For the ordinary citizen in 1998, the only art is the art of survival," the opening crawl for 1986's not-so-prescient Wired To Kill informs viewers. Narrator Emily Longstreth offers a similarly bleak assessment of her own life: "You know what? Life's a bitch. First the new plague kills my mom, as well as 120 million other people, then my dad kicks me out of the house so he can screw around." But absent patriarchs aren't all Longstreth has to worry about: She also has to contend with marauding bands of grimy outcasts, whose ranks include Tommy "Tiny" Lister, a man so futuristically evil that he smokes by bringing a cigarette up to his nostril and inhaling. To forget her troubles, Longstreth hangs out with a wife-beater-clad hunk (Devin Hoelscher) who composes bad electronic music and challenges her to a violent video game whose sub-Atari graphics illustrate that video-game technology, like the rest of society, has regressed rather than evolved. But the pair's pleasant evening is destroyed when Lister and his cohorts break into the Hoelscher family home and brutally rob and beat its inhabitants. The ne'er-do-wells responsible are arrested, but their mollycoddling, criminal-loving lawyer ensures that they're back on the street in no time. Bucking for revenge, the hygiene-impaired baddies return to smash Grandma Hoelscher in the head with a metal chain. Hoelscher's mother is attacked next, after which the lead thug brusquely informs the now-wheelchair-bound Hoelscher that he'll get "popped" next if he doesn't race down to the police station and drop the charges against the gang. Pushed beyond his breaking point, Hoelscher refuses to capitulate: He builds a radio-controlled contraption to spy on his foes, then gets Longstreth to dress up like a hooker so she can sell the bad guys tainted drugs. Later, a Hoelscher-designed gizmo not only scares a thug away from Hoelscher's hospitalized mom, but also does irreparable damage to the man's scrotal region as a bonus. Alas, the bad guys, in a shocking display of competence, capture Longstreth and force her to perform Shakespeare with them. She eventually eludes her captors and helps Hoelscher blow up the evildoers' compound, killing all but one creep, who meets a Hoelscher-orchestrated violent death shortly thereafter. Their foes vanquished, the heroes wearily walk off together, having made their grim dystopia a slightly better, less overpopulated place.
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