In addition to writing news articles and film reviews for Arrow in the Head, I also write scripts for videos that are released through the site's YouTube channel, JoBlo Horror Videos. I have previously shared the videos I wrote that covered Frailty, Dead Calm, Shocker, 100 Feet, Freddy vs. Jason, and Pin, and now another batch of videos can be seen below.
For an episode of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series, I wrote about director Julien Seri's 2015 French production Night Fare:
Night Fare script:
Some of the films we cover in the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw video series are more difficult to find than others, but for the last couple years the film we’re looking at in this episode has been available to watch on the Netflix streaming service in several countries around the world. Netflix has so much content that things can sometimes get lost in the crowd – and that’s why we want to draw your attention to the 2015 thriller Night Fare.
CREATORS / CAST: A French production, Night Fare was the fourth feature film from director Julien Seri, whose previous works had been action films built around parkour and mixed martial arts. Keeping that in mind, it’s not surprising to learn that the initial idea for Night Fare actually came from a martial arts expert, that person being the mononymous Tarubi, who served as the capoeira advisor on Ocean’s Twelve. When you see Vincent Cassel using capoeira to avoid lazer beams in that movie, you have Tarubi to thank for it.
With Cyril Ferment and Pascal Sid, Seri fleshed Tarubi’s idea out into a screenplay, then the filmmaker cast another martial arts expert in a major role: the mysterious taxi driver at the center of the story is played by Jess Liaudin, who was a professional MMA fighter for over twenty years, starting when he was just sixteen years old.
Jonathan Howard and Jonathan Demurger play Chris and Luc, friends who have the bad luck of getting into the taxi driver’s cab during a night out on the town. It’s a smooth ride at first, but when Luc decides not to pay the fare – despite having a wad of cash in his pocket – things take a turn for the worse. The driver relentlessly stalks Chris and Luc through the city streets, and not even the offer to give him the money he’s owed is enough to get the driver to leave them alone. Once he’s been stiffed, the driver never shows any further interest in getting paid. Now he’s just out to torment these guys… and whenever someone gets in between him and his prey, he lays waste to them in brutal, bloody ways.
The driver isn’t the only problem that Chris and Luc have to face over the course of this night. They also have to deal with the fact that Luc is now dating Chris’s ex Ludivine, played by Fanny Valette. Unfortunately for Ludivine, it doesn’t take long for the driver to figure out that she’s important to both of the guys he’s pursuing.
BACKGROUND: Julien Seri was just in his twenties when he was given the chance to make his feature directorial debut on a film called Yamakasi, produced by Luc Besson. He has said that ended up being a painful experience for him, and that he only directed forty-two percent of the finished product. A few years later, Seri directed The Great Challenge – a film he describes as “lame”, even though he was happy with the visual style. His third film, Scorpion, is one he was more proud of, while admitting that it had weaknesses. After Scorpion, Seri spent several years working in television, and eventually reached the point where he was ready to walk away from directing entirely. It was when he was deciding to quit that the opportunity to make Night Fare presented itself.
Seri and the producers put together a plan to make this film very quickly. It was written, funding was secured, the cast was assembled, and the film went into production all within a span of three months. The first draft of the script was knocked out in just four days, and a total budget of around a million euros was raised through private investors and crowdfunding. Before Night Fare, Seri was feeling angry and disillusioned with the entertainment business, but through the approach taken to making this film he was able to achieve real artistic freedom. As he put it, “We had no censors, we were all alone, we didn’t even know if the film would ever come out. We were like 20 year old kids making their first movie.”
The finished film had some luck playing at festivals, it was able to generate some good word of mouth and was given a Best Feature Film award by at least one of them. Then it landed a major release from the Netflix streaming service – and that’s pretty much where the Night Fare conversation has ended. While many Netflix subscribers have access to it, it’s not a movie you hear about too often. Hopefully that will be changing soon, because it’s a film that is absolutely worth watching and recommending to other fans of the horror and thriller genres.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: The Steven Spielberg classic Duel and Michael Mann’s Collateral were the primary inspirations for Night Fare, and the influence of both of those films can be seen in the film. You have a mysterious driver following people around in his vehicle, like in Duel, while Collateral is reflected in the “nighttime in the city” setting, the prominence of a taxi cab, and sequences of violence. But before we reach the violence, Seri gets us to care about the characters who will be dropped into this bad situation, spending the early minutes establishing the complicated love triangle Chris, Luc, and Ludivine are in.
