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Wired to Kill (1986)

Nathan Shumate on December 5, 2001 in Sci-fi — No Comments

  • Written and directed by Franky Schaeffer
  • Starring
    • Emily Longstreth
    • Devin Hoelscher
    • Merrit Butrick
    • Frank Collison

There are movies that I love, and there are movies that I hate. Some movies I enjoy despite glaring deficiencies, some movies I love to make fun of, some movies impress me with their historical significance or artistic attempts. All of these are fairly strong reactions, and they make writing reviews easier.

This movie, on the other hand, really incited no passions in me. It wasn’t good; it wasn’t notably bad; it wasn’t breathtakingly original, nor incredibly derivative. It was just kinda bland, kinda dull, kinda unmemorable. Unless you really really loved MacGyver.


“So — been to the Eighties recently?”

We open with a double prologue — never a good sign, as we’ve learned by experience. The first one, a screencrawl, tells how a plague in 1992 cause large sections of major cities to become quarantine zones, and in the “present” of 1998, though the plague is gone, the zones remain. Warning: This information will have pretty much bugger-all to do with the movie that follows. The next, a voiceover from our young heroine Rebecca (Emily Longstreth), tells us how her mother died in the plague, and now her dad has kicked her out because she was causing trouble with his new girlfriend, and there aren’t any schools anymore, and everything just about sucks.

Rebecca, a blonde teensomething, has moved in with teensomething Steve (Devin Hoelscher) and his mother and grandmother, in a small home in the barrio inside the zone. (Which looks pretty much like the barrio without a zone.) Steve’s an electronic musician, which means we get to have him demonstrate his awesome keyboard skills and play some early Narada electronic stuff (which, oddly enough, sounds exactly like the soundtrack). He’s also got a computer setup, and a remote-control robot named Winston. (He’s also got a poster of Winston Churchill on his wall, which might clue you in to a symbolic subtext here.) All of which will stand him in good stead in a little bit.

See, there’s also a gang of (I think) former plague victims who’ve been left crazy as loons. Think of the token crazy giggling guy in every post-apocalyptic movie you’ve ever seen; it’s like a full dozen of those guys at one time. Their leader (whose name, according to the credits, is “Reegus,” though you’d be hard pressed to catch it during the movie) as played by Merritt Butrick, is a quiet Shakespeare-reading kind of fellow in the midst of the insanity. (I don’t think it was just the Trek connection that had me thinking of Christopher Plummer in Star Trek 6.) Being a bunch of numbnuts, they first try knocking over a classy apartment complex, only to get sprayed by the defensive toxic spray. Then they knock over an instant teller (yup, that’s more their speed), and we’re treated to scenes of them burning the money, chewing it, getting high on coke, and generally being wastes of sperm.


Yeah, like holding the joystick by yourself is so hard…

So it comes as no surprise when these morons decide that a house chosen at random in the Barrio should be the next target of their nocturnal pillaging, and they all jump through Steve’s window. They beat his mother and almost rape Rebecca before Steve manages to get her freed — and has both his kneecaps broken for his trouble. Reegus warns him: if he says one word to the cops (whose sirens are already audible), he’s dead.

Unfortunately, see, they gave the message to the member of the family who’s going to spend the next day in the hospital, semi-sedated. So Mom and Grandma ID two of the perps at the police station (before a slimy public defender — what, even the public defenders are sleazeballs? — gets them out in twenty minutes), which means the threat is followed through. Grandma has the back of her head knocked off with a chain by a motorcyclist while walking down the street; then, when Mom goes to get Steve from the hospital, bikers divert her to the abandoned industrial complex where the gang lives (you know an abandoned factory was going to show up sooner or later, right?), where they cat and mouse her until running over her Datsun with their big-ass mining truck, breaking her back.

So the only person left at home when Steve is brought back by his neighbor, complete with a wheelchair, is Rebecca. (Who tried to get her dad to let her come home, but he pooh-poohed all the violence and hung up on her.) And immediately they get a call from Reegus: Steve’s been chosen as a lifeline. (Whoops, that’s “Regis,” not “Reegus”!) Steve’s got one hour to go down to the police station and retract the charges his mother made, or they’ll kill him too. Maybe not today… maybe not tomorrow… but as soon as their deficit attentions get around to it.


Our hero.

Does Steve run? Does he cower? Does he let Rebecca convince him to go to the police and revoke his mother’s words (as if that were even legal)?

It’d be a short movie if he did. This is an electronics wiz with a pet robot, remember?

And so we get forty minutes of MacGyverisms. He lets his robot hook to the bottom of their truck to make it back to their lair, then plants a listening bug. In the meantime, he and Rebecca rig a number of terrible “accidents,” such as:

- Stealing the money that was meant to buy drugs for the gang.

- Overhearing about the plan to buy some drugs at the whorehouse, and substituting the chemicals for a dry-cell battery for the dope, causing the imbibers’ sinus cavities to explode into a foamy acidic reaction. (I would always opine that any plan which involves having your girlfriend quickly learn how to behave like a believable and experienced hooker has “BAD IDEA” stamped all over it.)


The monster is an abomination! We must burn it — Wait. Wrong movie.

- Boobytrapping the seat of a motorcycle under repair so that, at the touch of a button, a blade springs up into a very personal area. (OwOwOwOwOwOwOw…)

- Installing a remote-control gun in Winston.

After a while, though, all of this creative revenge gets tedious. Yes, we understand that Steve’s clever, and that he’s devoted to revenge. Do we need to see every instance, in exhaustive detail? By analogy, think of either The Ten Commandments or The Prince of Egypt; both smartly decided to summarize the plagues of Egypt, in favor of showing the effect they had on the personalities in conflict. How tedious would each movie be if they gave ten minutes to the frogs, and ten minutes to the lice, and ten minutes to the boils, and…

In fact, so much time is spent here, that scenes at the end seem rushed — it actually seems like the climactic scenes we already begun before we join them in progress. And for all that, we still don’t get much characterization. Is Steve going over the edge in his quest for vengeance? Is Rebecca horrified at how much she enjoys the violence? What the hell is the story with the Shakespearean introvert leading this bunch of morons? We never dig that deep.


The powerful sinus-clearing action of new Claritin Extreme.

And in retrospect, the whole backstory of the prologues never amounts to anything. The Plague? The fact that we’re in a quarantine zone? Neither make any contribution to what appears on screen. For that matter, the supposedly futuristic setting also makes very little impact, aside from a few bits of easily-dispensable window dressing.

In short, there have been better revenge movies; there have been better marauding gang movies; there have better economically-depressed future movies; there have been better kit-bashing gadget movies (and TV shows); and there have even been better remote-controlled robot movies (at least the robot spiders in Runaway didn’t like they were made from tinkertoys). Granted, this may be the only movie made with all of those elements, but that’s far from being a recommendation.

Some Notable Totables:

  • body count: 12
  • breasts: 0
  • explosions: 5
  • ominous thunderstorms: 0
  • actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
    • Merritt Butrick (Reegus) was Kirk’s son David in Star Trek 2 and 3, and also played “T’Jon” in the TNG episode “Symbiosis”
    • Frank Collison (“Sly,” one of the gang members) played “Gul Dolak”in the TNG episode “Ensign Ro”
    • Tom “Tiny” Lister, Jr. (“Sleet,” another gang member) played “Klaang” in the Enterprise pilot “Broken Bow”

Posted in Sci-fi
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