HARDWARE @ 35

A professional scavenger finds a broken robot in the desert and brings it to a scrap dealer. While the dealer is out of the shop for a few minutes, a similar scavenger Mo buys the wreckage and then sells it at a profit to the returned dealer. Except for the head. That will make a pacifying gift for the girlfriend he's neglected on his own journeys. Getting through the wrecked streets in the near future world ravaged by war and climate disaster, he struggles to get into his own flat but he is let in and the robot head does make a good gift for his sculptor girlfriend Jill. They are ok for a while but have another barney and he splits. Meanwhile, Jill paints the head with stars and stripes and puts it at the centre of a big nasty looking installation. That's when we find out the head is still active, part of a M.A.R.K. 13 killer model and is stealthily reconstructing a body out of the machine parts Jill likes to use. Ummmm....

The rest of Richard Stanley's bleak action sci-fi is about stopping the robot as it takes over the apartment with a view to expansion and continued self-expression. Into this is woven a host of comments of the imagined future on the time of release including climate awareness, overpopulation and the possibility of administrative solutions for it that involve mass fatality and an overall sense of how the smartest things to emerge on the planet are compelling its ruin.

Stanley's film career has always been a bumpy one. He has been big on ideas and low on tolerance for besuited limitations. Hardware shows this in its mix of well lensed cinematic moments and the more typical use of scant means to create maximum effect. If this means that scenes that need constant tension get a little deflated by repetitive action with the puppetry of the robot then so be it. But there's a tiem bound consideration, here, that's easy to miss.

Hardware, though it had the rising Miramax stamp on it, was destined for the arthouse and the video shop. That's not a comment on its overall quality but its character as a dark and often cobbled together piece. It more than made its money back in the cinemas where it did screen and had a healthy afterlife on VHS and remains in print for home video to this day. Its reputation is mixed among the sci-fi community swinging between tawdry ripoff and above-weight vision. In its prime day, though, there was a persistent appreciation for the aesthetic of the DIY production values of indy cinema that resonated from punk. Hardware only intermittently resembles the Terminators or Blade Runners it wants to share a bed with and will never present a complete record of support in its community, forever living in the realm of cult cinema.

But that's no bad thing. It was decades of getting used to the figure of David Lynch and his popular second act movie Mulholland Drive that might just allow Eraserhead into a mainstream cinema season (and then in deference to his passing). Richard Stanley does not have Lynch's cache, having never been popular or at least well enough known to get his name into dictionaries, but that says nothing about his ideas. The projection of the M.A.R.K. 13, its purpose and the final statement about it at the film's close is a clearly anti-fascist statement. That it was put into a diegetic context of art service without an obvious pointer in a politico-cultural direction is clever. Jill's solution to the problem of the robot's detection is as strong as anything in the dark sci-fi of the era. The saviour/voyeur figure of Lincoln is intentionally troubling as is his corner on the technical expertise the situation needs: it's not just M.A.R.K. 13 that threatens.

So, even now, decades beyond it first getting cache as a hot new title in the groovy movie houses, Hardware still needs a little love from viewers to warm to it. It does stand in the retro shelf beside War Games and Demon Seed instead of living in constant praise like Blade Runner but I have no problem with that. This might well be due to my age as I lived through that punk attitude from adolescence and will easily look around the sight of virtual gaffer tape on the special effects (I mean, I did have to do more of that when I watched the 4K of Terminator which begins with a scene that only looks like a plastic model hovering over a mini set).  What I do see, the more I watch this one, is the cry against tyranny and the misappropriation of technology. If that isn't a message for now I don't know what can be.

Viewing notes: I watched Umbrella's superb new 4K presentation of this one. It might make the glue and tape of the effects a little more evident than an old hire VHS but that's just a trademark from when sci-fi was arthouse and remembered what punk felt like.

Review: QUEER

Bill Lee, an expat drinking his days long in Mexico City. There aren't a lot of spots in town to pick up the guys he wants but he kind of gets by. Then, when a flawless beautiful young man Gene appears on the scene Bill is not only struck but confused by the guy's sexuality. This will take some courting. Even after his breakthrough, the situation does not clear up and they continue on with a love that is nothing if not conditional. It might be time to see about that shared experience everyone says is good for that.

Luca Guadagnino's film of William Burroughs' novella is largely faithful to the source, evoking the sense of ex-patriot life and Lee's yearning for everything he thought his opiate dependency would bring him: love. "Love," wrote Burroughs, "is the most natural painkiller ..." Lee, running from deeds and events from his recent life in the U.S. is in constant pain. Gene is both a bridge to analgesia and a fulfilment of his suffering. When he finds it, it is hot and cold and needs constant nurture, just like every other dissapointing thing he has known.

Guadagnino lays is on with a trowel, offering us glimpses of the romance of vintage do it yourself travel in locations of strong but flawed beauty all the way to a massive hallucinatory communion. His choices of sourced music (or music makers as Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross take over, there) and a master cinematographer serve him well again. My problem is at base level: the writing.

As usual, you could lose about forty minutes of this film and not know it. More, you would emerge with a refreshing character study and things to take away about the numberless facets of love. Burroughs himself did that in a book that was less than two hundred pages. You might think that a film that takes almost two and a half hours to say this must have further cinematic material to explore this but it doesn't, really. While repetition and behavioural looping can be read as valid expressions of the ennui and frustration of navigating love, there is so much on screen here as to appear oppressive to the point where it becomes boring.