Chris and Ludivine were in a relationship two years earlier, until a night when he went back to England, his home country, without giving Ludivine any sort of warning or explanation. Now that Chris has returned to France, he’s somehow shocked that Ludivine has moved on in his absence and is now dating his friend Luc. It really seems like he expected her to just sit around and wait for him, even though he cut contact with her. Chris may be a bit of a fool, but he still seems to be a better person than Luc, who is obviously mixed up in some criminal dealings. Ludivine admits to Chris that she might still have feelings for him… and while the driver’s violent pursuit of her two suitors will be the main focus of the film, Seri and his co-writers have still managed to hook us with the personal drama of the characters. In the midst of the thrills, we’re also waiting to find out more information on why Chris bailed on Ludivine, and France in general, years earlier. As it turns out, it may have something to do with what’s going on with the driver. It quickly becomes very clear that this isn’t just about the cab fare.
There are some awesome scenes of the driver menacing Chris and Luc without even getting out of his vehicle. A moment of the cab circling the guys as they stand in the center of a roundabout brings to mind a shark circling something it’s about to sink its teeth into. A scene of the guys hiding in a parking garage while the cab drives between the rows of vehicles brings to mind the style of a slasher movie, and that’s not the only time you’ll be thinking of slashers while watching Night Fare. In fact, there’s even a moment where someone compares the dark, hulking figure of the driver to Jason Voorhees. The driver goes on to prove that he is quite capable of racking up a healthy body count, much like Jason.
This isn’t a straightforward slasher like a Friday the 13th, but it did start out that way. Night Fare was written as a slasher, and went into production as one. As filming went on, Seri began to see the driver as something more than just a killer cabbie. He dropped in some hints that there was a hidden depth to this silent, menacing character, and during the editing process he became certain that he and the other writers needed to come up with a back story for the driver and dig into his motivations with some additional photography. That’s when the driver drifted away from being a Jason type and became a character that Seri would be more likely to compare to The Punisher or Wolverine.
The revelation of what exactly is going on with the driver comes in a third act twist that may be the dividing line that determines whether or not someone is going to consider themselves a fan of this movie. Some may be disappointed that we learn anything about this character, or that we find out he isn’t just a rage-fueled maniac. Others may be fascinated by the unexpected mythology the filmmakers crafted for the cabbie; a mythology that, in a cool stylistic choice, is even conveyed through the use of some animation.
Night Fare doesn’t end up being the film you might be expecting it to be when you start watching it, and maybe that’s why it’s lesser known at this time. But that subversion of expectations is also part of what makes it a great viewing experience. Seri said he wanted to “…subtly move away from the clichés to highlight the characters and their emotions, bringing more depth to the story than one could imagine. … The atmosphere at times leans more toward romance, at times more toward an action film with original fight scenes, and at other times, quite gory with surprising shots that become more and more violent. Our driver reveals the unease of our daily lives, the violence and the perversity that looms above us. He lurks, he hunts, he’s always where we don’t expect him.”
BEST SCENE(S): While it’s greatly appreciated that Seri wanted to give the driver and the people he’s pursuing some extra depth, of course the most entertaining and satisfying scenes in the film are the ones where the driver is unleashed on unlucky victims. Animal lovers may applaud how the driver handles a security guard who mistreats his dog, and one of the most memorable scenes involves the driver taking on a gang of criminals with a samurai sword in his hand. The only letdown is that moments of people getting slashed and impaled feature some unconvincing CGI blood spray
Liaudin, on the other hand, is one hundred percent convincing in the violent scenes. He has a very intimidating screen presence, and it’s totally believable when he bashes people around like they’re nothing to him. Which makes sense, given his former profession. We see the driver take down groups of people on a couple different occasions, so we know Chris and Luc aren’t going to be able to do anything to him when they try to tag team him in the climactic sequence, but it’s fun to see them try. Even with one hand latched on to the captive Ludivine, the driver is able to fend off their attacks. It might not always be clear whether he’s a villain or a hero, but it is always clear that the character is a badass.
PARTING SHOT: Night Fare was a great accomplishment for Seri and his collaborators. What starts out as a simple stalk-and-slash filled with bloodshed turns into something different by the end, and getting to that surprising destination is a hell of a trip. This quickly-made film turned out to be an entertaining, fast-paced, hard-hitting thriller, but the best thing to come out of it may be the fact that the artistic freedom Seri enjoyed on this production managed to revive his passion for directing. After seeing how cool Night Fare is, it’s exciting to know that we will have more Seri projects to look forward to in the future.
If you haven’t watched Night Fare yet, you should seek it out – whether on Netflix or otherwise – and give it a spin.
