Circuitry Man (1990)

Director: Steven Lovy
Writers: Steven and Robert Lovy
Stars: Jim Metzler, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, Dennis Christopher and Vernon Wells

Index: Make It a Double.

If I was on autopilot, I’d start this review by pointing out that Circuitry Man is a “bad movie, but...” and then talk about all the things I liked about it. However, it really isn’t a bad movie. It is, however, a cheap movie, whether I buy into IMDb’s suggestion that it cost a mere $5,000 or not. Then again, if it started life as a thesis film at UCLA, maybe that’s true.

So, Circuitry Man is a “cheap movie, but...”. It isn’t hard to come up with negatives, starting with the opening credits that run weirdly long and alternate with imagery when they should have overlaid it. The text scrolls up as we head down, through the layers of post-apocalyptic underground L.A. But hey, a $5,000 budget. In that context, these negatives are forgettable.

We’re underground because the atmosphere is gone and what air remains is unbreathable. Climate change concerns were big in 1990 and we can only dream about rich politicians who craft policies after watching straight to video sci-fi flicks instead of reading Ayn Rand.

If you have a 1990 vision of what this post-apocalypse looks like, you’re wrong. The Lovy brothers, who wrote this film, saw it as thirties Hollywood gangster movie, so everyone wears suits, talks like gangsters (without ending each sentence with “see”) and listens to smoky jazz in smoky rooms. Dana Wheeler-Nicholson is a kinda sorta femme fatale, given that she works bodyguard duties for the mob, and we’re given occasional expressionistic shadowplay.

However, just to keep us on our toes, drugs in this weird metaphor are computer chips, so this retro-future is cyberpunk and much of the tech we see put to futuristic uses is seventies or eighties, from TV remote controls to a Ford Galaxie 500 to the analogue and IBM PC ports on Plughead’s head.

Against this richly imagined backdrop, the story is flimsy. Juice has a case of chips to sell to Plughead when the cops show up. He takes them in the aftermath and leaves her for dead, but Lori, her bodyguard, is able to seize them back and then hire Danner to drive her to New York to hawk them. Plughead and his cronies give chase and behind them are the cops.

That’s about it for story but what matters is what the Lovys throw at the virtual walls as it all goes down. This really isn’t about plot, it’s about characters and situations and how they can make them feel recognisable even in such a weirded out state. So almost everything feels familiar, sometimes clichéd, but everything is simultaneously new and wild and subtly off.

Given that Lori is all elegance and toughness as a mob bodyguard trying to quit (to go into dress design) and the three thugs who pull her back in are nothing but that, it’s Plughead who leads us into weirdness. Vernon Wells clearly had an absolute hoot playing him and I’m not remotely surprised that he chose this for the first half of his Double.

There are plenty of other weird characters to come, from Danner the romantic ponytailed bio-synthetic pleasure droid through Jugs the half human half conglomeration of industrial scrap hanging from a ceiling to Leech, a wild sewer denizen with a flamethrower who lives off toxic sewer leeches, but all that starts with Plughead and his highly interactive skull.

But Plughead is the villain of the piece, an amalgam of utterly calm crime boss and weird thrill junkie, getting high by plugging into the skulls of those he’s about to kill so that he can literally feel their pain as they die. I wonder if he ad libbed a lot of what could be considered throwaway lines because they add a powerful quirkiness to his role that goes far beyond the story into what an actor might feel a character would do even in nothing situations.

If Plughead’s the villain, I can’t tell you who the hero is. For a while, it seems to be Lori. We meet her first and she kicks things into motion when she steals the case of microchips. Lori’s very capable but she sadly doesn’t get to show off her skills very often. She’s a highly passive protagonist, this film happening to her much more often than she happens to it.

If the hero isn’t Lori or doesn’t stay Lori, it’s Jim Metzler as Danner. Maybe there’s irony in the fact that she literally hires him to drive, as he ends up not just driving her to New York but driving the plot as well. It’s her film as we start but it turns into his as it progresses.

Certainly, he has a much more powerful arc than Lori does, because he seriously grows. At the outset, he’s a tragic figure, whether we see him roughly as a sexbot or more elegantly as a romantic artificial escort. The tragedy is that Juice got him to smuggle the chips into L.A. by programming him to believe that he’s doing it in exchange for the location of his true love, a woman who doesn’t actually exist. Everything about him early on is limitations, because he’s defined by what he can’t do. As the film grows and he grows with it, he starts to be defined by what he can do rather than what he can’t and that’s when he transitions into the lead.

This is a heady mix. As the wife pointed out, Metzler is like “a sexy Judge Reinhold” but his voice is like Tim Curry in Clue, all English class without the nobility. Wheeler-Nicholson is as elegant as she was in Fletch but she’s no victim any more and she’s older school elegant. Wells is joyously arrogant, so in charge in the post-apocalypse that he doesn’t even need to shout, let alone dress up like he did in Mad Max 2. As Leech, Dennis Christopher goes for outrageous grunge; I kept imagining him playing for Guns n’ Roses. And Lu Leonard, playing Juice, steals scenes like she’s auditioning for the Penguin.

All of them clearly had fun making this and Wells most of all, even if this was never a huge payday for them. They embrace the weirdness and that brings me back to the script that sets it all up, which means the Lovy brothers.

So many details make no sense whatsoever that the whole film should fall apart. Even in a post-apocalypse, why would a parking garage run from L.A. to Denver and sewers from there to New York? What’s above to warrant that? When we venture onto the surface, we just see emptiness, except the Last Gasp Café and a set of Mexican bandits who clearly think this is a spaghetti western take on Mad Max. Why are there plants if there’s no air? Why didn’t Juice just program Danner to be obedient? Why the drama? Why is a question that comes up a lot.

But I didn’t care. I’m good with low budgets. I revel in films that can’t just rent anti-gravity machines so have to use their imaginations to make something memorable. This succeeds in that with style. Now I want to see the sequel.