WIRED TO KILL

WIRED TO KILL (1986)

"If You Want History You Gotta Make Your Own" ...what the hell does that even mean?

Captain Kirk's son Merritt Butrick(WRATH OF KHAN) stars as a completely baffling villain who controls a bunch of crazy street people who seem to have no motivations whatsoever to be doing anything they are doing other than that they were hired to play crazy psychopaths who run around and kill and torture people in this movie. So I guess that is cliche #1. A mechanically inclined geek builds a really lame 'robot' or remote controlled toy and then his house gets raided by these 'gang members.' On the box the video says something about 'mutant' gangs, and half the world is gone after some disease outbreak, but none of this happens in the movie. 

This kid lives in a house in what looks like a really bad neighborhood, but that's about it. This is no 'post-apocalyptic' road-warrior flick, though it contains cliched characters from one...The crazies break into his house for no reason and beat up his mom. His girlfriend runs away and calls the police. They appear to live in some sort of quasi-police state, but the cops are pretty much portrayed as benevolent. They arrest two of the 'gang members' (we are not shown the police arriving or arresting anyone...that would indicate an 'action scene' which this movie is severely lacking in). The kid's legs are broken, and after a visit to a normal everyday hospital which doesn't appear to be 'post-apocalyptic' they all go home. Later they kill his grandmother, who is wearing clothes from the 30s or something for no reason, chase his mom around in her beat up car...she's in a car, they're in motorcycles and on foot, but they are able to 'chase' her while she drives 2 miles an hour...aw hell. This movie sucks.

There is no point in going into the 'plot' because there isn't one. It just goes on and on and on for no reason, and only gets somewhat interesting when the kid arms his little toy robot, and has his girlfriend sell fake drugs which are really a baggie of powdered battery acid. Honestly, this movie is utterly pointless. There's a lot of pointless violence, torture and screaming, and I have no idea why these crazy people are so violent, nor do I know what the hell the entertainment value of anything that is going on in is. The kid gets his legs broken, his mom gets her back broken, a guy gets his balls cut off by a boobytrap, his grandmother clubbed to death, his girlfriend gets tortured, and the violence keeps happening, but why is this movie so damn boring? Maybe it is because I don't care about any of these characters. They do a lot of dumb things, the kid is an asshole, the girl is really kind of stupid, and the villains are pointless and motivationless. (Is that even a word?) Who the hell wrote this script and why? What the hell is the point of anything that happens? People scream a lot at eachother, say crazy and maniacal things a lot and if there is supposed to be a relationship between this kid and his girlfriend, I don't get it. Black people show up periodically to sell drugs or guns, crazy people from what would appear to be a Mad Max movie seem to inhabit a movie that really seems to take place in nothing but a bad neighborhood, there really isn't anything 'futuristic' in this movie, though we are told otherwise. The two main characters sit there yelling at eachother, or staring off into space, as if they're trying to avoid talking to eachother all the time. Nothing 'fun' happens in this movie, and the pacing is so slow, what might make a good trailer full of violence and screaming scenes would be a bad joke.

It looks like it was filmed at the same abandoned industrial zone they used in ROBOCOP, and aside from that there is nothing interesting to really say about this movie. The kid eventually manages to unwittingly kill all the 'gang members' through uninteresting rigged traps, and accidents. They live in a shitty house, and the kid is all about protecting his house, which the gang threatened to come back and destroy and kill him--though they never do. The whole point at the end is they defeated the ugly crazy bad guys, but seriously, who cares? I suppose if the actors had some sort of charm, or shall we say, talent, this might have been slightly more interesting to watch. "Wired to Kill" just fails to even be funny in its badness, you couldn't sit through this borefest drunk just to wait for ridiculous things to happen, you'd fall asleep. Ultimately, whatever the gimmick was to sell the idea to investors or whomever produced this nonsense completely failed to make it on screen. It's low-budget, but professionally filmed, and my question is who could have possibly imagined this would make an interesting movie? I waited and waited and waited for the story to get going, and all I got was screaming and utterly pointless violence which makes no sense. I can't attempt to tell you what this movie is about, because it doesn't seem to be about anything at all. People get victimized in some senseless fictional world and a bunch of people get killed, that's it. There's no story here, there's just people getting brutalized, killed, mamed and a lot of long boring scenes pretending to be drama in between. Sometimes there's some odd commentary on something political over loudspeakers, but none of it really has anything to do with what is going on in the movie. I thought for a moment at one point, the government was going to turn out to be behind these crazy people and how they got that way, but it was a red herring. There is no explaination. No point to it. Was I supposed to just know why? Did I miss some other movie which contained cliches I was supposed to remember during this particular movie? I'd avoid this film if you could, though you probably don't have to, it isn't on DVD, and I doubt it ever will be. Even the stupid little toy robot scenes are dumb and boring, and I think that was supposed to be the clever gimmick, but there is nothing clever about any of this. I consign this piece of crap to the CYBER TRASH CAN! Oh, yeah...by the way, one of the crazies was the President in THE 5TH ELEMENT...that's all I have to say. It's crap.