ZombieDog’s rating: Plug in… tune in…..

ZombieDog’s review: I said it before that B-movies and cult movies gamble hoping for success and for somebody to like the movie enough to pay to see it. In hindsight, I don’t think this is entirely true. If there’s any art form that is a natural evolution of theater, it must be B-movies. And if the art of the theater was truly for the masses, then that has to be exponentially more so for B-movies. When we talk about movies of this kind we are basically talking about low-budget.

However, low-budget doesn’t necessarily mean low creativity. In 1963, Doctor Who grabbed imaginations with little or no support financially. Flash forward to 2015 and Uganda’s Who Killed Captain Alex? independent film made a splash around the planet. Yes, there will always be Oscar-class films, but the power to create independent cinema has been let out of the box and is available to anybody who wants it.

While not quite zero budget, 1994’s Plughead Rewired: Circuitry Man II brought the gang back together to finish the story that they started four years earlier. The sequel takes up shortly after Circuitry Man with a world still in chaos trying to find its way. Plughead has managed to escape and is operating in Brazil, coming up with an insidious plan to take over the world. For all intents and purposes — it’s working. The characters that we met in the first movie have spread to the wind but they’re about to come back together to thwart Plughead’s plan.

Circuitry Man II has Vernon Wells (of Road Warrior fame, see above) playing Plughead, Dennis Christopher (Breaking Away) returns as Leech, and Jim Metzler returns to play the lovesick robot. New cast member Deborah Shelton (Miss USA 1970) was actually given the bulk of the heavy lifting to be done because, as it turns out, she’s very important to the plot.

I feel it’s extremely important to explain myself at this point. I’ve been reading Tom Hanks’s book “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiec.” In it, he talks about an idea of if it’s OK to hate a film, which he concludes is wrong to do. You can say the movie “failed,” although to hate it is the wrong emotion. This explains only partly how I see B-movies. I see B-movies as garage bands, local theater groups, or a young kid with a passion to make something. I see B-movies as raw potential. What this means is if you walk away from a B-movie and you feel as though it failed, at the very least try to appreciate the effort that went into it.

If there was ever a B-movie, this is it. With a whopping 3.6 on IMDb, Plughead Rewired is presented in all its “B” glory. I watched both movies back to back because I hadn’t seen them in a while. Believe it or not, they’re actually not bad sci-fi. Not great mind you, but like a pulp novel, with characters who are defined yet not overly so. Don’t get me wrong: This is definitely a B-movie, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was in the bargain-bin at the dollar store. It’s just with the score so low, you would think it would be an incoherent mess — and it’s not.

The real problem is that Plughead’s evil plan is actually pretty good. He’s selling life extension chips, with each chip extending your life by 10 years. I’m assuming the chips work because he’s selling them to the rich and powerful. However, that’s not all the chips do. They also allow Plughead to manipulate the decisions the rich and powerful make on a level that they are completely unaware of.

This is truly a missed opportunity as this plot point is revealed so late in the movie and doesn’t affect the storyline all that much. It would’ve been better if we had known this early on, casting Plughead as a greater threat who not only had a plan to take over the world but was actually capable of doing so.

It’s truly difficult to write about this movie because in many ways there’s a difference between embracing B-movie culture and enduring 90 minutes of crap. Being a lover of B-movies carries with it the burden of forgiveness. You need to forgive plot holes, bad acting, less than stellar cinematography, most of all you need to see all of these attributes as endearing. Nowhere is this more clearly asked than in Circuitry Man II.

The actors and most likely the crew are all minor-league, yet they’re still working. These people could be our friends and neighbors just trying to make it in the world like the rest of us. In my mind this is one of the attractions of low-budget cinema. The best way to look at it, in my opinion, is going down to the local bar to show your support as your buddy who’s playing in a cover band.

Is Plughead Rewired: Circuitry Man II a hidden gem? No, no it’s not. But it could be a wonderfully fun night when paired with the first movie along with a bag of weed, a delivery pizza, some good friends, and a comfy couch.