Evolution At Its 90sest

Nothing warms my heart finer than when a friend recommends a terrible movie knowing it was made for my questionable taste. Hence, today’s obscure 1995 Instant Watch treat comes courtesy of my pal James, aka Equal Opportunity Dork.

He is a real American hero.

Quick Plot: All the cool kids are really into this totally rad new thing called “virtual reality,” so much so that young Kyle Baxter (Ethan Randall, who would later rename himself Ethan Can’t Hardly Wait Embry) spends a whole lot of time trying to get the top score for an arcade game in order to win a major contest. And this being the movie you’re currently watching, he does!

Cue the not-that-exciting ceremony as a wealthy toy baron and his head developer crash the Baxter home with Evolver, a Johnny 5-ish little robot designed to play laser and ball tag around the home. Though he at first seems like a more advanced vacuum, Evolver is programmed to improve after every game, thereby becoming an unstoppable player who will dominate his top opponent. It’s perfect for the upcoming Christmas season!

Well of course, that’s what the toy developers hope and that’s why, despite receiving reports from Kyle that Evolver is getting a little too competitive, the experiment continues. See, the entire contest thing was simply one of corporate America’s more elaborate market research schemes and ending it prematurely will never prepare them for the inevitable January product recall.

As you can guess, Evolver EVOLVES a tad too aggressively for a nice broken suburban family to handle. Though Kyle and his pal try to corrupt the little robot by recording camera footage in the girls’ locker room, rascally Evolver would rather hunt down the dreaded half-shirt wearing bully and shoot his eye out or head to the arcade to electrocute a pair of stoners. It’s not until he launches an all-out attack on Kyle’s precocious sister Ali (or ‘Jerkbrain,’ as Evolver prefers to call her) that things get serious.

Evolver isn’t a very good movie by any means, mostly because it suffers from two serious but separate cases of identity crisis. One is its time period: released in 1995, the film feels far closer to the techno explosion of the late 1980s. This is best viewed with Chopping Mall or Deadly Friend, not Virtuosity or The Net. The odd anachronistic quality it seems to have, however, is more amusing than offensive.

The bigger problem is that Evolver was probably made with no real clue as to how much of a horror film it was allowed to be. The hero is a 15-year-old nerd whose biggest drama stems from being in the, as his crush says, Divorced Kids of America Club, which yields plenty of easily resolvable conflict with his never-home single mom. But it ain’t E.T. when there are boobs on display, eyeballs being shot out of heads, and cars dropped on adolescents. Except the adolescent miraculously survives, probably because at some point someone on the production team pointed out the fact that the subject matter and style was far more suited to teenage boys and maybe killing them was a mixed message? It’s quite confusing.

Until a slew of Hilary Duff collaborations, director Mark Rosman’s best-known credit was the fun if unexceptional House On Sorority Row, a more blatant slasher that knew its audience and gave them the goods. I imagine Evolver was originally intended for a PG-13 audience before failing the MPAA’s standards and reinserting some of the more violent action to justify the R. I have no evidence to back up such a theory, but it’s one way to explain the bipolar nature of Evolver.

Not that I’m necessarily complaining. The weird inconsistency of Evolver is part of its charm from a nostalgic standpoint. And hey, considering the lack of 1990s killer robot movies, I'll take what I can get.

High Points

Though the script doesn’t have nearly as much as it could have with the concept of a cute WALL-E slowly becoming self-aware, any moment were Evolver gets to freestyle is highly amusing

Low Points

The entire production feels, how do I say, small. It’s obvious that Evolver didn’t have a large budget, but it still seems like the movie wasn’t ever trying to hide that. We have ONE evil robot, ONE human kinda villain, NO boxes of Evolvers-to-be waiting to take over the world, and so on. I’m not asking for SKYNET rallies, but showing us some blueprints or sales records or overseas factory mass labor or SOMETHING to give us some form of scale of what’s at stake other than one dull family

Lessons Learned

Prototype war robots can survive car flipovers that instantly kill seatbelt-wearing humans with nary a scratch

Similarly, doughy teenagers can survive automobiles being dropped on their faces with just a few days of hospital care

Half-shirts were apparently still in for bullies circa 1995

Evolver can’t lose!

