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Oh, WELL, if you'd told me that without "Hardware" we might never have had "Freejack", that would have been completely different....
Sorry. Joking.
I would say the characters are far more like "Halloween" and similar movies than "Aliens" - the screamy heroine who comes through in the end, the perverted next door neighbour, the functionaries (in this case the superintendent and his assistant, in others cops or janitors) whose duties put them in the wrong place at the wrong time and lead to bloody evisceration, the jock boyfriend and his kooky best friend (although I do like the fact that she is implicitly pregnant with Shades' child). The aesthetics are, as you say, Mad Max. The ideas I would suggest were a reaction to a lot of other things going on at the time - most obviously a reasonably entrenched "Cyberpunk" ethic and aesthetic in geek culture. "Shok!" the stroy did indeed predate the Terminator by some years, but then as both predate Hardware I don't think that matters very much (unless you mean to suggest that The Terminator plagiarises "Shok!", in which case I would point out that the plot of the Terminator is that a robot designed to look human goes back to the past in an attempt to kill the mother of the leader of the human resistance, whereas in "Shok!" a woman's boyfriend buys her the skull-like head of a battle robot to use in her art, the head then builds itself a new body from household implements and attacks the woman, having locked her in her flat. The woman is pursued but realises that the robot's vision is sensitive to heat...need I go on? Note also that IIRC Stanley only acknowledged this debt after legal action was threatened).
As I say, nice little film - it achieves most of its objectives, looks good, gets pretty good performances out of...well, John Lynch, provides some thrills and spills and touches all the bases - sex in the shower, fat bloke getting gutted, dream sequence - it's a good slasher movie with atmospheric sci-fi trimmings.
However, the mention of the Slimelight suggests that we are in fact looking at it as a piece of *goth* cinema, in which case it is up against the Crow and Razorblade Smile, and in that field I am more than happy to agree to its preeminence. |
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