DEATH MACHINE

Before making his mark on Hollywood with Blade and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, director Stephen Norrington made this nasty little cyber-punk shocker. Firstly it is a blatant rip off of the brilliant British post-apocalyptic film Hardware. Hardware is amongst my 20 favourite films and so the similarities are hard for me to ignore. Doing my best to put that aside, Death Machine also owes a lot to RoboCop... the story tells of a corporation which is experimenting with hi-tech killing machinery (why doesn't seem important). The genius behind the weaponry (Brad Dourif) unleashes a mecha-massacre on the CEO's when he is fired from the company. Thematically this is a grisly film. There are 4 different versions, 3 of which are banned. What we are left with is a dumbed down version that omits almost all of the gore and subsequently removes the movie's impact. Such a shame and I am keen to see the uncut version. Another thing to the movie's undoing is it's "2003" setting. I've never understood why movies declare specific futuristic dates... suspension of disbelief if much easier without ANY known time setting. Anyway... Death Machine is a carbon copy of many other movies with a few nice touches of its own. Not a waste of time but look out for an uncut version.

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