Review of The Wraith (1986) by Lost Fanatic — 04 Aug 2009

"The Wraith" is a film for people who like cars, babes in slutty clothes and hard-rock music from the 80s, which is not exactly my profile. IMDb will tell you exactly what car each of the characters in the film is driving, but I tend to classify cars the same way I classify flowers: by the colour. So I can tell you the Wraith drives a black one, the bad guy drives a red and grey one, and there are other cars of other colours, which I forgot.

The babe, though, I did enjoy, since she was none other than Sherilyn Fenn, four years before she became Audrey Horne, so the film had pleasant echoes of Twin Peaks (all the more so as there is a guy called Packard and Fenn brings meals on wheels.) As for the music, I did listen to some Billy Idol as a teen, and I could recognise Robert Palmer and Bonnie Tyler, but I had to play the sound down during the action scenes because Motley Crue and Ozzy Osbourne are really not for my ears.

As for the story, well, it's a ghost galleon tale where cars stand in for ships. You have a gang of road pirates (who actually call themselves that way) who are being haunted by a ghost (or "wraith", a term less suggestive of sheets and booh-hoos, though this one uses a marker pen and Scotchtape at one point) who rams their cars one by one. There's also a "romance" between a new guy in town and Fenn - he rides a nice motorbike with an open shirt, she has nice legs, they immediately connect, they kiss, and they enjoy the sensation so much that they mlater have sex in a pond in a rock.

The film is trash, probably the "Fast and Furious" of its day (if "Fast and Furious" is really about what the poster suggests it is about), and left me chuckling at its silliness. Its only "message" apart from its obsession with cars and babes is that you should stand up to bullies, which in my experience is not always recommended, especially if you're a teenage girl and the bully is a psychopathic murderer with a switchblade and a gang of moronic punks behind him.

But it was watchable, partly because it's well shot (I was lucky enough to see it in the original format, rather than in a grainy pan and scan VHS copy), it has some 80s flavour and you can always fast forward through the boring bits (the three or four car chases.).

The premise is left pretty much unexplained though. As is the fact that the supernatural car comes equipped with a guidebook in the glove compartment.