For the WTF Happened to This Horror Movie video series, I looked into the troubled production of Poltergeist III, which was nearly scrapped completely when star Heather O'Rourke tragically passed away at the age of 12:
Poltergeist III script:
There’s a popular theory that the 1982 Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg collaboration Poltergeist was cursed, but if there was a curse in play it didn’t extend to the box office. Poltergeist was a major hit for MGM, and to this day is considered one of the best horror films of the ‘80s. A sequel followed four years later, and the strange events surrounding the production added to the curse theory – but again, the film was financially successful, so MGM wanted more. Sadly, Poltergeist III was struck by such a major tragedy that the film was barely even finished, and when it reached theatres in a compromised form in 1988 there weren’t many movie-goers who were interested in seeing it. The tragedy, combined with low box office numbers, caused the film franchise to go dormant for nearly thirty years – so let’s dig into What the F*ck Happened to This Horror Movie.
The first Poltergeist didn’t really leave the door open for a sequel. It told the story of the Freeling family – which consisted of Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams as parents Steve and Diane, Dominique Dunne as their teenage daughter Dana, Oliver Robins as middle child Robbie, and Heather O’Rourke as little Carol Anne – dealing with some intense paranormal activity in their home, and gave a perfectly simple explanation for why this was happening to them. The housing development they lived in had been built on top of an old cemetery; the company that built the houses had moved the headstones to a different location, but left all the corpses in the ground, and the spirits of the people buried there were not happy to have a bunch of identical homes built on top of their graves. The despicable cost-cutting measures were revealed, the Freeling home vanished, and the family left the housing development, presumably to live happily ever after. But then Poltergeist II: The Other Side came along and told us that the Freelings were still in trouble, because their home hadn’t just been built on a cemetery, there had also been a cave beneath the cemetery – and directly under their home – where a doomsday cult led by Reverend Henry Kane had perished in the 1800s. Trapped in limbo just like they were trapped in that cave, Kane and his followers were drawn to the life force of Carol Anne. When Poltergeist II was released in 1986, there was already some indication that the general audience wasn’t that enthusiastic about the idea of Poltergeist becoming a franchise. The sequel was made on a budget of 19 million dollars, nearly twice the first film’s budget of 10.7 million, but only earned around half of what the first film made at the box office. The first Poltergeist made over 77 million domestic, while Poltergeist II made just under 41 million.
Still, the sequel did well enough that MGM announced their intention to make a Poltergeist III soon after the second film reached theatres. Poltergeist II writers and producers Mark Victor and Michael Grais, who had also written the first movie with Spielberg, opted not to return for part 3, so MGM needed to find someone else to develop the new sequel from the ground up. They turned to director Gary Sherman, who had earned some positive attention in the early ‘80s for his killer pimp thriller Vice Squad and at the time was working on the Rutger Hauer action flick Wanted: Dead or Alive. Sherman had previously been in the running to direct Poltergeist II, before commercial and music video director Brian Gibson was hired, but hadn’t been very interested in taking the job. MGM wasn’t able to make a deal with Sherman for part 2, but they had better luck when they offered him the chance to write, direct, and produce Poltergeist III, even though he still didn’t really want to make a Poltergeist movie. The decision mainly came down to the fact that Alan Ladd Jr. and Jay Kanter had recently taken control of MGM, and they had produced Sherman’s feature directorial debut, the 1972 “cannibals in the London Underground” horror film Death Line, a.k.a. Raw Meat. Sherman took the POLTERGEIST gig because of his history with Ladd and Kanter..
Since the second film hadn’t done nearly as well as its predecessor, MGM dropped the budget on this one down to 9.5 million, and Sherman seemed to confirm to them that he had been the right choice for the project when he said he didn’t want to do any optical effects in post-production. All of the supernatural occurrences in his Poltergeist would happen live on set, accomplished through old fashioned cinema tricks. This must have been music to the ears of the studio bosses, because Poltergeist II had gone over-budget due to the special effects work. Doing all of the effects on set for Poltergeist III wouldn’t make the production easier for Sherman, but it would save MGM from the risk of the effects budget going out of control in post.
