The Wraith

This supernatural flick goes all in on entertainment, and with a character who comes back from the dead to exact supernatural revenge on his murderers, the plot sounds a lot like “The Crow” (1994), but “The Wraith” hit movie screens nearly a decade before Alex Proyas’s more highly regarded film.

Specifically aiming his work at a teen audience, semi-novice director Mike Marvin haphazardly tosses together various genres and elements that were popular in B movies at the time. At its base, the resulting film is an on-the-road thriller propelled by a healthy dose of high-speed action, topped off with a pinch of maudlin sentimentalism, a few ounces of light horror, and a drop of glossy eroticism (oddly, despite how hard they try to sell the futuristic look of the wraith and his car, the film is basically devoid of sci-fi elements).

Despite the endless repetition of a banal story built on a weak screenplay sprinkled with plot holes, the film still manages to achieve its stated goal of providing entertainment: the pacing is lively, the pyrotechnic special effects hit the mark, the local hicks are just colorful enough, and the dialogue is mindlessly amusing (stuff along the lines of “Okay, pal. Time to drain the drug overdose sloshing above your eyebrows and tell me who the dude was driving that other car“). As an added bonus, the entire film is accompanied by an upbeat soundtrack brimming with pop and hard-rock hits that catapult the viewer back to the legendary Eighties (Lion, Stan Bush, Tim Feehan, Ozzy Osbourne, Bonnie Tyler, Billy Idol, Ian Hunter, Robert Palmer).

Packed with celebrity siblings and offspring, the cast fails to shine on the acting front. Charlie Sheen’s performance is particularly bland – he’s a pretty boy with the expressive range of a plaster cast and a trite cliché always on the tip of his tongue: “There’s gonna come a time when you’ll have to take a stand. When you do that, that’s when you’ll free yourself of him“. The young Nick Cassavetes does a better job as the unhinged Packard.

Still, fans of genre film – and tricked-out muscle cars – will appreciate it.