Film Friday: The Wraith
January 15, 2026
Peter Hughes
Peter Hughes experiences The Wraith, another 80s movie about a Chrysler product that kills people.
It is the fate of all decades to be retconned into comic book caricatures of themselves. The 1920s consisted exclusively of flappers doing the Charleston; every human being alive during the 1950s sported either a black leather jacket or a poodle skirt; the entire duration of the 1970s took place between a discotheque and somebody’s hotboxed basement. You see this phenomenon at Radwood, too, with people dressed in outfits that have come to signify the 1980s while simultaneously bearing little resemblance to anything anyone actually wore during that benighted decade.
It seems unfair to pin much blame for this on something as obscure as Mike Marvin’s independently-produced 1986 supernatural thriller The Wraith. But when I see a character like this movie’s low-life gang lackey, Skank (David Sherrill), who inexplicably combines a multi-colored, mulleted fauxhawk with “Apache” face paint, I’m sorry, but I have to call bullshit. Granted, it’s hard to prove a negative, but you have to believe me: Nobody outside of a Hollywood casting call ever looked like this.
That doesn’t mean we should dismiss The Wraith out of hand, though. For whatever distortions it might perpetuate with regard to ’80s fashion, more important is that it preserves for posterity at least one example of a key part of the era’s automotive landscape that has otherwise been largely forgotten. I speak, of course, of the PPG Pace Car.
Starting in 1980, when PPG Industries assumed title sponsorship of the nascent CART Indy Car series, the paint-supplier invited automakers to create one-off pace cars to showcase their styling and engineering prowess. At a time when economic and regulatory realities prevented much excitement from reaching showroom floors (to say nothing of actual performance), it proved a welcome opportunity. The resulting cars ranged from lightly-modified examples of production models to genuinely radical, full-on concept cars. If you tuned into an Indy Car race at the time—inevitably tape-delayed and heavily edited—you might be lucky enough to catch a tantalizing glimpse of one of them out front, wondrous and exotic. Personally, I’m still mourning the failure of anything like the Cadillac Cimarron Dual-Cowl Phaeton to make it to market, but I’ll never give up hope.
The automotive star of The Wraith is the Dodge M4S Interceptor, a low-slung, mid-engined sports car very much from the wild-concept end of the PPG Pace Car spectrum. And while the concept car’s provenance is well documented, in the movie its origins are more mysterious, mystical even. For one thing, it appears to come into existence when a handful of glowing orbs descend from the night sky and coalesce on a lonely road in the Sonoran Desert. And while it generally looks and behaves like a conventional automobile—synthetic-sounding exhaust note aside—it also has a miraculous ability to reconstitute itself after being completely obliterated in a series of murderous wrecks it initiates. The Interceptor may have a Chrysler Pentastar on its nose, but this is clearly no ordinary Mopar.
The Wraith is set in a fictitious Arizona town terrorized by a gang of young miscreants led by the repellent sociopath, Packard Walsh (Nick Cassavetes). When he’s not alternately stalking and forcing himself onto the effervescent but uninterested Keri Johnson (Sherilyn Fenn, pre–Twin Peaks fame), he’s out with his boys, bullying locals into racing for pink slips.
Their fleet is an odd hodgepodge of vaguely menacing machinery. You’ve got Packard in a lamely—it must be said—customized C3 Corvette, with flared front fenders that commit the unforgivable sin of exceeding the front track by an embarrassing margin, and a C4 rear clip awkwardly grafted onto the back. The aforementioned Skank and his whimpering flunky sidekick Gutterboy (Jamie Bozian) get a weathered first-generation Barracuda, complete with teeth painted on the front bumper and stenciled kill marks on the driver’s door indicating victims: four other cars, three motorcycles, two people in wheelchairs, and a dog. (The Cuda is honestly pretty sick.)
There’s also a caged, second-gen Trans Am with a giant and obviously fake blower coming out of its hood for the disposable Minty (Chris Nash); a brand new Dodge Daytona Turbo Z—another Chrysler rescued from the dustbin of history—coerced out of an unlucky chump in the movie’s opening shakedown sequence that ends up in the hands of the leopard-print doo-ragged Oggie (Griffin O’Neal); and a GMC C/K belonging to Rughead (Clint Howard), the ostensible “brains” of the operation.
Right around the time the interstellar Interceptor shows up, Charlie Sheen rolls into town on a Honda XL350R as the enigmatic Jake—coincidence?—and immediately starts chatting up Sherilyn Fenn’s character. Meanwhile, it becomes clear that the mysterious car the gang refers to as “the turbo” is on some kind of revenge mission. (They must’ve read the press release about the M4S’s twin-turbocharged 2.2-liter four, good for 25 pounds of boost and an astonishing-for-the-day 440 hp.) It challenges Packard and his crew to one race after another, each ending in a spectacular fireball and an inexplicably preserved corpse. It’s all a bit perplexing, not least to the local sheriff played by Randy Quaid, who gets to chew on lines like, “You listen good, Skank: I know it’s gonna be hard with your melon on chemical overload, but there’s a killer out there and I’m gonna track the hairball down.”
None of this makes a whole lot of sense, to be honest, even when Jake’s true identity is revealed and we’re meant to understand what we’ve been watching the whole time. As New York Times critic Janet Maslin put it, “The greatest suspense in The Wraith … is generated by the problem of how the writer-director, Mike Marvin, will work a word like wraith into the dialogue.” The answer comes from Rughead, the “digital radio killer” and “injection plant” engineer, and the only one of Packard’s minions with the sense to bail. “This gang thing was okay when we had the edge,” he tells Skank, “but now that there’s that wraith out there that killed Oggie…”
“A what out there, man?”
“A wraith, man! A ghost! An evil spirit and it ain’t cool!”
The Wraith is dumb fun, evocative of an era when sexually predatory male behavior was taken for granted, and homophobic f-slurs, anti-Iranian jingoism, 85-mph speedometers, and performance cars with slushboxes were all equally commonplace. (At least we’re no longer saddled with the speedometers?) Worth watching if only for the pornographically clinical close-up of the Dodge Daytona’s digital tach.
Alloy Official Rating: 2 magnetic strobe lights to put on top of your unmarked, beige Dodge 600 ES Turbo cop car on black steelies
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