Sharing three more of the videos Cody has written for the JoBlo Horror Videos YouTube channel.
I have been writing news articles and film reviews for ArrowintheHead.com for several years, and now I also write scripts for videos that are released through the site's YouTube channel JoBlo Horror Videos. I have previously shared the videos I wrote that covered
- Frailty, Dead Calm, and Shocker
- 100 Feet, Freddy vs. Jason, and Pin
- Night Fare, Poltergeist III, and Hardware
Below, you can see three more videos that I have written the scripts for.
For the WTF Happened to This Horror Movie series, I wrote about the issues director Alex Proyas ran into when his film Dark City was in post-production, resulting in a theatrical cut that was a compromised version of Proyas's vision:
Dark City script:
Director Alex Proyas’s Dark City wasn’t a hit when it was released to theatres in 1998, but it did receive a lot of positive attention from critics, with Roger Ebert even going so far as to name it the best film of the year. So it’s interesting that the theatrical cut was a compromised version of Proyas’s vision, the result of the film being whittled down after it received a weak response from a test screening audience. In this video, we’re going to dig into the making, editing, and re-editing of Dark City to find out What the F*ck Happened to This Horror Movie.
Dark City tells the story of a man named John Murdoch, played by Rufus Sewell, who wakes up in a hotel room to find that he has no memory of anything that happened to him before he woke up. He doesn’t know who he is, but he knows he doesn’t want to catch the blame for the slashed-up corpse beside his bed. Murdoch’s quest to solve the mystery of his own identity and find out why he’s waking up next to dead bodies will eventually lead him to discover that the shapeshifting city of endless night that he’s living in is under the control of alien beings called the Strangers, and that he has the same reality-bending ability these Strangers have. An ability called Tuning.
“First there was darkness. Then came the Strangers.” That’s a line from Dark City, but it’s also a fitting description of how the concept of the film first occurred to Alex Proyas. It all started with a dream he had about the Strangers, the group of trenchcoat-wearing characters the filmmaker described as “strange, bald-looking men with an ethereal, androgynous quality”. Basically, they resembled Riff Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is why Richard O’Brien was cast as the most prominent Stranger in the film. Inspired by his dream, Proyas began writing the first draft of Dark City in 1990, but the story would go through some major changes on the way to production.
Wanting to blend a hard-boiled detective story with the science fiction genre, Proyas centered his first draft on a detective investigating a murder mystery, and over the course of the investigation the detective would realize that nothing about the case – or the world around him – made sense. By the end of the script, the mystery became so overwhelming that the detective went insane. That first draft sounds like it could almost work as a prequel to the final version of Dark City, because there is a detective who lost his mind while on the job in the film, but he has already gone crazy and been taken off the case before we’re introduced to him. Played by Colin Friels, he’s a side character named Walenski and he has some memorable interactions with William Hurt’s Inspector Frank Bumstead, the detective who replaced him on the murder investigation, and with the prime suspect in the case, Murdoch.
A music video director who made his feature debut with the sci-fi adventure Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds, in 1987, Proyas is best known for his second feature, the 1994 comic book adaptation The Crow. He found further inspiration for Dark City while he was filming The Crow, watching crew members work with the sets constructed to bring his vision of Detroit to the screen. This is when he had the idea for the imagery of buildings growing from the ground up and changing shapes in the world of Dark City.
Despite the success of The Crow, Proyas had trouble finding a suitable home for Dark City, moving it from studio to studio in a search for the one that would give him the most creative freedom. It ended up at New Line Cinema, a studio that had some of its greatest successes by taking a chance on projects other studios didn’t have faith in. At this point, New Line was known as “The House That Freddy Built” because it had paid off so well when they took a chance on Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. A few years later, they would give Peter Jackson the opportunity to make the Lord of the Rings trilogy. They were willing to let Proyas make the film he wanted to make, and even provided a budget that the filmmaker would later admit was probably higher than the story merited.
