In this ultraviolent horror show, a nuclear holocaust has incinerated most of the world and left New York looking even grungier than usual. Jill, a sculptor played by Stacey Travis, has to check visitors to her apartment for radiation levels. Writer-director Richard Stanley and his production crew, most of them veterans of the music-video world (Stanley worked with Renegade Sound Wave and Pop Will Eat Itself), have a ball giving the picture a techno-junk look. A thrash-metal radio jock named Angry Bob, given voice by Iggy Pop, announces, "There is no fucking good news."

There's none about the movie either. The bite goes out of Stanley's script shortly after Jill's black-marketeer boyfriend Moses (Dylan McDermott) gives her a helmet that mutates into a killer cyborg. The ensuing savagery won the film an X rating until a few seconds of limb tearing were cut to win an R. But the movie isn't shocking, just numbing. Add Hardware to the scrapheap of films that sacrifice ideas for sensation.

“Is It True”

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."