The Wraith (1986)

93 Minutes, Color, USA, 1986

Written By: Mike Marvin

Directed By: Mike Marvin

Dramatis Personae:

Charlie Sheen is Jake, mysterious stranger who blows into town. He is also The Wraith, vengeful ghost with a sweet ride.

Sherilyn Fenn is Keri Johnson, local girl and object of Jake’s affection.

Nick Cassavetes is Packard Walsh, 1980’s-style psycho and leader of a drag racing gang.

Matthew Barry is Billy Hankins, goofy fry cook, friend of Keri and enemy of Packard.

David Sherrill is Skank, local punk, member of Packard’s gang and one half of the comic relief.

Jamie Bozian is Gutterboy, dumb hick, member of Packard’s gang and the other half of the comic relief.

Clint Howard is Rughead, Packard’s chop-shop tech.

Griffin O’Neal is Oggie, high-strung and expendable member of Packard’s gang.

Chris Nash is Minty, preppie member of Packard’s gang.

Randy Quaid is Sheriff Loomis, the Stubby Arm of the Law in these parts.

Commentary:

Well do I remember this movie. It was a staple of HBO when my family first got cable. You could catch it at least twice a week, and believe me, my brother and I DID. Oh those were more innocent times for me, back when cable TV was new, and ANY movie I could see in the privacy of my own home was awesome (especially if it was R-Rated; nothing more fun to a ten-year-old than watching some R-Rated movies). Looking back at it after twenty years, of course, I realize it isn’t very awesome. It’s merely okay. But it is quite evocative of a time and place, and it still burns as a fond memory. And it’s a bit alarming how well I remember it.

Our story opens at night in the desert, outside the small town of Brooks, Arizona. Four shooting starts shoot across the land, causing some minor damage to poor innocent cacti and billboards. They combine at a crossroads to form…the Wraithmobile!

What’s the Wraithmobile, you ask? Well, it’s a sleek black object of automotive porn. It is a dark sinister cool-as-ice concept car, and it represents nothing so much as a gearhead’s wet dream; it seriously looks like something Batman would drive. The sleek predatory sheen (HA!) of the Wraithmobile is complemented by its mysterious driver, a helmeted man likewise clad in glossy black from head to toe.

Elsewhere in the desert, a couple out for a nighttime drive is accosted by Packard Walsh and his gang. Packard steals cars, but he does it in a mock-sporting fashion: he challenges his victim to a drag race, with the loser giving up his car to the winner. Packard races the man, and cheats to win – thus proving not only his evil nature but also his questionable competence as a car customizer, since a factory-floor Daytona almost outran his chopped Corvette.

The next morning, a young man named Jake rolls into town on his motorbike. He meets Keri Johnson and sparks immediately fly. Their conversation is cut short by the arrival of Packard on the scene. Packard has decided that Keri is his girl, and no one else has the right to even look at her funny (Keri doesn’t seem to have much say in the matter, but she makes no effort to get away from him). Jake heads to the local creek to cool off on this hot day, and he meets Billy Hankins (and we’re introduced to the mysterious scars that crisscross Jake’s back). When Packard and Keri also turn up at the creek, Billy tells Jake about his brother Jamie. Jamie and Keri were once an item, until Jamie was murdered. The crime remains unsolved to this day.

On the other side of the creek, Packard notices Jake and Billy talking, and he starts to relive an old memory, confirming what the audience already suspects: Packard and his gang killed Jamie Hankins so that Packard could have Keri to himself. Packard goes off to meet with Skank and Gutterboy and orders them to keep tabs on Jake while he’s in town – probably not the best course of action, considering that Skank and Gutterboy are a couple of idiots – and Keri takes advantage of the moment to slip away and continue her conversation with Jake. She invites him to come around sometime to Big Kay’s, the local burger joint where she and Billy work, and maybe they can hang out or something.

The next day, Billy offers to give Keri a ride home after her shift, but they are stopped and harassed by Packard’s gang. The high-strung Oggie makes threats, then Packard challenges Billy to a race for his beat-up Triumph (the fiend!). The fun and games are cut short, however, as the Wraithmobile cruises by (pausing at the burger joint just long enough for Packard to get a good look). Practically drooling over the prospect of adding the car to their collection, they drop Billy and Keri and set off in pursuit. Oggie volunteers to race, and he and the unseen driver of the Wraithmobile take off. For a while the race is evenly matched, but it soon becomes clear that the Wraith is just toying with Oggy: he pulls out ahead and vanishes behind the curves of the winding mountain roads. By the time Oggie catches up, the Wraithmobile has pulled out across the road. Unable to stop, Oggie plows into the car and they both explode into an impressively horrible wreck. Once the smoke clears, the Wraithmobile mysteriously re-constitutes itself and drives off.

