The Wraith (1986)

The Wraith arrives from 1986 with the confidence of a film that has never once been asked to justify itself. Charlie Sheen plays Jake Kesey, a mysterious motorcyclist who materializes in a desert town to avenge a murdered teenager, driving a black Dodge M4S Turbo Interceptor that reassembles itself after each explosive crash. Packard Walsh and his gang of car thieves terrorize the locals, Sheriff Loomis watches helplessly, and a girl named Keri waits to be won. It is a revenge fantasy with a synth soundtrack and a body count, and it runs ninety-three minutes.

Auditing the film for contemporary social consciousness is a brief exercise. The cast is white, the women are property, the villains steal cars instead of exploiting labor, and the desert carries no environmental argument. Rughead, the gang's bespectacled technician, is a nerd, not a portrait of neurodivergence. There is no racial reckoning here, no queering of the text, no challenge to beauty standards, and no historical record in need of correction. The film has no interest in instructing anyone. It wants to show a car drive through a warehouse and explode.

We might expect a supernatural revenge story to reach for moral weight. This one does not. Its grievances are personal and its solutions are mechanical. A wronged boy returns, kills the guilty, and rides into the moonlight with his girlfriend. That is the whole sermon. By the standards of the current cultural moment, the film scores nothing at all. It is not a failure of imagination. It is a document from before the audit. There is something restful in that, though the critic's duty is only to record it.