Hardware

• Made for roughly £960,000 (about $1.5 million), financed by British Satellite Broadcasting, British Screen, Palace Productions and Wicked Films. The opening desert scene was shot in Morocco; the rest was built and filmed inside London's then-abandoned Roundhouse, where the soundproofing was so poor that all the dialogue had to be re-recorded.
• Fleetway Comics sued the production and won. The plot lifts heavily from 'SHOK!', a short strip credited to Steve MacManus and Kevin O'Neill printed in the Judge Dredd Annual 1981 (a 2000 AD spin-off). After the successful suit, a credit to the creators and Fleetway was added to later releases.
• The MPAA hit it with an X rating for gore -- three times before it passed -- with a malfunctioning-door death the main sticking point. Cuts to the violence and sex were made to drag it down to an R and dodge the porn-adjacent stigma of the X.
• Iggy Pop voices radio DJ Angry Bob, the disembodied voice narrating the wasteland; Motorhead's Lemmy turns up as a water-taxi driver (playing 'Ace of Spades' on the radio). Public Image Ltd's 'The Order of Death' sits on the soundtrack.
• The nomad who digs the robot skull out of the sand is Carl McCoy, frontman of goth band Fields of the Nephilim. Richard Stanley had already directed two of the band's music videos ('Preacherman' and 'Blue Water') before casting him.
• It opened at number six domestically and pulled $5,728,953 in the US (from a $2,381,285 opening weekend across 695 theaters) plus £313,038 in the UK, against its sub-million-pound budget.

The machine is the government's quiet hand. Mo cracks the designation back to the Bible verse Mark 13:20, 'no flesh shall be spared,' and the read is that M.A.R.K. 13 isn't a malfunctioning weapon at all but a population-control program working exactly as designed in an overcrowded, irradiated world. The 'rogue robot' framing is the cover story.

Watch the robot's body language. It repeatedly settles into crucifixion and prayer poses, and the final shower-stall image frames it almost devotionally. The film keeps suggesting the M.A.R.K. 13 isn't just a tool running its kill loop but something the script treats as a new, resurrected order of being inheriting a dead world from the people who built it.

Jill's apartment is the trap, not the sanctuary. The whole fortress of locks, screens and surveillance she's built to keep the rotten outside world out becomes the perfect kill-box once the machine is inside, turning her own paranoid security against her. The siege reads as a verdict on hiding from collapse instead of facing it.

In a radiation-scorched future where the government quietly pushes population control, a drifter hauls a scrapped cyborg skull out of the wasteland and sells it off. It lands with Jill, a metal sculptor holed up in a fortress apartment, who welds the junk into art. Bad move. The thing is a M.A.R.K. 13 combat unit, and it cannibalizes her tools, her flat, and anyone nearby to rebuild itself. What starts as a haunted-house-with-one-robot turns into a clattering siege, drills and scalpels and a machine that will not stay dead.