In the year 1998, society has seen itself regress in the wake of a plague that left several lawless quarantine zones across the United States. When a zone gang lead by Reegus (Merritt Butrick) storms the home of teenager Steve (Devin Hoelscher), the gang leaves Steve's mother (Kristina David) badly wounded. Using his salvage skills and his surveillance robot Winston, Steve teams up with his girlfriend Rebecca (Emily Longstreth) to exact his vengeance upon the gang when justice has failed.
Wired to Kill (aka Booby Trap) is a 1985 post-apocalyptic revenge film directed by now former evangelist Frank Schaeffer following his prior work as a producer on Christian documentaries How Should We Then Live? And Whatever Happened to the Human Race?. Released in 1986 to little fanfare with most critics dismissing it as another in a longline of Mad Max knock-offs, Wired to Kill on paper has a unique enough idea, but it's undermined by sloppy execution and paper thin uninteresting characters.
If you're familiar with the framework of Death Wish and Mad Max, you pretty much know how this goes to a "T". Gang does something awful, police are incompetent, protagonist pushed to far takes matters into his own hands. Lather, rinse, repeat. This is a genre that relies heavily on formula, but just because something is formula based doesn't make it bad as it just depends what you do with that formula. The movie does have the novelty of us following a pair of vigilantes with Steve being wheelchair bound and using various gadgets, robots, and traps to exact his vengeance often relying on his girlfriend Rebecca to do so for him, but the novelty is undermined by the fact that they're not very good actors with even less chemistry. While Emily Longstreth does slightly better as Rebecca (though hardly leading material) Devin Hoelscher makes so little of an impression as Steve I routinely forgot the characters name. The movie also suffers from the sloppy direction, writing, and editing of Schaeffer in the director's chair who doesn't know how to establish structure in the writing, tone in the direction, or clarity in the editing (which gets particularly sloppy towards the end). The movie has two scenes that are backed by what sounds like comedic Tuba music, and while some of the kills and traps are creative the movie's so flabby and directionless it robs them of their impact. Some of the villain performances like Tommy Lister Jr. Or Merrit Butrick try to bring something to their roles, but it's very much band-aids on bullet holes.
Wired to Kill is the kind of cheap disposable exploitation that's designed to be experienced on cable at 3:00AM, because at that point you'll be too sleepy to care and probably dream of a much better movie than you're watching. Unless you're a completionist of Mad Max knock-offs, I can't recommend this.