As Sherman sat down to write the script with his Wanted: Dead or Alive co-writer Brian Taggert – a script that would receive an uncredited polish from When a Stranger Calls writer Steve Feke – they were given a couple guidelines to follow. First, the only returning Freeling would be franchise poster child Carol Anne. Nelson and Williams had both expressed a reluctance to come back for more Poltergeist films, Robins was retiring from acting, and Dunne had been murdered soon after the release of the first movie, the biggest tragedy associated with the franchise up to this point. So now O’Rourke would be surrounded by a new cast, with just one exception: Zelda Rubinstein would be reprising the role of clairvoyant paranormal investigator Tangina Barrons. Sequels had been included in Rubinstein’s contract from the beginning, so it would be easy to get her to return. The ghostly villain of the film would once again be Reverend Kane, but the role would have to be recast because the original actor – Julian Beck – had been dying of cancer when he played Kane in part 2, and passed away when that film was in post. Prolific voice actor Corey Burton had been brought in to handle some additional dialogue recording for Beck, and would be doing vocal work for the Kane character again in part 3. MGM also wanted the action to move out of suburbia; they asked Sherman to drop Carol Anne into a totally new environment. Sherman turned to his own childhood for inspiration. He had been born in Chicago and grew up in a high-rise building, so he decided to set Poltergeist III in a high-rise… but not the sort of old, creepy building you might expect. The place he had in mind was a brand new, hi-tech building with apartments on some floors and various businesses on others.
When the story catches up with Carol Anne, she’s staying in this Chicago high-rise with her aunt Patricia – her mom’s sister, a character who was never mentioned in the previous films – Patricia’s new husband Bruce Gardner, who is the manager of the building they live in, and Bruce’s teenage daughter Donna. These characters are played by Nancy Allen, Tom Skerritt, and Lara Flynn Boyle, so you can’t say Sherman dropped the ball when he was tasked with assembling a new cast around O’Rourke and Rubinstein. He even included a nod to Allen’s work in the horror classic Carrie by having Skerritt directly reference the film in one scene – but didn’t have Allen reference Alien back at him. Why is Carol Anne in Chicago? The reason given isn’t that great. She’s there to attend the Seaton School, a place for gifted children with emotional problems. Carol Anne refers to the place as “that creepy school”, and if Steve and Diane knew how things were going there they’d probably bring her back home immediately. The school is run by child psychiatrist Doctor Seaton, who is convinced that Carol Anne and her family have not actually experienced any real paranormal activity. Instead, he blames it all on Carol Anne, believing that she’s capable of inducing mass hypnosis and making people think they’re seeing ghosts. That doesn’t explain the disappearance of the entire Freeling house, but that’s the theory Seaton is going with.
Although Poltergeist II left viewers believing that Reverend Kane had been defeated, that evil spirit is already lurking around in the very first scene of part 3, and we’ll come to find out that he has been drawn back to Carol Anne because the therapy sessions Seaton is putting her through have stirred up her memories of him. This whole movie is Seaton’s fault. Seaton is played by Richard Fire, and someone involved with the production would later tell the webmaster of PoltergeistIII.com that Sherman was not pleased with Fire’s performance. Watching the movie, you can understand why. Fire was really hamming it up. He does succeed at making his character deeply unlikeable, though, which is important since Seaton earns the honor of being the only character in the trilogy to get flat-out murdered.
Nathan Davis was hired to play Kane, with a mask based on a mould of Julian Beck’s face placed over his own. Davis wasn’t given much to do, as if Sherman knew that someone else wearing a Julian Beck mask could never match up to the incredibly creepy performance Beck delivered in Poltergeist II, so he didn’t even bother trying. Instead of building up Kane, he decided to present the method of Kane’s haunting in a different way than we had ever seen before, and the modern high-rise setting plays into this. The spirits in Sherman’s film are reaching out to the living world through mirrors, and there are mirrors everywhere in the high-rise. This results in some mind-bending scenes that play with reflection, pulled off through the use of different kinds of mirrors as well as moments where the actors appear to be standing by mirrors but their reflections are actually mime doubles who are mimicking their movements.
The director would later say that this was the most problematic movie he ever worked on, even before devastating tragedy occurred. The problems started before cameras started rolling. Sherman was hired to make Poltergeist III in the fall of 1986, and there was a chance the Directors Guild would be going on strike after June 30th, 1987. Principal photography had to be finished by then, so Sherman had to move very quickly. The script was written in the final months of ’86, the project moved into the pre-production phase at the start of ’87, and the first day of filming was in mid-April. Sherman has said that there wasn’t a single day of production where there wasn’t some sort of major problem to deal with, whether it be the weather not cooperating, the cast and crew being unnerved by the news that Poltergeist II cast member Will Sampson had died, Rubinstein having to leave for a while because her mom passed away, or the fact that Sherman broke his foot in the middle of it all. By the time publications like Fangoria visited the set, Sherman was directing from a wheelchair, with his throbbing, broken foot propped up on cushions. One of the biggest problems came during the filming of a sequence set in a frozen-over, snow-coated parking garage. A planned explosion went awry, catching six vehicles that were covered in styrofoam “snow” on fire. Three people were injured in the blaze, including two firefighters, and the fire did $250,000 worth of damage to the parking garage.
