtesy of Simon Boswell). For a movie that doesn't really unleash it's threat until an hour in, it does a credible job holding our attention. It's a unique experience to say the least, a movie that wasn't given a fair shot because of its subject matter and, I would guess, its micro budget ($1.5 million). It's no wonder given the treatment of this picture and his follow up, the also underestimated Dust Devil, that director Richard Stanley has stuck to documentary filmmaking ever since. The latter was butchered by it's American distributor, Miramax (need I say more?), and with that in mind, it's also worth throwing in that two of the producers of M.A.R.K. 13 were Bob and Harvey Weinstein! As we've seen with newcomer Greg McLean (Wolf Creek, Rogue), they are good at screwing over real talent. Even if Richard Stanley never makes another piece of fiction, at least we have this to remind us what could have been.


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