Over on Kung Pew Video, I’ve been revisiting the direct-to-video relics that raised us. This week: Circuitry Man.
I Was Wrong
Circuitry Man shouldn’t work.
It’s a cyberpunk love story/road trip movie shot in deserts, parking garages, and industrial basements. Half the cast behaves like they wandered in from completely different movies. The villain’s motivations barely make sense.
And somehow…it’s kind of charming.
In fact, after revisiting it recently, I think I owe the movie an apology.
Not a huge apology.
I’m not about to tell you Circuitry Man is some forgotten cyberpunk masterpiece. It isn’t. The movie still has plenty of problems.
But I do think I gave it less credit than it deserved the first time I reviewed it.
The Back of the VHS
Circuitry Man is like a cross between Johnny Mnemonic, Blade Runner, and The Road Warrior, if Johnny Mnemonic, Blade Runner, and The Road Warrior were produced by Golan-Globus and directed by Albert Pyun.
The story follows Lori, a bodyguard escorting a briefcase full of stolen chips across a polluted future wasteland. Along for the ride is Danner, an android gigolo with implanted memories and enough emotional baggage to make the rest of the characters look normal by comparison, and chasing them is Plughead, a cybernetic psychopath with complicated motivations.
What’s Good?
One thing I was wrong about the first time around was the acting. I remembered it being pretty rough, but it’s really not that bad at all. And when it is, it’s almost certainly intentional.
Jim Metzler is actually pretty good as the synthetic Danner. Vernon Wells is having a blast as Plughead. Dana Wheeler-Nicholson is fine if underserved by the script. And Barbara Alyn Woods is an absolute riot as Yoyo, Plughead’s sex-obsessed henchwoman whose bizarre little quirks nearly steal the movie.
It’s also way funnier than I remembered. Not laugh-at-it funny. Laugh-with-it funny. There are weird little jokes all over this thing. Two bumbling cops. Oddball side characters. Random bits of slapstick. Yoyo unzipping a henchman’s pants in an elevator while everybody else carries on like nothing unusual is happening. The movie knows it’s weird. And it just leans into it.
Worldbuilding on the Cheap
But the worldbuilding is probably where Circuitry Man shines the most.
Whatever budget the movie had, it wasn’t much. Some have reported as low as 5,000 and some have said the figure is closer to a million. Like so many other post-apocalyptic/cyberpunk movies from this time, most of its bleak future setting is created with deserts, industrial locations, and parking garages. Nothing really looks futuristic to be perfectly honest. And somehow it works.
Not because the illusion is perfect, but because the filmmakers understood how to suggest a much bigger world than they could actually show. The sound design helps. The location choices help. The shot compositions are often surprisingly solid. The result is a future that feels grander than the movie’s budget.
What’s Bad?
Unfortunately, some of the movie’s weaknesses remain.
The action scenes are mostly flat. Lori is supposedly this elite bodyguard, but we never really see her kick any ass. Most of the fights happen offscreen or are staged for laughs. Which I am guessing came down to budget constraints.
The movie is basically a chase film love story, but it fails to create any sense of urgency or real peril for our heroes. For a movie that’s basically one long pursuit across a wasteland, there’s just never any real sense of motion or speed to any of it. It feels slow and is sometimes plodding.
Salvador Dali meets Freddy Krueger
And then there’s Plughead. And he’s easily the most memorable character in the film, but he’s also the most confusing.
For most of the movie we’re told he’s after the chips Lori stole. Then near the end he suddenly reveals that it’s really been about Lori all along. Which is totally out of left field and never even hinted at. The result is a villain who’s fascinating to watch but never entirely coherent.
The same can be said for the climax of the movie, where Plughead enters Daner’s mind and Circuitry Man suddenly transforms into a surreal nightmare that feels like Salvador Dali mashed up with A Nightmare on Elm Street.
It’s visually the most interesting part of the movie.
It’s memorable.
But it’s also entirely pointless. I’ve seen this twice now and I still have no idea what the point of this scene was. Other than it looks cool.
Circuitry Man is Worth a Watch
Still, I came away from this rewatch liking Circuitry Man more than I did the first time.
It’s not a great movie.
The action is weak. Some of the character motivations don’t make much sense. And there’s a pretty glaring, unresolved conflict between our two heroes.
But it’s fun.
It’s campy.
It’s self-aware.
And it manages to create an entertaining cyberpunk world with little more than a handful of locations, some creative production design, and a cast of lovable goofballs.
If you’re a fan of movies like Cherry 2000, Hell Comes to Frogtown, Hardware–or low-budget post-apocalyptic sci-fi in general–Circuitry Man is definitely worth checking out.
Kung Pew Video is where I dig into the neon-drenched, straight-to-VHS corner of film history. New episodes weekly. Be kind. Subscribe. See ya in the VHS wasteland.
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