Hey! That’s…

The robotic voice of W.H. Macy, better known to most filmgoers as William H.

Token Broken Family Exchange

Mom: Even your dad says-

Bitter Child: Dad’s not around anymore, IS he?

The writing and delivery of this moment was simply too good not to mention

Rent/Bury/Buy

Any genre film fan with a soft spot for unremarkable and highly dated trash will get a mild enjoyment out of Evolver. The movie is rife with weird timely moments to bring you back to the early ‘90s, and the titular villain himself is fun when he gets the chance to be. Worth the energy of a Netflix stream and not much more, unless you just REALLY like robots, Ethan Embry, or W.H. Macy’s sexy robotic vocal chords.

Modern Art Is Soooooo Subjective

If movies have taught me anything, it’s that the future is a world I never want to live in. No amount of Wild Stallions or Jetsons-like housekeeping could make me wish myself into a land rife with infertility, leather, nuclear fallout, totalitarianism, android bounty hunters, and more than one scenario wherein Kevin Costner is the messiah. Sure, it can be argued that the better time leaping movies are actually commenting on today’s society, but that still doesn’t mean I’m jumping on a hoverboard any time soon.

Richard Stanley’s 1990 dystopian techno thriller Hardware does little to change my views on the future....which I’m now apparently living in. This recently reissued film borrows a little inspiration from The Terminator, Soylent Green, Z.P.G., and a few other post apocalyptic films of the past, capturing a striking mix of 70s hard edged 70s cinema and 80s action to be its own interesting, if highly imperfect slice of metallic sci-fi.

Quick Plot: It’s the 21st century from a 20th century point of view, meaning the world is a sizzling desert filled with robot rubble, red skies, and intrepid little people. Iggy Pop’s DJ voice informs us that the government is set to pass a proposal to control the population by sterilizing anybody found reproducing, as resources are scarce and radiation is high. It’s an ugly world bathed entirely in an orange fuzz that burns straight through the camera lens.

A lonely and haunting opening follows a ragged gas-masked scavenger searching a wasteland for any goods to sell. He comes upon a few pieces of MARK 13, a failed cyborg experiment worth its weight in trading. Our nameless traveller brings his haul to a tech savvy junk trader named Alvy (Willow’s Mark Northover) and sells what looks like the head of C3P0's rebellious older brother to Mo, a roving soldier played by Dylan McDermott. Mo in turn presents it to his artist girlfriend Jill (Stacy Travis) for a Christmas/sorry-I’m-never-here gift. She’s elated because it’s just what she needs to complete her latest piece (after a hip dose of spray paint that would have gone perfectly with a kicking pair of American flag Converse, of course).

As you might imagine, MARK-13 ain’t WALL-E. Once Mo slips out of the room and Jill falls asleep (irresponsibly with a joint in hand, mind you) the wiry widget juices himself up with the apartment power grid and assembles himself into a homicidal little machine using other electronics in reach. As if that wasn’t enough to make for the worst yuletide ever, Jill’s foul-mouthed voyeur of a neighbor (who resembles what would happen if Jon Lovitz ate John Favreau and washed him down with popcorn butter) forces his way into her hallway with the automatic door sealing tightly behind him.

Hardware is an odd film, and not just because it is blatantly stylized with quick edits, robot vision, and a colored lens. Filmmaker Richard Stanley seemed to put a lot of thought and energy in establishing this post nuclear holocaust society, sprinkling in television commercials and window views that drop eerie hints about just devastated the world has become. Some of Mo’s conversations with Alvy and his friend Shades about how the radiation has affected them are truly haunting in a perfectly post apocalyptic way, and the background politics of sterilization, government assisted living, and drug use could easily have been the central device of their own feature length films. Great care was clearly taken with painting the sky such a rusted hue and yet, Hardware chooses a very different path for its 93 minute runtime.