As Dark City moved toward production at New Line, the story began to evolve. Lem Dobbs was hired to do a pass on the script, and while he probably got the job because of the work he did with Steven Soderbergh on Kafka, he should have been getting buried in job offers due to the fact that he wrote the Gary Busey classic Hider in the House. The Dobbs draft brought the story closer to what we see in the finished film, shifting the focus from the investigator to the murder suspect. When New Line increased the budget, a decision they might have regretted later on, David S. Goyer was brought in to add some bigger action and effects sequences into the story Proyas and Dobbs had written. Today, Goyer is very well known for working on high profile projects like Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, Man of Steel, and Batman v. Superman, but at the time he had been building up his career working on lower budgeted fare like Kickboxer 2 and Demonic Toys, as well as the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Death Warrant. Proyas chose him to work on Dark City after reading his script for Blade, which New Line also released in 1998.
With the script ready, Proyas assembled his cast. In addition to the actors already mentioned, notable cast members include Jennifer Connelly as Murdoch’s lounge singer wife Emma, Bruce Spence of the Mad Max franchise as one of the Strangers, Melissa George in her big screen debut as a prostitute who crosses paths with Murdoch, and Kiefer Sutherland, who gives a show-stealing, oddball performance as Doctor Daniel Schreber, a human who is in league with the Strangers and therefore one of the only people in the city who knows exactly what’s going on. Schreber is a character who was originally envisioned as being an older man; in fact, Proyas considered William Hurt for the role before he cast Hurt as Bumstead, and when Sutherland received the script he thought there had been a mistake, as the role of Schreber seemed to be more fitting for his father, Donald Sutherland.
Schreber knows that the aliens in control, which look like demonic jellyfish and are piloting human corpses – every Stranger is actually the re-animated body of a deceased person – are a dying race, and they’re conducting this citywide experiment on people in hopes of finding a way to save themselves. They’re not doing this on Earth, either. All of the people in the city have been abducted from Earth and dropped into this fake metropolis, which happens to be on some kind of ship that’s moving through space. That’s similar to how Proyas took his cast and dropped them into a world that was meticulously crafted by production designers George Liddle and Patrick Tatopoulos, alongside art directors Richard Hobbs and Michelle McGahey. With brief exceptions, Dark City was not shot in exterior locations, the entire city was built on a set. The place looks incredible, and even if the Academy didn’t agree with Roger Ebert’s opinion of the film enough to nominate it for Best Picture, they should have at least given the production designers and art directors a nod that year.
Dark City was shot in Proyas’s home country of Australia, and New Line let him do his thing. Trouble didn’t enter the picture until Proyas had cut the film together and New Line held a test screening. This screening wasn’t a disaster, there weren’t any walkouts, but Proyas could tell that some members of the audience had checked out of the story well before the end. He said there was a lot of shuffling and moving around in the audience; viewers were intrigued enough that they wanted to see how it all turned out, but they were anxious for it to be over. Checking the scores and comments after the screening, New Line found that the audience opinion was split – which was bad news as far as they were concerned, because they had sunk something in the range of thirty to forty million into this project, and they wanted it to appeal to the widest audience possible. Proyas wasn’t surprised to find that Dark City wasn’t for everybody, and didn’t want to alter his film to try to draw in viewers who might not appreciate his director’s cut. But New Line felt some editing needed to be done, and an executive actually told Proyas, “You’ve got to dumb it down.”
The process of dumbing Dark City down involved trimming a lot of scenes and rearranging some moments, but the biggest change that was made was the addition of an opening narration delivered by Sutherland’s Doctor Schreber. The theatrical cut doesn’t give Proyas any chance to lure the viewer in with a mystery and then gradually reveal the facts to them. Viewers who went to see Dark City during its initial run were greeted with a scene in which Schreber tells the audience what’s going on in this city in the very first minutes of the film. This narration is based on dialogue that wasn’t supposed to be spoken until more than eighty minutes into the movie. Every night at midnight, the Strangers put everyone in the city to sleep so they can manipulate the cityscape and, with Schreber’s help, swap the memories of residents, changing people into different characters with different lives. Schreber’s narration is immediately followed by shots of people around the city falling asleep at midnight, something Proyas didn’t intend for us to see until almost forty minutes into the movie.