Sherman was determined to keep his movie on schedule, though. He was going to get this thing wrapped before June 30th, even if he had to call in an exorcist. He ended up pulling it off; the last day of filming was June 25th. As far as staying on schedule goes, it may have been for the best that budgetary issues caused Sherman to scrap 17 pages worth of material from the script before it could be filmed, but losing those chunks of story probably didn’t help the quality of the movie.
When gearing up to make Poltergeist III, Sherman said he was going to be greatly expanding Carol Anne’s role; since O’Rourke had been very young when she made the first two movies, she hadn’t been asked to do a lot more than deliver creepy lines and be scared. This time Sherman wanted to give the child actress more to do, to “stretch her bounds”. That is evident in the film up to a point. O’Rourke was given the chance to banter with her co-stars and did a great job with the material she was given to work with. Unfortunately, halfway through he puts Carol Anne in the same old situation; she gets pulled into the spirit dimension and is held captive there for the rest of the movie, the same thing that happened to her in the first movie. Sherman also said he was going to make up for Tangina being underused in part 2, but really just made her this film’s equivalent to Dick Hallorann in The Shining. From a great distance, she senses that Carol Anne is in trouble, she travels on a mission to help the kid out, but then once she reaches the high-rise she doesn’t fare much better than Hallorann did. Maybe there were better scenes with Carol Anne and Tangina in those pages that couldn’t be filmed.
Losing those pages certainly didn’t help when it came time to cut the film together. Once in the editing room, Sherman struggled to get the film to a length that MGM would find acceptable. His first cut was under 80 minutes, and he had to find ways to pad it out, keeping moments he would have cut out otherwise. He padded it quite well, because the final running time is over 97 minutes. Despite this trouble, it has been said that the director was pleased with the film once the rough cut was ready. MGM, on the other hand, was not. Sherman’s cut was given a PG rating by the MPAA, the same rating the first movie had – but the first movie had been released before the PG-13 rating was introduced. Poltergeist II had earned a PG-13, and MGM felt that Poltergeist III would be more appealing to movie-goers if it was also PG-13. They needed Sherman to toughen his movie up a bit, but not too much. They didn’t want an R. Having Tom Skerritt add the line “Fucking son of a bitch” seemed to do the trick, because Poltergeist III was PG-13 when it was released.
Less easy to fix was the ending, which was seen as cheesy and unsatisfying. Sherman was busy with other obligations in the final months of 1987, working on the short-lived television series Sable with Poltergeist III script polisher Steve Feke, but it was decided that the ending of Poltergeist III would be reshot in February of 1988, just four months before the June 1988 release date. And that’s when tragedy struck. On February 1st, right before the reshoots were scheduled to take place, Heather O’Rourke passed away at just 12 years old.
O’Rourke had been feeling ill before Poltergeist III started filming. She was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, an inflammatory bowel disease, and was receiving treatment throughout production. This is evident in the film, because the medication she was taking made her cheeks puffy… and this makes it very difficult to watch Poltergeist III, seeing O’Rourke with her appearance altered by medication that she didn’t actually need, knowing that she was already suffering from the affliction that would take her life. Crohn’s had been a misdiagnosis; O’Rourke did not have a bowel inflammation, she had a bowel obstruction, the result of a birth defect. Although she had started feeling better in ’87 and had even enjoyed a trip to Disney World with her family after Poltergeist III wrapped, she fell ill again on January 31st, 1988. She collapsed and was rushed to the hospital the next day – and even though doctors were able to figure out what was wrong and perform an emergency surgery, it was too late to save her.
Sherman had bonded with O’Rourke during filming; he had wanted to test her acting skills, and was impressed with the result. She had told him that she wanted to be a director herself, and he believed that she would have a great career as a filmmaker ahead of her. Instead of being able to watch her career continue to grow, he had to serve as a pallbearer at her funeral. After O’Rourke passed away, Sherman was ready to shelve Poltergeist III, feeling that there was no merit in releasing a film starring, as he put it, “a dead 12 year old”. The studio disagreed. They had a financial stake in this thing, they needed to get Poltergeist III out into the world. The June release date wasn’t going to change, so the reshoots happened as scheduled in February. Sherman gave his film a new, quick and simple, still not very satisfying ending, with a child actress on set in the Carol Anne wardrobe, her face kept turned away from the camera in an attempt to make it less obvious that it wasn’t O’Rourke. Everyone was so understandably shaken by O’Rourke’s passing that they didn’t even realize they hadn’t brought enough of the cast back to the set to film the new ending. The Donna character’s love interest Scott, played by Kip Wentz, had been involved in the original ending, and was saved from a terrifying fate there. Wentz was not brought back for the reshoot, Scott is not present at the end of the movie, leaving viewers with the lingering question, “What happened to Scott?”
