Prime Time: The Wraith (1986)

I'm not sure how everyone else encountered it, but The Wraith is a film I will always remember as a fond VHS favourite. The cooler poster design, the one that had the titular character standing beside his awesome car, the taglines, and the fairly impressive cast all made a strong impression on me, and the younger me had no idea that it was basically a reworking of one or two atmospheric Clint Eastwood movies.

There's a gang of assholes, led by Packard Walsh (Nick Cassavetes). Walsh wants to be with the beautiful Keri Johnson (Sherilyn Fenn), but she keeps resisting his advances, which is hard to believe when you see what a charmer Walsh is. The gang of assholes like to spend their time bullying people, racing cars, and generally being assholes, much to the chagrin of Sheriff Loomis (Randy Quaid). A new guy in town (Jake, played by Charlie Sheen) gets some attention, but not as much as "The Wraith", a black-clothed mysterious driver who turns up in a very impressive car, some kind of one-of-a-kind Dodge Interceptor. Without saying anything, this driver is challenged to race, which allows him to start picking off the gang, one at a time.

Written and directed by Mike Marvin knows exactly how to throw plenty at the wall for enough to stick. You get the attractive cast, the supernatural aspect of it all, the set-pieces (they might be limited by the budget and resources, but they're there), and the shiny, speedy car. Certain moments are very cheesy, not least of them being the moments of closure at the very end of the film, but if you accept it for all it is aiming for then you should still manage to have a good time. Perhaps Marvin could have learned further into the horror, and added some more gratuitous creepy moments in between the races and confrontations, but he generally does well at balancing the tone in a way that keeps focus on the teen appeal around the heart of the story. Having said that, I wouldn't be averse to a ramped-up remake.

Sheen is good enough as the handsome new guy in town, Fenn is as lovely as ever, and Cassavetes is a great alpha douchebag. The gang all under the leadership of Cassavetes is full of fun little turns, with special mention going to Clint Howard. Well, I suppose I mean to give special mention to Clint Howard's hair. Quaid is enjoyably chewing the scenery as the exasperated sheriff, and Matthew Barry is okay as a young man who doesn't realise that he has already known "The Wraith" in another guise.

The racing scenes are decently shot, the soundtrack has a couple of surprising hits in the mix, and the cast all at least have fun with their roles, even if they are not delivering the best possible performances. If you have fond memories of this from the VHS experience, as I did, then revisiting it won't leave you disappointed. It holds up surprisingly well, perhaps because it never tried to sell itself as anything more than an entertaining teen tale of ghostly vengeance. Which is all you get.

7/10

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Wish Upon (2017)

Here are some things that can almost guarantee I watch a film: zombies, sharks, time travel, Diora Baird, and wishes that are granted in deviously twisted ways. So I knew that I would see Wish Upon eventually, despite hearing plenty of negative opinions on it, and it was only the concept that sold me. I was unaware of writer Barbara Marshall. I wasn't exactly blown away by the filmography of director John R. Leonetti (who bagged the Annabelle gig, and scored a hit there). And although I recognise lead actress Joey King, I don't know her well enough to seek out or avoid anything that she stars in.

King plays Clare Shannon, a young girl who isn't doing too well in life. Her schooldays are quite miserable, her father (Ryan Phillippe) spends most of his days scavenging from bins for items to renovate or sell on (I guess), and she gazes lovingly at a hunky fella (Paul, played by Mitchell Slaggert) who hasn't looked her way in years. She does at least have two loyal best friends (played by Sydney Park and Shannon Purser) but not much else. But everything changes when she finds a magical box that grants wishes. Those wishes come at a cost, of course, but Clare has already been seduced by a better life by the time she realises the big picture.

Starting off with an enjoyably twisted wish (Clare just wants someone to rot away), things start subtly enough to allow the film to build and build with each wish. The fact that the main characters go throughout approximately half of the movie just thinking everything is the result of an overdue deluge of good luck is ridiculous, and writer Marshall could have tried harder there, but it's easy to forgive the failings of the film as we start to watch one tease after another, wondering if people will live or die in sequences that wouldn't feel out of place in a Final Destination movie. Admittedly, tension is diluted while viewers can laugh at people sliding their hands into garbage disposal units, moving under cars that are jacked up while a tyre is being changed, or just helping someone go to work on a tree branch with the most unsafe chainsawing set-up possible, but it's all still good fun.

