31 Horrors: Hardware (#22)

Wherein I attempt to watch 31 horror films over the course of October. 31 horror films that I have never seen before, from obscure to acclaimed classics. We'll see how well I go in actually finding the time to watch and then write about them in some way.

Well this was insane and I loved it.

It's hardly surprising to discover that Richard Stanley's 1990 sci-fi/horror action flick received a poor critical reception upon its release. It's a tough film to pin down, seemingly a pastiche of so many different films that it's hard to keep count - post screening my friends and I labelled Blade Runner, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, The Terminator, Alien, Short Circuit, Rear Window, Total Recall, Vertigo, and several more as obvious influences - and yet one that, despite it's mad sloppy screenplay, proved to be an intoxicating winner. It's an exhausting hoot of a film that shows flutters of such astonishing technical finesse that I couldn't help but admire its chutzpah even when it was flapping about like a fish out of water. I loved this movie, perhaps against my better judgement.

Set primarily in one of those futuristic dystopian cities that became so popular in the aftermath of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner where the skies bleed red from nuclear radiation and the cityscapes are dark masses dotted with neon and fluorescent. Hardware begins with the emergence of Dylan McDermott's Moses out of the desert where he has been scavenging for spare parts. Taking some mysterious, but uber-cool, electronics home to his girlfriend who uses these type of foreign objects in her industrial artworks. They live in a world riddled with dirty violence and people are lining up for voluntary sterilisation to reduce population growth. Naturally, the machine from the desert wakes up from its robotic sleep and begins to wreak havoc in exceedingly violent and explosive ways.

I'd never actually heard of this movie before I saw it on a Halloween night double bill with, what else, Halloween at the Astor Theatre. It shares nothing in common with that 1978 classic, so it was a double bill in horror goodness only, but I'm glad I got the chance to see it and to do so on a big screen. The astonishing editing and production design is best experienced on a cinema screen where they merge to form a dizzying collaboration. As the film continues to go higher and higher with its batshit craziness - culminating perhaps in a truly confounding, eye-popping sequence that takes a bit of visual influence from 2001 and Vertigo - I was continued to grow fonder and fonder. Richard Stanley, working from a screenplay (an admittedly odd, muddy one) by Stanley, Steve MacManus, and Kevin O'Neill, never lets up and isn't afraid to go to some truly unexpected places. The gore, too, which rears its head in the final act is certainly a bright and red in a gleeful fashion.

As a visual feast, it ranks alongside Blade Runner, Dark City and The Matrix as dying worlds on life support. It's visually stunning. The claustrophobic one-set nature is obviously derived from Alien, but Stanley is still able to do some interesting, fresh things with it. I admired the performance of Stacey Travis, more the star of the film than McDermott, and found she was able to make the preposterous sequences glisten with genuine emotion, not to mention blood, sweat and tears. Even when it descends into a grotesque Real Window moment of voyeuristic perversion, she keeps the film from spinning off of its axis, something that Stanley clearly had no interest in.

This hallucinogenic, post-apocalyptic, weird, crazy horror extravaganza was a real treat. Evil robots are always fun, but I don't recall seeing anything this flat out bonkers. A movie without blinkers on in its wide-eyed technology-is-evil-yo attitude and that has the balls to really go to some odd places. I loved it! And who can resist a movie in which Iggy Pop features as a radio DJ? A-

Review: Tornado Alley 3D

Tornado Alley 3D

Dir. Sean Casey

Year: 2011

Aus Rating: G

Running Time: 43mins

It was some 11 years ago that I saw my first IMAX film, as well as my first film in 3D. The movie was CyberWorld in which a collection of short 3D animations – including The Simpsons’ famed third dimensional episode – were strung together in a rather lousy way. It was nothing more than a clip reel for the technology, but it worked on my teenage brain. Much has changed since then, with the IMAX brand now expanding to even bigger sizes and screening Hollywood blockbusters like The Dark Knight (I chuckled upon seeing a poster for Real Steel at the Melbourne Museum’s IMAX theatre), whilst 3D has advanced so much that we can now watch it at home on our high definition televisions without the need for those uncomfortable blue and red tinted glasses.

Both mediums are so fully integrated into the cinema-going experience that I was surprised to find sitting down to watch a 43-minute 3D documentary on the IMAX screen actually still has as much novelty value as it once did. That giant screen is still awe-inspiring, as is the idea of these documentarians lugging around the massive IMAX cameras for years at a time to put a barely feature length film to celluloid. Sitting down in an IMAX seat – a genuine IMAX seat, not one of those multiplex quote unquote versions – is daunting and I can just remember

With Sean Casey’s visceral Tornado Alley, the IMAX and 3D formats are put to rather exceptional use, and it works as a telling reminder of the impact they can still have. Audiences have no doubt seen tornado footage dozens, if not hundreds, of times before on their flat 2D television screens, but witnessing it on such a scale – the IMAX screens in Sydney and Melbourne are amongst the largest cinema screens in the world – is completely different.

In Tornado Alley, Sean Casey follows a team of scientific tornado chasers whose goal is to apparently live out the plotline of Jan de Bont’s windy blockbuster Twister and research the hows and whys of tornado formation. Parallel to that he follows his own mission to capture the inside of a tornado with an IMAX camera from inside his reinforced tank. Images of Mad Max are to be expected once you see this less scientific and more macho beast of an automobile that’s for sure. Weighing 14,000 pounds and customised with bullet-proof glass, a 6.7 litre turbo diesel engine and a 92 gallon fuel tank (thank you official website), this car known as TIV2 is built purposely to withstand the impact of being in the centre of a category 5 tornado and can travel at 100mph. There are even spikes that dig into the ground of added holding power! Casey intercuts between these two missions whilst throwing around graphs, charts, weather patterns and other scientific mumbo jumbo to appease teachers taking their classes on field trips under the pretence of “education”.

Usually when a documentarian inserts himself into the film it becomes more about their smugness and desire for attention than anything else, but Casey’s passion for storm chasing is so infectious that it works and his half of the film proves more fascinating than the less chest-beating weathermen that he shares the roads with. There’s grandeur to his half of the film that lifts the film above a mere dry science lesson and with editing reminiscent of a Hollywood disaster movie it’s certainly exciting when that funnel is charging towards the screen. And in 3D, of course.

The IMAX cameras capture astounding images of the American south (known as “tornado alley” due its high frequency of storms) and they look stunning projected onto the big screen. If Bill Paxton (yes, from Twister – oh the hilarity) constantly, and lifelessly, narrating to us about the “warm moist air” had been excised, I would have been more than happy to keep watching for longer than the three quarters of an hour running time. Still, if it’s been a while since your last traditional IMAX experience then Tornado Alley could be an exciting remedy. B