Poltergeist III is a rather mediocre and messy movie, and was probably going to turn out that way no matter what, but the tragic loss of O’Rourke makes it more difficult to get any enjoyment out of sitting through it. Sherman was right, it is tough to watch a movie that stars a little girl who was just months away from dying when she was working on the set. The one element that makes the movie worth watching are those practical special effects. The fact that everything was being performed live on set turns the effects into awe-inspiring magic tricks that are likely to make you wonder “How did they do that?” at least once along the way. It’s a shame that the film around those effects isn’t better… and it’s heartbreaking that Heather O’Rourke wasn’t receiving the treatment she needed at the time.
Poltergeist III was a box office failure, with a domestic haul of only 14 million. While there was a TV show that used the Poltergeist name – but had no other connection to the films – in the ‘90s, MGM wouldn’t make another Poltergeist movie until 2015, when producer Sam Raimi and director Gil Kenan teamed up for a reimagining of the original. Unlike the ‘80s trilogy, there were no notable curse-like events that occurred during the making of that film, which was a financial success but has been mostly forgotten in the years since its release.
And for Best Horror Movie You Never Saw, I let viewers know why Richard Stanley's 1990 sci-fi horror film Hardware should be considered a Christmas classic:
Hardware script:
In this episode of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw video series, we’re going to be telling you all about the cult classic 1990 science fiction nightmare Hardware, a movie that’s too often overlooked as a yuletide viewing option. When movie fans are celebrating the holidays with the likes of Die Hard and Gremlins, they should also leave some room in the schedule for Hardware.
CREATORS / CAST: This film was the feature writing and directing debut of South African filmmaker Richard Stanley, who was just 23 during production, and the basics of the story go back to a Super 8 short Stanley made when he was still a teenager. Inspired by Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room!, which served as the basis for the film Soylent Green and was a look at the dangers of overpopulation, that short version of Hardware was not a horror story. It was merely a quirky look at the lives of a group of people trying to survive in a dystopian, overpopulated future. Stanley wanted to expand that short into a feature, and it wasn’t until multiple drafts had been rejected by potential producers and investors that he decided to rework the idea and drop his characters into a bloodbath. Trying to make Hardware as commercial as possible, he turned it into a horror story with a killer android and American lead characters.
The source of the horror is the M.A.R.K. 13, a homicidal android created by the government for the purpose of population control. Not content with just trying to bring down the number of Americans through a sterilization program, the government is planning to set these androids loose on the public – but before that plan is put in motion, one of the androids ends up in the apartment of a shut-in artist named Jill, played by Stacey Travis. Jill uses salvaged junk to create her art, so when her boyfriend Mo, played by Dylan McDermott, shows up at her place on Christmas Eve and gives her the head of a M.A.R.K. 13 that was found busted up in the desert, it actually seems like a nice gift. Problem is, the M.A.R.K. 13 is still active, it’s self-repairing, and as the night of Christmas Eve turns into Christmas morning, the android pulls itself together and goes on a rampage in Jill’s apartment, doing its best to kill everyone who crosses its path.
While the credits acknowledge that Hardware was inspired by a story called Shok!, which was written by Steve MacManus and Kevin O’Neill and published in the pages of the 2000 A.D. comic book, Stanley himself seems reluctant to admit it, saying the M.A.R.K. 13 was primarily inspired by the killer robot in the 1980 film Saturn 3, as well as a recurring nightmare he had about a metal skull being unearthed in a desert. However, if you read Shok! it’s tough to believe that the similarities found in Hardware could be mere coincidence. Shok! was only seven pages long, so the film greatly expands on the ideas in those pages, but nearly everything in Shok! can also be found in Hardware. It’s good that the Shok! creators got a nod in the credits.
BACKGROUND: While the addition of the M.A.R.K. 13 made Hardware more appealing than the previous version of the story was, it still took years before the project went into production. Stanley directed music videos to pay the bills, and pondered self-financing and making Hardware on his own, figuring he could shoot it in a warehouse and bring the M.A.R.K. 13 to life with stop-motion animation. Disillusioned by some of the videos he had to make, he nearly gave up on filmmaking entirely and decided to spend some time in the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan. There he inadvertently got swept up in the end of the Soviet – Afghan War and the beginning of the Afghan Civil War, and found himself making a documentary in the middle of battles where thousands of people lost their lives. He was in a hospital in Pakistan when he got the call from a producer saying there was interest in getting Hardware into production. Stanley caught a flight to London, where he immediately dove into making his movie.