King is okay in the lead role, with Park and Purser both likable enough as her friends, and Slaggert does okay in a role that really sees him unwittingly under the spell of one of the wishes. Ki Hong Lee is also enjoyable enough, playing a student who ends up helping Clare try to solve the mysterious origin of the box. It's odd to see Phillippe in the dad role, despite the fact that he may have been in that age bracket for a few years now, but he does well enough, and Sherilyn Fenn gets some screentime too, which will always make me happy.

Leonetti keeps things pretty teen-friendly, neither elevating nor dragging down the average script, and the concept should please anyone who, like me, already thinks they might derive some pleasure from it. Once past the first third, which sets up the characters and shows the box starting off small before growing and growing, in terms of the price paid for wishes, this provides solid entertainment.

Oh, and if anyone ever makes a movie in which a time travelling zombie shark tries to entrap the soul of Diora Baird by offering her a number of wishes that won't pan out as she wants them to . . . . . . show me where to buy my tickets.

6/10

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Noir November: Fatal Instinct (1993)

 It's hard to think of any reason why writer-director Carl Reiner would want to put another comedic spin on film noirs after hitting such a home run with the brilliant Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. Well, perhaps he was happy to be working from a script by someone else (David O'Malley) this time, or maybe he just liked how this referenced a lot of classics while also skewering a number of neo-noirs in every scene. Either way, just enjoy the end result. It has a game cast all providing plenty of laughs.

Splicing a plot together from Double Indemnity, Body Heat (so . . . . . . Double Indemnity twice), Fatal Attraction, Sleeping With The Enemy and Cape Fear, the movie follows Ned Ravine (Armand Assante), a cop who also happens to be a lawyer, as he deals with the potentially dangerous Lola Caine (Sean Young), fails to notice the crush that his assistant (Sherilyn Fenn) has on him, and ends up an unwitting potential victim in a deadly scheme cooked up by his wife (Kate Nelligan) and her lover (Christopher McDonald). And then, to make matters worse, there's the release of Max Shady (James Remar), who also wants to see Ned bumped off.

While it's not the kind of parody that nails every tic and trick of the material it's spoofing, this is a comedy that knows where the easy laughs are and starts to build them up nicely. It's more interested in being silly than being clever, but it throws everything into the mix in a way that should please fans of Zucker/Abrams/Zucker fare. O'Malley hasn't, from what I can see, written anything else in this vein. Some will think that's a good thing, yet I think he has a good success rate with the number of gags that at least raise a smirk.

Reiner knows how to direct comedy, of course, and does his usual good work here. Despite the broad strokes being used, he has fun lifting some major sequences from other movies and filtering them through his skewed vision. The fact that he also knows how to easily steep each scene in the appropriate noir atmosphere is a big plus, whether he's showing sexual chemistry between characters or making sure that the saxophone player is always available to pop onscreen while playing the background tune.

Assante is very funny in the lead role, admirably keeping a straight face even as he's asked to act in more and more ridiculous situations, and the same goes for Young, Fenn, Nelligan, McDonald and Remar. McDonald is probably the one who gives a performance close enough to many of his other acting turns throughout the '90s, but that's no big deal when he's always such good fun to watch. There are also cameo roles for Eartha Kitt and Rosie O'Donnell, which you can view as a good or bad thing, and at least one scene is stolen by an adorable, and all-too-fake, skunk.

I've gathered that I am, once again, well within the minority with my love for this one, but that's no problem. I'll just keep enjoying it, and I'll keep recommending it to people until at least one or two others come around to my way of thinking.