The police descend on the scene, and hardcase Sheriff Loomis gives Packard and his gang a severe tongue-lashing. Loomis has been after the gang for a long time, knowing what they do but unable to prove it. Unfortunately he still can’t prove anything: he can’t place any surviving member of the gang at the scene of the wreck or the race. But he makes it clear that they’re all on his list. A deputy draws his attention to the baffling condition of Oggie’s body: it is intact and unharmed, except for his eyes, which are missing. Loomis is shaken, but he orders the body removed as soon as possible. And on a nearby cliff, the driver of the Wraithmobile observes silently.

Later that night, Packard and his gang work on cars. They’re not particularly broken up about Oggie’s death, perfectly content to just keep on stealing cars and customizing them. Until the Wraith himself shows up at their garage, wielding a shotgun. Packard at first tries to bargain with him, but the Wraith starts to shoot up the place without a word. During the chaos that ensues, Rughead catches a glimpse of the face behind the helmet, and it looks to him like the long-lost Jamie Hankins. The Wraith all but destroys their cars, then vanishes.

NOW Packard is pissed. The death of a gang member he could let slide, but touch his car and you will know his wrath. The gang turns the town upside down but can find no sign of the Wraith or the Wraithmobile. Instead, the Wraith finds THEM, challenging them to a race via a note left on Packard’s dashboard. Loomis, who has been following the gang, orders all units to proceed to the scene and set up a roadblock. Minty takes up the challenge to race the Wraith, and he meets the same fate as Oggie. Loomis’s roadblock is to no avail; the Wraithmobile literally punches a hole through it, then literally vanishes into thin air.

Meanwhile, Jake’s romancing of Keri behind Packard’s back continues, as he encourages her to stand up to him, all the while dropping cryptic clues that his “time here is short.” Keri is confused but attracted to him, as he reminds her so much of her lost love. And as the body count begins to rise, Loomis finds himself investigating the unsolved murder of Jamie Hankins, and begins to realize that maybe he’s not as dead and gone as everyone thinks…

While it’s not a masterpiece by any means, The Wraith is a pretty solid little movie. It’s got some good ideas behind it, and of course some really cool cars. In the mid-80s there was a mini-revival of custom car culture, thanks to those high-octane post-apoc movies like The Road Warrior and its ripoffs, and The Wraith was clearly made to cash in on the trend. With its desert location and fast cars, it tries to conjure up that same sense of social isolation. In this world, a man’s weapon of choice is his vehicle. It even tries to evoke the theme of a Western – small desert town in the grip of an outlaw, until a mysterious stranger rides in on a dark horse – with a more modern and fantastic bent.

Of course, as is often the case, the movie’s ambition overreaches its ability. There are a lot of good and interesting parts of the movie, but they remain underdeveloped. And good acting is hard to come by; it says a lot about a movie when its biggest star is Randy Quaid. And even Quaid has little to do but be the stereotypical small-town Sheriff, heaping verbal abuse on these drag-racing punks but not really able to do much else. Young Charlie Sheen, quite literally on the verge of stardom – the day after he filmed his last shot in this movie he was on a plane to the Philippines to shoot Platoon – shows little of the charm and charisma that made his career in the 80s. He’s simply not in the movie enough as Jake to make an impression. As the Wraith, silent and imposing in his black body armor and feature-concealing helmet, he makes a better impression, but it might as well be anyone in that suit (and probably is). Sherrill and Bozian are pretty good as Skank and Gutterboy – representing one in a long continuum of cinematic dumbass double-acts, perhaps reaching its pinnacle in the form of Bill and Ted – but no one else really makes any lasting impression. Nick Cassavetes isn’t as menacing as he should be, and Sherilyn Fenn delivers her lines as if she was in a school play.

In striving to be something of a modern fable, The Wraith unfortunately sacrifices realism here and there, in the form of some gaping plot holes and questionable character decisions. It’s implied that Packard and his gang own the town and everyone is too afraid to stand up to them, but none of the general public of Brooks seem to regard them with anything other than polite indifference. Loomis clearly knows Packard is up to illegal activities, but he never seems to be able to pin anything on him, even though Packard makes little effort to hide it. I mean, the couple in the Daytona at the beginning of the movie could have easily fixed this whole mess if they’d just gone to the police. Why doesn’t Keri just go to Loomis about Packard’s veiled threats and car theft? Why doesn’t Billy put two and two together about his brother’s death and Packard’s violent obsession with Keri? And how old are these characters anyway? Where are all the parents? All puzzling, unanswered questions.

