In sharp contrast to The Dark Knight, the second of the weekend’s cinematic offerings is one of my favourite films of all time. It sits on my list of top ten films next to other obscure pieces of cinema such as Subway, The Big Blue, Ghost Dog and the Director’s Cut of Alien³. And Death Machine, obviously.

Hardware was made in 1990 by director Richard Stanley, who also wrote the film adaptation of the original story. Stanley went on to make the creepy horror Dust Devil before being fired from the remake of The Island of Dr Moreau (which is probably better for his career than him having completed it). Stanley himself showed up at the cinema to introduce his film, looking like a cast member from The Mighty Boosh and seeming quite overwhelmed by the large audience who had turned out to watch it.

Based on a 2000AD story, Shok!, Hardware tells of an artist’s encounter with the Mark 13 (No flesh shall be spared) cyborg, brought home for her as a Christmas present by her boyfriend Mo (himself slightly cybernetically enhanced) who thinks its a scrap maintenance droid. Found in pieces by a Zonetripper out in the Dune Sea, the Mark 13 — being self-repairing and able to charge itself from any power source, including the sun — extracts itself from the sculpture she has made out of it, puts itself back together and proceeds to tear the shit out of her entire apartment and anything that gets in its way. Including, thankfully, the wibbly wobbly pervert who spends his time masturbating sweatily as he watches her through the longest zoom lens you have ever seen and takes pictures, all while wearing latex gloves.

The story is delightfully iterative: the themes spiral in on themselves, echoes upon echoes like a giant fractal curve. Indeed, there is a fractal curve in the utterly mesmerising death scene, appearing full-size on the screen and swallowing the viewer into its depths. The lens of the Mark 13’s infra-red vision reflects and is reflected in the infra-red of the pervert’s camera watching through her window. The sexual fantasies of the voyeuristic neighbour are turned back on themselves when he finally makes it into her apartment and discovers the blinds are closed: when opening them the Mark 13 plunges its phallic drill bit into his belly and rams its thumbs into his eyes. The heart-stopping beauty seen by Shades in a butterfly as he’s ritually tripping on hallucinogenics is echoed in the fantastical psychotropic effect of the Mark 13’s deadly poison.

Jill the artist is the object of affection and obsession of every other major character in this film, including the Mark 13, resulting in the storyline for each of them weaving around her in the same way that her pet spider weaves it web, and the way all her artwork twines organically around a central hub. Each of them tries to possess her in the only way he knows how, only for the Mark 13 to out-obsess them all. No one wins, not even the robot: Moses gets inside it, echoing from beyond the grave through some link formed with his cybernetic hand while the machine is killing him, telling his beloved about the one flaw that will allow her to kill it.

This is an absolutely stunning movie. The vision of Mega City One is vastly superior to the later Judge Dredd. It has a gritty, believable realism, despite some now rather dated special effects. It has an intense claustrophobia, and some truly gut-kicking moments used apparently casually, which is exactly what gives them their power. The few seconds showing the filthy, crying toddler tied by a rope to her dead mother are skimmed through with as little focus as the two men passing pay the child. It’s exactly the sort of institutionalised desperation and inhumanity that one would expect from such a dystopian future.

Jill, locked away in her penthouse fortress, trapped inside there behind bomb-proof doors with the cyborg from hell that does not want her to leave, reminds us that sometimes the very act of trying to prevent ourselves being at risk puts us in far greater danger than if we’d faced up to our fear in the first place. Shades says to Mo at one point: “She doesn’t have to stick her little toe out if she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t need you.”

But what happens when she does want to get out, and can’t, and Mo isn’t there to help her?

This film is about fear, about violence, about depravity and desperation and weakness. It’s not just a sci-fi shocker. Things are turned inside out and outside in. The danger isn’t outside any more, where it can’t get in: it’s inside, and she can’t get out. A mother lies dead on the landing while her surviving toddler cries by her side: in the news a population control bill has just been passed and people are queuing up to be sterilised. The cyborg has an artifical intelligence that allows it to think and act and plan: it’s Mo’s slavish robot hand that allows him to get inside the machine and force it to speak out about its own vulnerability.

Everything in this film has meaning. Everything is telling you something. Everything from the Gwar video showing on the TV screen as Jill turns a killing machine into art (even though it’s not a Gwar song that’s playing) to the image of the Hindu deity (I need to watch it again and see which deity it is, as I suspect it’s Shiva but can’t be sure) on the wall of Shades’s apartment. This film has, packed into its 90-some minutes running time, more story than you’d find in the average 140 minute epic blockbuster.

I can’t recommend this film highly enough. If you ever get a chance to see it, do so. I had to import my copy from Germany and no, you can’t have it. If you weren’t there yesterday you missed a rare treat: I’ve seen this film more times than I can count and I still found new detail in it with the benefit of the cinema screen.

I’m only sorry it was on too late for me to stay and hear what Stanley had to say about it.