Oct 08 2008
B+ Movie Review: Circutry Man and Circutry Man II
Post-apocalyptic settings offer a lot to low budget movie makers: You don’t have to use a lot of extras (everyone’s dead). You can keep the costume budget in check (everyone has gone retro). You can introduce any number of Deus Ex Machina and McGuffins with just a few lines of technobabble (because it’s the future). The trick is making things bleak enough to provide for adventure but hopeful enough to allow for a hero to emerge.
By these standards, lets look into the world of Circuitry Man.
The setting for Circuitry Man, and it’s sequel Plughead Rewired: Circuitry Man II, is a near future dysotopia where the world’s surface is unlivable and the air unbreathable, causing what’s left of humanity takes refuge underground. People distract themselves with kinky sex, dressing in zoot suits and a poorly explained, euphoria enducing electronic interface which is implemented by plugging a computer chip into a socket implanted into one’s head.
The last is for some reason illegal.
In the first movie, we’re introduced to Lori, a bodyguard/badass who comes into possession of a large number of the illegal chips and needs to get from LA to New York in order to profit. She enlists the help of Danner, a “bio-synthetic” who has experience using the maze of tunnels that run under the whole damn United States as well as the delusion of a long lost love who in reality is nothing more than an artifical memory. They meet the colorful, leech eating Jersey boy named… well, Leech (who provides one of the best scenes in the movie explaining why he wants to hitch a rid), get chased byby a pair of comedic, inept agents of what’s left of the government and also by the main villain of the piece, Plughead.
Plughead is a psychotic psychotherapist who is addicted to pain, adding more hardware to his cranium and being exceptionally creepy. He’s played by Vernon Wells, who rocked the mohawk and assless chaps in Road Warrior.
While I won’t tell you who survives the LA to NY trek, I will point out that Plughead, Leech and Danner are the only characters that make it into the second film.
Circutry Man II: Plughead Rewired picks up some time shortly after Circuitry Man leaves off with Plughead now being public enemy number 1. A new heroine is introduced to chase him down and she pulls Danner out of a loony bin to help her. Traci Lords plays a scientist being used by Plughead to do something bad and which threatens us all, etc. etc.
Both films commit the sin of dithering on whether or not they’re going to take themselves seriously, though Cicuitry Man suffers from this worse than its sequel (the government agents are practically introduced with Yakkaty Sax). But in the moments they do take themselves seriously, some intense acting happens. Danner comes across as genuinely sympathetic and Plughead comes across and genuinely threatening. The quality of acting is polluted by the mediocre performance of the second movie’s heroine which may be forgivable considering she gives us the only nude scene in either flick.
Circuitry Man and its sequel are fun movies, not even trying to get higher than a 6 on the reality scale. Both are testaments to the early nineties mindset that computers were the answer to everything and that soon our skin complexions would all look like the back of a PC. The core theme of both movies is hope in the face of crushing adversity and despite the moments in which you can almost hear the script writers snickering at you for watching, there’s a consistent and marginally plausible universe here for the characters to play in.
I liked these movies enough to go buy the two-for-one DVD release of them after having seen them both only once before. Going down the report card I give Circuitry Man and Circuitry Man II a C and B, respectively. Though in truth, I’m not holding my breath for Cicuitry Man III.
