Lots of odd things came out of the 80s: a love for bright red leather jackets, lots of bad horror films, and The Wraith. One part love song to muscle cars and another part someone's badly conceived sci-fi, beyond the grave romance. It really is hard to pinpoint exactly where this should fall in the grand spectrum of teen flicks. The Wraith has the things you'd expect from that genre: a bully with a gang of moronic cohorts, a quiet-type hero, and a little bit of nudity. The dialogue is laughable, the acting is melodramatic, and then there's Randy Quaid trying his best to play a stern sheriff, a role no one who's seen Christmas Vacation will ever accept him in – even though he tried again in Hard Rain.
Packard (Nick Cassavetes) leads a really stupid troop of greasers who force other drivers into one on one racers where the loser walks away without a car. The leather-clad honcho holds the local hotty Keri (Sherilyn Fenn) in a hostile relationship, even going so far as to pull a knife on her when she threatens to get out of the car. She's told him she doesn't love him, that she'd never have sex with him, but his testosterone blocks out any chance of him hearing her out. Parents seem entirely absent in this film (apart from Randy Quaid), and so the really obvious murder of her ex-boyfriend has been labeled as a “mystery” and dumped in the good ol' unsolvable bin at the sheriff's office.
Then comes Jake Kesey (Charlie Sheen), his arrival oddly aligned with that of a mysterious black Dodge Interceptor from beyond the stars. Yes, beyond the stars. The film opens with four falling stars smashing into one another creating the Interceptor in the middle of the town's outlying desert highway. It's first act in liberating the local roadway's from the generic bully's tyrannical reign is to outrun one of the goons in a race and then park in the middle of the road, exploding when the opponent rams into it – then mystically reforming without a scratch. Meanwhile, Jake goes about town, from the quarry to the burger shack, blatantly courting said local hotty while dropping painfully obvious clues that he just might be the reincarnated form of her dead ex-boyfriend. If the film had any tact at all, I'd have said spoiler alert – but after about 10 minutes if you didn't make the connection, it's because you weren't watching the movie.
With hotty in his corner, Kesey, as the Wraith clad in black leather and what looks like a Daft Punk helmet, takes out the gang members one by one. There are really odd scenes added to placate the need for action beats but which require the typically superviolent gang thugs to just shiver in fear while the Wraith deals a bit of damage to cars and casts masked glances of awesomeness. As awesome as any leatherclad, Daft Punk helmet-wearing racer from the 80s can be.
The acting is negligible. It's not really about that. It's indulging a love of fast cars, even if the film doesn't really parade them all that effectively. What you do get is interestingly filmed racing sequences, which are little more than a camera on the back of a car filming two other cars – but it pulls off the desired effect. Sheen rides the same subdued cool stride that carried him through most of his career (including the one in Hot Shots, in which case the same stride was part of the joke). Nick Cassavetes does a respectable job playing a hormone-driven man of war with no means of expressing himself beyond driving fast and holding tight to a girl in a short skirt.
DVD Bonus Features
For a rerelease of a 1980s film, this thing has a strikingly high number of extras. Director Mike Marvin gives us a decent audio commentary, partly revealing some of the odd decisions that made this movie; longtime character actor Clint Howard gives an interview; Mike Marvin talks even more in an interview that doubles back on much of the material in the commentary; a featurette on the Dodge Interceptor offers some insight into why someone though seeing the Chrysler symbol would instill fear; and a theatrical trailer closes out the disc.
"The Wraith" is on sale March 2, 2010 and is rated PG13. Action, Drama, Sci-Fi. Directed by Mike Marvin. Written by Mike Marvn. Starring Charlie Sheen, Randy Quaid, Nick Cassavetes, Sherilyn Fenn, Clint Howard.