Made on a budget of around a million dollars, Hardware was financed by Miramax and Palace Pictures, and the fact that producer JoAnne Sellar was the managing director of Palace’s music video division was probably a great help when it came to landing a couple cameos from popular musicians. Iggy Pop has a voice acting role as radio DJ Angry Bob, a character who was originally meant to be voiced by Johnny Rotten. Lemmy essentially seems to be playing himself in his cameo as a gun-toting cabbie, but that role was intended for Sinead O’Connor. Stanley had a working relationship with the band Fields of the Nephilim, which is why lead singer Carl McCoy shows up in the film. McCoy is the first person we see on screen, the nomad who finds pieces of the M.A.R.K. 13 in the desert.
Stanley wanted to cast a pair of genre fan favorites in prominent roles. The Mo character was written as a long-haired, drug-addicted mechanic who was dying of cancer, and Stanley wanted him to be played by Bill Paxton, fresh off of Near Dark at that time. It sounds crazy, but apparently no one at Palace or Miramax knew who Paxton was, so even though he was interested in taking the role, the higher-ups were hesitant to give him an offer. By the time an offer was made, Paxton had already signed on to be in Navy Seals, so he was no longer available for Hardware. The other genre regular Stanley wanted in the movie was Re-Animator’s Jeffrey Combs, who would have played Mo’s also-drugged-out buddy Shades. At the end of the day, Stanley decided to give up on the idea of having Combs play Shades because he was only allowed to have two Americans in the cast, and they were going to be Jill and Mo.
The director got his number one choice for Mo’s girlfriend Jill when he cast Stacey Travis, who had a small role in Phantasm II. Although Travis was an unknown, Stanley saw that she had great potential. In exchange for being able to cast her, Stanley let Miramax pick the actor for Mo. Their choice was Dylan McDermott, which forced Stanley to completely re-think the character. Mo became a short-haired career military man, and if he has cancer in the finished film the only sign of it is some coughing. McDermott’s Mo also shares the actor’s Christian faith and reads the Bible, which is something the Mo envisioned by Stanley would not have done. While the director and the Miramax-chosen actor had some issues on set, McDermott’s suggestion of having his character look up Mark chapter 13 in his Bible did lead to the discovery that the Bible passage that’s also the name of the killer android contained a line which went with the film perfectly: “No Flesh Shall Be Spared”.
Palace wanted to make Hardware because they had distributed Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead and felt that Stanley’s film could be equally visceral and unrelenting. The director was certainly out to shock and disturb, but he ran into some resistance along the way. McDermott joined some members of the crew in objecting to certain moments of violence and questionable content, and Miramax even prevented Stanley from filming a couple of the violent death scenes he had planned. The bloody violence he did manage to bring to the screen was so intense that the MPAA gave the film an X rating, and it had to be whittled down a bit to receive an R.
With the R in place, Hardware was given a decent theatrical release – quite an achievement for the young first-time feature filmmaker, and something which came as a bit of a surprise to Stanley himself. He thought Hardware was destined to fall into direct-to-video obscurity, lumped in with the Alien, Terminator, and Blade Runner cash-ins of the time. Instead, it was a theatrical success. It made its budget back through distribution deals, then pulled in over five million dollars at the U.S. box office alone. It won a cult following, and that cult of Hardware fans has continued to grow over the last thirty years. Yet somehow the movie still hasn’t become known as a Christmastime favorite.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: During production, Stanley told Fangoria magazine, “Hopefully (the film) will play like the worst possible drug trip. I’d like it to be a genuine psychedelic experience.”
He was successfully able to capture that feeling, as Hardware is a very trippy and surreal film with fascinating visuals. It blends dirty dystopia, cyberpunk elements, and a colorful lighting style inspired by the work of Italian genre filmmaker Dario Argento with a dream-like atmosphere that’s also reminiscent of Italian horror. That nightmarish trip feeling is enhanced by the presence of characters who are actually tripping on drugs. Stanley has said that he and cameraman Immo Horn, who had been in Afghanistan with him, were both still processing the trauma of having been in the midst of battle during the making of the movie. They had come close to being killed in the final battle they witnessed, and at one point Horn said he felt like they might have actually died, and the production of Hardware was part of their afterlife. Stanley agreed, “It did feel a little uncanny, as if we weren’t really on set but in Hell all along, and that the folks surrounding us weren’t really our friends, colleagues, and loved ones but demons sent to devour us. …It helped give Hardware a certain edge, an authentic stench of trauma. Hardware is what we had instead of therapy.” Hearing this makes sense, because it does feel like a movie that was made by a person who was in a particularly troubled mindset.