With so much mediocrity in the movie, it’s all the more frustrating to see the diamonds in the rough. There are hints throughout the picture of a fairly well-developed mythos around Jamie Hankins’s resurrection as the Wraith, mostly in the form of designs and setpieces. The Wraithmobile is a product of arcane, almost alien technology, with a muted futuristic sound and an engine that seems to run on lightning. The shotgun the Wraith uses to bust up Packard’s garage is a quasi-futuristic thing festooned with blinking red lights (nothing says “80’s sci-fi” quite like random strobe lights that don’t do anything). The Wraith himself seems to wear some kind of full-body support brace that vanishes one piece at a time as he exacts his revenge. The disturbing state of the victims’ bodies, naked and without any physical injury other than the loss of their eyes. All very cool, but unfortunately nothing is ever made of them. They’re just left as mysterious, just like Jamie’s return as Jake.

It’s always a risky thing to revisit a childhood pleasure. So many things that seemed really awesome to a ten-year-old can seem pretty dumb to a thirty-year-old. And while The Wraith may not be as awesome as I remember it being, it’s at least not unwatchable twenty years later. You can’t say that for every film.

Things To Look For:

- As I mentioned earlier, the Wraithmobile is a truly awesome car – or at least seemed that way to a pre-teen boy – in a movie filed with awesome cars. Our villains drive a cool and eclectic array of vehicles, from Packard’s classic Corvette to Skank’s beat-up old Barracuda, so it would stand to reason that our avenging hero would have to drive an even cooler car. The M4S Turbo Interceptor is a truly cool and menacing vehicle, and certainly looks like something a supernatural bad-ass would tool around in. The only things that ruin the effect are the barely-concealed Chrysler emblem on the hood, and the word “Dodge” clearly spelled out over the rear window. Oy. Dodge was apparently so proud of their prototype that they used this movie to sneak in some free advertising. The audience is left to presume that Dodge is the car company of choice for the vengeful undead (and speaking as a demon who drives a Neon, I’d have to say that’s a fair assessment).

- Anyone who’s seen this movie can attest to the surprisingly good soundtrack. There are some shining examples of mid-80’s pop-rock to be found here. Robert Palmer, Lion, Ozzy Osbourne before he became a living cautionary tale. It’s highly evocative music, clearly identifiable as mid-80s music. There was a definite sound of that time and place, a certain polish, a certain feel in the ear canal, and one listen to The Wraith’s soundtrack and you’re suddenly there, feeling a mullet involuntarily grow from your scalp. I would compare the soundtrack to that of Top Gun in terms of vintage; one listen and you know where and when this movie took place. Top Gun was just lucky enough to get Kenny Loggins.

- Packard’s gang. God I love these guys. It appeared to be a recurring motif in the 1980s that, when you have a group of friends or compatriots together, they must all be very different from each other. They must be separated into types, so that the audience can quickly tell one from the other, and if each one of them can conform to a subculture archetype that is popular at the time, so much the better. You see this a lot in slasher films – it persists to this day, in fact – but it’s nowhere more glaring and more unintentionally hilarious than in The Wraith. Oggie, the gangbanger, with his dayglo ‘do rag and his studded fingerless gloves. Minty, the preppie one, complete with high school letterman jacket and khakis. Skank the punk. Gutterboy the spaz. Rughead the nerd. They’re all so very 80s in their own unique ways. And it makes you wonder just how the hell they possibly all found themselves in the same small town, let alone wound up being a gang together. I have no idea how this motif got started. Frankly, I blame John Hughes. But then, I blame him for a lot…

- Skank and Gutterboy, our primary purveyors of comic relief, are actually pretty entertaining in a really dumb Beavis and Butthead kind of way. Their arguments occasionally have the timber of an old married couple; you get the sense that these two only hang out together because no one else wants to, so they know each other all too well. A running gag is Skank’s propensity to get high by drinking hydraulic fluid (I guess that’s a step up from sniffing glue). Evidently Brooks, Arizona is one of those small towns that Savage Steve Holland told us about: so small that junkies can’t even get the right drugs.

Date Posted: May 3^rd, 2007

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