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San Francisco filmmaker Ernie Fosselius made the most successful short film of all time in the 1978 Hardware Wars, an inspired, mock-trailer for a nonexistent, cheapo rip-off of Star Wars. It worked like this: instead of Chewbacca, Fosselius offers the Cookie Monster. Instead of Darth Vader's breathy, slightly echoed voice emerging somehow behind that black-mask helmet, we get a villain whose every ranting utterance is so muffled even this film's Princess Leia equivalent beseeches him, "What? I don't understand you." And so on. Part of the joke is that George Lucas's revolutionary special effects are supplanted by common kitchen gizmos--mixers, toasters--that serve as spaceships and weapons sources. The updated special edition contains 20 computer-generated "special defects" that don't--the distributor boasts--at all match Fosselius's earlier version. Um... right on? --Tom Keogh
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It's Christmas in the tech noir slum of the post-apocalyptic future, and scrap-metal sculptor Stacey Travis gets a present she'll never forget. Scavenger boyfriend Dylan McDermott returns from the wastelands with the insectoid robot head of a killing machine. In no time it whirs to life and builds itself a gizmo-laden body out of handy appliances to continue its single-minded destruction of the human race, one warm body at a time. Director Richard Stanley, something of a scavenger himself, plunders everything from The Terminator, Blade Runner, and The Road Warriorto Short Circuit (the spidery construct resembles a demonic Number 5) for his violent flesh-vs.-metal survival thriller. Shot in sun-blasted orange and sweltering red, it's a triumph of style, set design, and grunge aesthetics over story, driven by a pounding techno score by Simon Boswell and punctuated by splattering gore. --Sean Axmaker
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