What I didn’t like about Stanley’s film was, in a word, its plot. We’re presented with this dying society rife with political implications, but Hardware chooses instead to focus on the loud and clunky events of this one apartment. The bulk of the film features Jill’s struggle to evade MARK 13, who I like to think of as what would happen if Robocop’s son was a 15 year old punk hanging out with the wrong crowd. It’s action packed and has a few big payoff moments, but there’s something so limited about Hardware’s second half that can’t help but let down the sprawlingly dystopian setup. 

High Points

William Hootkins supporting role as a foul peeping tom adds a sick but highly engaging touch of oddness to the film


From the casual talk about cancer to the snippets of radio and television ads for radiation-free produce, the environmental and societal breakdown of Hardware is sufficiently disturbing

The wordless opening scene that follows a nomadic junk trader through a dusty red desert is breathtaking

Low Points

For a film with such a carefully envisioned dystopian scope, the limits of one evil robot encounter can’t help but feel like a letdown

It’s a style choice and for the most part, a very strong one but still: so much flashing lights can give even a healthy young woman one mean headache 

Things We Can Expect Sometime In the 21st Century

A completely sealed apartment with occasional bursts of open door radiation will do incredible things for your naturally curly hair

GWAR’s popularity will soar

Housing for those on welfare will be spacious, offer great views, and have a steady supply of running water

Newscasters will style themselves like 1970s era of anchormen

Thankfully, radiation-free reindeer steak will be available for the holiday season and advertised by the same commercial directors that filmed the final montage movie moments of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure

Robots will be homicidal and prudish

Rent/Bury/Buy

After nearly 19 years, Hardware has finally received a deluxe DVD release in a 2 disc set loaded with extras. I, however, purchased my copy several months ago from Cinema De Bizarre , a fantastic service with great deals on hard-to-find flicks. On that hand, I can’t really tell you if the DVD is worth an investment but if it sounds interesting to you and you find it well priced, it’s a leap worth taking. I can imagine the extras being somehow more fascinating than the finished product simply because Stanley seems to be a unique artist with a whole lot of dramatic ideas that probably didn’t make the 90 minute cut. I didn’t love Hardware, but it’s a neat little picture stuffed with innovative ideas and a distinct visual style.

Ya Da Da Da Dah, 2018

Due to a continuously busy schedule and some limited Internet access, I haven't had the chance to compile my complete thoughts on the enjoyable mediocrity that is Terminator Salvation. Still, since it's the first film I've seen in the theatres in three months, it seemed necessary to post a few lessons Christian "The American Whisperer" Bale and friends taught me as I munched on non-movie theatre popcorn and a Duane Reade Peppermint Patty. Later this week, I'm hoping to go a little deeper with my T4 analysi/defense over at Pop Syndicate. Stay tuned, but first, take some notes. You never know when the American military will accidentally unleash self aware Austrian killer robots to herd us lowly bipeds into giant metal buckets.


So be prepared, in part because a few SPOILERS may follow, but also because in nine years, the future will be a world where the following is true:


Dr. Hibbert prevails! Major surgeries WILL be performed in the outdoors

Early versions of terminators will be unable to count to 3, at least when it comes to chances


Early versions of terminators will be prone to lapsing into Australian accents

Romantically unattached female members of the Resistance will not be the greatest judges of character. Or heartbeats.


SKYnet may be an evil collection of man-hating machines, but they do believe in free will


Hair ties will be hard to come by, but there will be a surplus of shampoo and hydrating conditioner

Two day old coyote is better than three day old coyote. Duh.


Despite a lack of food and sunshine, the survivors of the future will be rather hot


SKYnet's favorite film characters are Bond villains that rarely kill key prisoners with the power to thwart their plans


Post apocalyptic fashion will involve Samurai eye makeup


If you've never driven a car before, the best time to learn will be in a high-speed chase with advanced killer robots in hot pursuit. Don't worry: you'll do just fine.


Michael Ironside will continue to make anything cooler