This despite the efforts of Daniel Craig as Lee who shows with strength and great skill how such a mean minded monster can appear attractive (and thankfully, thankfully, thankfully, he doesn't attempt a Burroughs impersonation). Drew Starkey is clearly more than his looks. Jason Schwartzman has learned real acting. And so on. But the slow roll and roll flattens all the good grace the film began with.

Queer is an early work by Burroughs. It was published in the '80s but finished in the '50s, held back by Burroughs himself. The prose, while highly seasoned with Burroughs' characteristic sharpness of observation, black humour and genuine emotion, is startlingly conventional. It is not the borderless blend of satire and dream sequences that the much later Naked Lunch is; it reads very easily and does its work as well as any airport novel (like its predecessor Junkie). There is a dream sequence at the end but it is heartrending rather than confronting. 

Guadagnino has made no bones about how much he has lifted from Cronenberg's adaptation of Naked Lunch. Towards the end it feels like a cover version. Yes, yes, postmodernism and all that, but Cronenberg earned his take on a difficult book by making a creditable companion piece that allows both book and film to co-exist without sparks. Queer's plundering of this feels bitchy and undermines its own originality.

There is a lot to enjoy here but like every other Guadagnino film I've seen, it would benefit from tightness and focus. By now the lack of both are entrenched in his style and it would take a massively successful contrary case to change that.

FRIGHT NIGHT @ 40

Charley is still in his teens but he's already a wreck. Amy is ready to take things to the next level which should be electrifying his teenage raison d'etre but there's a vampire moving in next door. Amy leaves, the school horror nerd Evil Ed takes his money for some pat advice and the host of the late night horror show Peter Vincent brushes him off as a crazy fan. Well, who would believe him?

Tom Holland's mid-'80s horror-teen-comedy doesn't have the future-star appeal of the Lost Boys or the genre-expansion of Near Dark from later in the decade but what it does have is an early take on self-reflexivity in genre. This is generally supposed to bloom in the next decade with Scream but Charley's knowledge that both holds him back from action and pushes the plot further places him firmly on the timeline of characters who know the rules of the movies they're in. But then, instead of making this the pivot of the plot Holland throws in the realism of the barriers. Charley knows what is happening but everyone else he knows is just in the normal world. Cackling Evil Ed, the long suffering Amy, his tv idol and his latchkey mum, think he's nuts.

While the struggle to gain credibility is a plot driver in any supernatural movie, this one wears its era on its sleeve. The teens aren't just incredulous, they're cynical. Peter Vincent bemoans the plummeting popularity of supernatural horror in favour of the current oafish teen slashers. Amy's offer toward the sexual development of her and Charley's partnership is matter of fact, not the thing of giggling or smirking, it's something more John Hughes. Vampire Jerry also knows his movies and after kissing the hand of Amy and saying, "Charmed" he asks, "isn't that what I'm meant to say?" and it plays as a joke among the characters.

But then, when it gets down to the horror threads of the weave, Fright Night plays fair. Amy is revealed to be identical to Jerry's long lost love and he pursues her. Their serpentine dance in the nightclub is genuinely sensual, playing the creepiness of the mature Jerry against Amy's youth. (This is also the moment of the film's best mirror trick.) Her erotic fealty to the vampire is rendered even more worrisome by her acquiescence. When her physical form begins distorting, there is a sadness to the horror as we see the effects of her addiction to the maleficence. This also goes for Evil Ed and his own trajectory is a tragic one.

As for Charley, himself, his task is to grow up and take a real stand. This is done through bringing his team together and doing the hard work to convince them to join him in what will be a hard fight. To do this, he has to martial Peter's vanity after his urge to quit town has taken over. Charley's values now centre on the unity of opposites, centred in Amy who is transforming into a vampire but who is still saveable if Jerry can be vanquished. He has to shed his suburban teen skin with all its dependency, take up arms, such as they are, and do battle.

The cast works well with this. William Ragsdale does look about ten years older than he should but he makes up for it with the confusion of the younger character and his distracted nature. His change has to convince if the movie is to work. The dependably dark and unctuous Chris Sarandon revisits his ghastly role in Lipstick, but adds a skin of urbanity, emanating an intimidating confidence. He is a scarier vampire than Robert Eggers' recent Nosferatu, a successful seducer of the young. Amber Bearse might seem to have little to do but look middle  '80s pop star androgenous (kind of) until she is clad in prosthetics but her Amy does feel real and unaffected in contrast to the overwrought young women of the screen at the time. Stephen Geoffreys' Evil Ed is hard to take but has to be, a kind of teenage id-engine that works its one note into the centre of the Earth. Floating above it all, of course, is Roddy McDowall, whose decades-long career by then brought him well into the core of horror cinema. He plays camp at first but through a prolonged and credible vulnerability, finds his character's essence and strength. As goofy as it can get, this is one of Roddy's best turns.

While Fright Night's reputation leaves it on a lower rung than the hits of the later '80s, it remains one of the most engaging evocations of suburban gothic available. As a comedy it goes for amiability rather than belly laughs. As a horror it is more successful, building a dread between Jerry's palpable malevolance and Charley's isolation. That Jerry can pick him off, even in the sanctuary of his own home, works solidly. As a fable of accepting the things of adulthood I think it does better than the big John Hughes teen epics by keeping the themes streamlined into allegory instead of spraypainting them all over the dialogue in dated hues. It feels like it has less to prove while offering more. That's why I can keep returning to its warm dangers. 

Viewing notes: I watched my squeaky clean and beautiful sounding 4K steelbook edition which I can only recommend. However, Fright Night is rentable through most of the usual outlets like Prime or Apple, for a small fee. Beware of the remake. If it has Colin Farrell in it, it's the wrong one.