8/10

http://www.amazon.com/Fatal-Instinct-Armand-Assante/dp/B00008972V/ref=sr_1_2?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1415205575&sr=1-2&keywords=fatal+instinct

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Raze (2013)

I KNOW this may not seem important to many people, but I am going to start this review with a warning. Despite being named second in the opening credits, and despite having her name on the cover of the movie, Rachel Nichols is not in this movie for long. Five minutes. Maybe ten. That's it. Nichols may not be the biggest star on the planet, but I like her. A lot. I'll seek out anything that she takes part in. Which made my viewing of Raze slightly disappointing. I was expecting her to have a central, or at least central supporting, role. Such is life, however, and I had to just suck it up and view the movie as it was intended, with very little Rachel Nichols included. But I'm starting this review with this whole paragraph so that others might avoid such disappointment.

And now to the movie itself. A bunch of women (including Zoe Bell, Tracie Thoms, Rebecca Marshall, and Bailey Anne Borders) are held prisoner, paired off and forced to fight one another to the death. If they refuse to fight then their loved ones will be harmed. It's a standard exploitation movie set-up, basically, and there's even a sadistic guard (Bruce Thomas), some out-of-touch senior management (Doug Jones and Sherilyn Fenn), and some lesbian shower scenes. I'll admit it, that last part was a lie.

Despite the tame nature of so many moments, this is a WIP movie that should please fans of that particular subgenre. What it lacks in gratuitous nudity and sleaze, it more than makes up for in the scenes that show some excessive violence. When the fights take place there's no shortage of shots that show faces being mashed and broken as opponents messily scramble to stay alive.

Bell isn't bad as the nominal lead, and she's certainly someone a bit more recognisable compared to many of the other inmates (although the inclusion of Thoms makes for a nice mini-Death Proof reunion, with Rosario Dawson also making the briefest of cameos), but she struggles to carry the whole movie on her strong shoulders. Thankfully, I was easily pleased by the scenes featuring Fenn and Jones, and Thomas was solid as the nasty guard.

Director Josh C. Waller also helped to come up with the story, alongside two (?) other people, including screenwriter Robert Beaucage. It's as thin and ridiculous as a sheet of sudoku toilet paper, which isn't a problem while it rattles along at a decent pace, providing entertaining nastiness for viewers who know what they're letting themselves in for. The characters may not have much depth, but at least a few stand out from the group (with Rebecca Marshall's nutty turn being a highlight).

Ultimately forgettable, and veering between moments that seem strangely sanitised in between the gorier sequences, Raze is still good enough to give 90 minutes of your time to.

6/10

http://www.amazon.com/Raze-Zo%C3%AB-Bell/dp/B00IA1VQBS/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1408892932&sr=1-1&keywords=raze

Just One Of The Guys (1985).

A light, high concept comedy from the 80s, Just One Of The Guys still has some fans to this day and it’s certainly miles away from the worst that the decade ever gave us.

 

Joyce Hyser plays Terry Griffith, a girl with everything. She does well at school, she has a prize catch of a fella, she is popular and she doesn’t really want for anything. Except for a way to have her journalism taken seriously. When her article is passed over in favour of others, Terry starts to consider that she is not being taken seriously because she’s a girl. To prove this, she masquerades as a boy, with the inevitable complications that ensue.

 

Just One Of The Guys is one of many, many mildly amusing comedies from the 80s that is as forgettable as it is passable. Directed by Lisa Gottlieb, and written by Dennis Feldman and Jeff Franklin, it has nothing to make it a movie that would ever be anyone’s favourite.

 

The cast are all good enough. Hyser may not convince when wearing her male disguise but she’s sweet and easy to root for. Billy Jayne gets a lot of great little moments as the annoying younger brother revelling in his sister’s complicated fraud. Clayton Rohner is acceptable as the nice guy oblivious to Terry’s growing feelings for him and William Zabka is a great bully, easy to loathe from his first moment onscreen.

 

While the whole movie centres around Terry’s charade it actually doesn’t make the most of the premise (with one scene in the school gymnasium changing rooms proving to be the best when it comes to mixing the awkwardness of the situation with the comedy) and plays out, for the most part, like any other 80s teen movie featuring two friends who have to tough things out when one falls for the other.

 

There’s a surprisingly gentle approach when it comes to mixing the bawdy in with the more rom-com moments and that’s a bonus, particularly for a movie from this era, but it’s just not enough to elevate it above the average. Okay, maybe it’s just ever so slightly above average.

6/10. 

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