MovieChat Forums > Death Machine (1994) Discussion > I LOVED this movie. Amazed I never heard...

I LOVED this movie. Amazed I never heard of it and I love weird stuff


So I am in my 30s and I have been tracking down weird obscure scfi and especially cyberpunk related stuff since I was a teen. Love Hardware and similar flicks. Never heard about this till yesterday.

I made sure to watch the two hour long version. I thought it was amazing. However I did not see Cale in any way as a good person or a hero like Ripley. Even if she lost her baby, she is working for this vile company that makes terrible weapons. If she was a good person she would have steered clear.

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Yah but she was trying to shut down a lot of these unethical programs while the Corporation was attempting to cover it up. She wanted to full disclose to the public what was going on and fire Dante who was creating a lot (if not all) of the weaponry.

My take was they developed weaponry for the military which is not unethical or an issue of any means. However, Dante's weaponry and special projects were completely unethical/insane which is why she wanted to shut those things down. The hardman project for obvious reasons was messed up since it was frying men's brains and killing potentially innocent people when it malfunctioned (shown in the diner). The death machine (or warbeast lol) was pretty messed up in how it carried out killing and could be completely unsafe without a trigger switch, etc. Basically it was Dante's own little killing machine instead of being for the Corporation.

I can't recall if she was introduced as a new CEO or one that learned of these issues and then decided to go clean it up (probably the later). That said, both projects never would've been approved by a legit/ethical person, which is why Ridley wanted to cover it up.

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If you love this kind of thing i highly suggest a youtube GoodBadFlicks. He is the reason i watched this movie and liked it as well. He explores these type of movies all the time.

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The spirit of abysmal despair

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Me too actually! Cant believe I never saw this before.

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I'm about to watch it myself. Loved Hardware and enjoy weird obscure movies also. I heard about it from a friend

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Best sci-fi B-movie ever. Hardware could be a better movie artistically, but Death machine is my personal favorite. Movies as these are much more cyberpunk than the big budget ones. The uncut version is just glorious.

I could recommend also Nemesis and Gunhed, but the last one if for serious fans, because it is so incoherent that it is hardly watchable. The visuals, however, are top! Front Line Assembly used it for the Mindphaser video (which, sadly, is probably the best way to "watch" this movie).

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Loved Gunhed, it's probably one of the most underrated cyberpunk films out there, and it's extremely tough to track down. I used to see it all the time on the shelves at Blockbuster Video back in the early 1990s (lol... my how times have changed) and eventually I got around to watching some 20 years later.

Was never a fan of Hardware, even after finally seeing the full version. However, I absolutely, love, love, love Nemesis. I still think that and Cyborg are two of Albert Pyun's best. In fact, if Nemesis starred Jean Claude Van Damme it would probably be an even bigger cult classic than it already is.

I also need to finally get around to watching Eliminators, which I keep putting off because I've rarely been in the mood to watch it.

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Hopefully you watched the ~2 hours uncut release.

Maybe we should throw in Split Second also, although it is more "future noir" than cyberpunk. Stephen Norrington was on the FX crew of Aliens, Hardware and Split Second - now it all makes sense.

Do you find any semblance between Dourif's Dante and Ledger's Joker?

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Absolutely!

I was thinking to myself the entire time "Brad Dourif is acting like a cyberpunk Joker!". I'm guessing he was inspired by Jack Nicholson's turn as the Joker in Burton's 1989 Batoman and Mark Hamill's turn as the Trickster in the 1990/1991 The Flash series inspired by Tim Burton's Batman (or rather, set in the Burtonverse, if that makes sense)?

But yeah, I suppose he's much closer in some ways to Ledger's Joker, but a lot more psychotic... if that's even possible.

Split Second is another film I need to get around to watching. I also put that off because I remember my old man watching it at some point back in the 1990s and I asked him about it and he said it was terrible, so I never bothered to see it for myself, but it's been in my circle of recommended movies for some time now. Sooner, rather than later, I'll get around to that and Eliminators.

And Stephen Norrington seems to be a fantastic special FX guy, I had no idea he worked on those other films but that explains why he's capable of creating some great looking props, effects, and cinematic setups for said effects. Even though I didn't much care for Hardware, I did like the robot design and the atmosphere, as well as some of the effects and gore, I just hated how the movie played out.

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I can't say I loved the weird stuff, but I did really enjoy Death Machine. I steered clear for the longest because the reviews weren't very kind.

However, I will say that this was a lot more enjoyable than Hardware. The biggest difference is that they had some cool action sequences in Death Machine, and I completely adored the guns they used in the film. I wish more movies used those kind of funky, cyberpunk-inspired weapons. We rarely even get guns like that in games and games don't have the same kind of prop/production limitations like movies do (well, back in the 1990s we used to get awesome weapons like that, as seen in games like Corridor 7, Duke Nukem 3D and Blakestone).

If Hardware hadn't languished so much in the mid-section with that Winestein pervert, and if had more Dylan McDermott fighting the robot instead of him going out in such a pansy way, I think I would have enjoyed it more.

But Death Machine was one of those movies that started kind of weird, but slowly picked up the pace and had some fairly satisfying moments. The exo-suit was obviously super cheap, and they really should have taken some hints on the costume design from the production team that worked on awesome 1986 film, The Vindicator (pic below):
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092172/mediaviewer/rm1745979137/?context=default

But even still, I loved the fact that they used the suit to fight the Warbeast and the fight sequence was actually pretty well done.

The atmosphere was also great in this film. A few corridors/hallways were reused often, but it still looked futuristic in that 90s grunge sort of way, and it reminded me a lot of the old game Syndicate.

The obvious artistic thievery from Aliens when it came to the set design and lighting, and the soundtrack and thematic mimicry of Terminator actually helps give this film a cheesy but engaging platform on which to stand.

I also felt it aped Hardware but did it better and with characters you eventually started rooting for, and who put up a pretty good fight when the odds were stacked against them.

I sorely miss these kind of films, as the low-budget dreck we get these days don't even come close to the quality of Death Machine.

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