Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

A small desert town has been harassed for months by a gang of drag racers, but so far no one has done anything to stop them. One day, a ghostly black car shows up, challenging members of the group to race, then killing them one by one. Neither the gang nor the police can catch the car or its driver, but some investigating into the gang's past may reveal just who's behind all this....If you want a film showcasing Charlie Sheen's talents from 1986, seek out Platoon, because even though plays the titular character, he hardly has any screen time.This is Nick Cassavettes film through and through, and he is wonderful as the main villain. Of course the film references Ghost Rider and The Crow, but it feels more like Repo Man in some scenes of the film.The Wraith is a very strange creature, wearing calipers for no no good reason, and has moments standing high on mountains not doing very much at all.Fenn is also quite wonderful as basically Cassavettes punch bag, and the rest of his motley crew look like extras from The Road warrior, another film this references.The car is pretty amazing, and surprisingly, the cinematography is pretty beautiful when we are out in the desert.Randy Quaid pops up as the sheriff, and chews up the scenery whenever he appears.It's a good old eighties classic, with a cool soundtrack, cooler hair, and Clint Howard with the coolest hair in the world ever.

The movie starring a young Charlie Sheen from the nineteen eighties was a very impressive piece of work for its time. It was one of the first movies to use computer enhancement. And to this day, the car that the "Wraith" dove in this flick would be considered bad to the bone, and would fit in impressively on some rich Californian coast boulevard! The acting was better than average for the time and budget allotted to do the film. The movie is solid and its about a group of kids that scare the towns people. The bully and even kill people and one kid comes back to kill the ones that killed him. Within one weeks time he kills all of them with this car. The special effects are great but it's those characters that make the film.Featuring a terrific driving musical score from musical legends of the era like Billy Idol, Ozzy Osbourne and Motley Crue, The Wraith is a movie that epitomizes the old Sicilian mafioso adage that "Revenge is a dish best served cold". But it is also a love story that transcends death with the apparent help of some friendly extraterrestrials that provide the murdered young man with resurrection and some really awesome and deadly hardware. And the most impressive piece of this deadly hardware of course is the superb, jet black Dodge Turbo Interceptor which may be the real star of the show. This was a concept car originally built by Dodge to be used as a pace car on the 1981 Indy Car World Series racing circuit. All in all, it's a great and entertaining movie with terrific race scenes and good character development for all the principal characters as well as the major supporting characters. The racing scenes and crash scenes are really well done with very good special effects that stand up well even today.Overall rating: 7 out of 10.

A small Arizona town is terrorized by a gang of '80s toughs still living in the '50s, drag racing for pink slips. Charlie Sheen plays a new guy in town who, not unlike the Fonz, rides into town one day on his motorcycle and immediately catches the eye of beautiful Sherilyn Fenn. This doesn't sit well with gang leader Nick Cassavetes, who's got a thing for Fenn. At the same time, a mysterious helmeted driver with a black super Porsche shows up and starts taking down the drag-racing gang one by one.Sort of like High Plains Drifter for the brain-dead set. Charlie Sheen is wooden throughout. Sherilyn Fenn is gorgeous and has a nude scene. Her acting stinks though. Villain Nick Cassavetes makes William Zabka look tough. Clint Howard plays one of his cronies. Randy Quaid had bills to pay so he's the sheriff in this. Rock soundtrack is full of '80s goodness. If you're into car movies or '80s cheese, you should enjoy this. It's not high art but I was entertained.

So we find ourselves again in the heady, glossy '80's. A film that would delight any 10 year old; special, fast, shiny cars in high-speed races on Arizona desert roads. What more could a boy ask for? Well, in the case of The Wraith, we also have a supernatural avenging spirit.A gang of leather-clad "punks" lead by mullet-wearing Parkard (Nick Cassavettes), 'bothers' teenage drivers, and forces them to race for the possession of their cars. And they don't play fair. Packard is obsessed with Keri (Sherilyn Fenn), and believes that she belongs to him. We are offered glimpses of backstory in an incident where she was caught with Jamie Hankins, and the gang murder him. At the same time that Jake (Charlie Sheen) arrives in town, a visible apparition of possible alien origin arrives in a futuristic-looking sports car: A wraith with the intent of avenging his death (yes, he is the spirit of Jamie; revenge is his motivation). What proceeds is a series of repetitive kills, as the wraith races with the gang and blows their car (but not their bodies) to smithereens. In a different decade, this post-Knight Rider-like ghost-revenge flick, could have been less, well, 1980's. it focuses more on the fast-car elements, and less on the spiritual nature of post-death revenge. It's not a bad film, just very predictable and as I previously mentioned repetitive. There are hammy turns by Randy Quaid (Sheriff Loomis), and Eraserhead- haired geek, Rughead, by nerd regular Clint Howard. This adds nothing to the film, except for decade-cliché. The film bizarrely had a poster that was directly descended from the Back to the Future (1985) promotions (i.e. a figure exiting a vehicle with bright-white light emitting from the drivers door). The wraith itself is clearly lifted from the Japanese Manga character introduced in 1985, The Bio Booster Guyver (which was also turned into a Hollywood film in 1991). The costume almost identical.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com