Stanley’s initial desire to make a character study set in a dystopian world is apparent, as he takes his time building up to the horror. Roughly the first half of Hardware is still a dystopian drama, the characters just happen to be handling the M.A.R.K. 13 skull at the time. We see how terrible the world has become, we’re introduced to strange, downbeat characters struggling to survive, we hear reports about high radiation levels and the measures being taken to deal with overpopulation. The leads live in filth, and interact with people who are even filthier and more disgusting than their surroundings. When the M.A.R.K. 13 starts to go on its rampage, bringing some violent action into the picture, it’s almost a relief compared to how dreary the build-up is.
While McDermott and John Lynch do fine work in their roles as Mo and Shades, it’s almost impossible to watch them without imagining what it might have been like if Bill Paxton and Jeffrey Combs had been able to play the characters. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with McDermott and Lynch’s performances, it’s just that Paxton and Combs are so cool… However, there are no second thoughts about the casting of Stacey Travis as Jill. Stanley absolutely made the right choice in making her the heroine of the film. Travis was very enthusiastic about getting the chance to play the character and put her all into it. She told Fangoria that she found Jill to be an interesting person, and that the part allowed her to “stretch her emotions”. She said, “(Jill is) coming from a hardened place, emotionally speaking. The exteriors of the film – the world she’s in – are so horrible, and she’s resigned herself to that. It’s a natural defense. She’s shut herself up in the apartment and doesn’t really come out unless she has to. Then when all the mayhem starts happening and more and more people start coming in, she has to open up, but that fighting spirit, that sense of territory, is still there.”
Not only does Jill have to face off with an android that turns her apartment into a slaughterhouse, she also has a sleazy, scumbag stalker spying on her from a nearby building – and then showing up at her door. Jill, and therefore Travis, gets put through the wringer in this movie, and Travis delivers a strong, captivating performance in the process.
Of course, even with Travis’s performance, the film wouldn’t work if the M.A.R.K. 13 wasn’t a convincing threat. The effects team, which included future Blade director Stephen Norrington, didn’t have much money to work with, but they were able to make sure this thing looked like a functioning android that could truly mess people up.
BEST SCENE(S): The best scenes in Hardware involve the M.A.R.K. 13 going after its intended victims. Any time you have a killer android threatening humans with chainsaws and drills, or causing them to get cut in half by a security door, it’s a win. One especially great moment comes when Jill’s slimy, appalling stalker Lincoln, played by William Hootkins, infiltrates her apartment. On any other night, this situation surely would have gone in an awful direction – but since there’s a killer android in the apartment, it instead goes in an awesome direction, with Lincoln getting a very satisfying comeuppance.
Beyond the violence, viewers also tend to remember the shower scenes that have the Public Image Limited song “The Order of Death” playing on the soundtrack. Anyone who watches Hardware is likely to have lines of that song – the repeated “This is what you want, this is what you get” – stuck in their head for a while afterward. One of those shower scenes leads into a sex scene, because remember, Stanley was trying to make this as commercial as possible, while also making sure it was as weird as it needed to be.
PARTING SHOT: Stanley was not in a great mood when Hardware was first released, which explains an old quote in which he put it down as a “pretty dumb film” simply because it was written to appeal to a wider audience. Thankfully he came around on it, and a couple decades later he introduced a screening of it by saying, “I think the movie hasn’t entirely lost its edge … It still hurts more than one expects it to, which I’m pleased by.”
Thirty years away from its release, Hardware still holds up as a relentlessly weird and bleak vision of a future no one wants to live in, but which we might be getting closer to every day. Stanley and his crew brought his dystopia to the screen with unique style, making it clear that he was a filmmaker to keep an eye on. Unfortunately, he hasn’t been able to make as many movies as anyone would have liked, including himself, but he seems to be having a much-deserved resurgence now, thanks to his H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space, and it’s still worth going back to see this impressive start to his feature filmmaking career.
It’s also worth watching to see the M.A.R.K. 13 make a mess of some already messed up people, the violence and disaster set to a cool soundtrack that includes the music of Iggy Pop, Motorhead, Ministry, and composer Simon Boswell, plus that unforgettable song from Public Image Limited. “This is what you want, this is what you get.”
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