Re-editing the film and making it easier for the general audience to understand didn’t result in great financial success. Dark City quickly gained a cult following, but it only pulled in twenty-seven million at the global box office. The film never ranked higher than number four domestically, largely overlooked in cinemas while Titanic was having its seventeen week reign at number one. Proyas felt that New Line might as well have just stuck with his director’s cut, as he figured it would have made as much, if not more, than the theatrical cut did.
Although Dark City got a special edition DVD release in 1998, with Ebert proving his appreciation for the film by recording a full-length audio commentary for it, the director’s cut was not included on the disc. Fans didn’t have the chance to see Proyas’s cut of the film until 2008, when it was included on tenth anniversary DVD and Blu-ray releases.
The director’s cut has a running time eleven minutes longer than the theatrical cut, boosting it from one hundred minutes to one hundred and eleven minutes. Most of those eleven minutes are achieved through scenes being slightly extended with additional shots, and dialogue exchanges containing some extra lines. The film’s spiral motif gets a bit more focus, and some scenes are moved around in the timeline, like that early sequence of people falling asleep around the city occurring much deeper into the film. Proyas also took the opportunity to update the special effects used to show Murdoch’s Tuning ability, as he felt the Tuning effect in the theatrical cut was too “heavy handed”. It’s a very minor tweak.
Most importantly, the opening narration from Schreber has been removed. Sure, the movie had worked fine with that narration in there, but giving an information dump like that up front just wasn’t a good way to tell the story. In the director’s cut, the viewer receives that information as the story plays out, learning what’s going on as Murdoch does. Which is how it should be.
The differences between the theatrical cut and the director’s cut don’t sound that huge when you break them down, but as Proyas says, all the small changes that were made for his cut have a cumulative effect of providing the audience a richer viewing experience. The fact that the director’s cut doesn’t have Schreber spilling the beans in the very first scene makes it the preferred version of the film right away.
Dark City was always awesome, even in its compromised form, but the director’s cut is an improvement. It’s great that Proyas was finally able to get it out into the world, and now viewers have the chance to watch the version of Dark City they should have been able to see in 1998.
For the series The Best Horror Movie You Never Saw, I recommended Anthony Waller's Mute Witness:
Mute Witness script:
If horror fans know the name Anthony Waller, it’s most likely because he directed a movie that delivered a major blow to his career right when it should have been on the rise: his second feature, An American Werewolf in Paris. But Waller made a much better movie that he deserves recognition for, the one that earned him the chance to make that poorly received sequel to a John Landis classic. Waller’s first feature was a fun, suspenseful thriller called Mute Witness, and that’s the movie we’re going to be talking about in this episode of The Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: Like many filmmakers, Anthony Waller got his start working on commercials, but he was still a twenty-something college student when he managed to convince Oscar-winning actor Alec Guinness – that’s right, Obi-Wan Kenobi himself – to make a cameo in his feature directorial debut. There wasn’t even a script for Mute Witness when Waller approached Guinness about the project at an awards ceremony in Germany, but that didn’t discourage the aspiring filmmaker from asking the legendary actor to be in his movie. Guinness said his schedule was full for the next year and a half, but Waller saw a window of opportunity: they could shoot a scene in a parking garage the following morning, before Guinness caught an afternoon flight out of the country. Guinness agreed to do the cameo, and even said he would do it for free, the only condition being that he wouldn’t be credited in the finished film. Which is why Guinness is listed as “Mystery Guest Star” in the credits of Mute Witness.
Once Guinness agreed to appear in the movie, Waller had to write his portion of the script and assemble crew and equipment overnight. He got it done, quite an accomplishment for a college kid. Guinness worked with Waller just long enough to shoot three takes of the short cameo, then went on with his life… and now Waller had an Alec Guinness performance that he needed to build a movie around. That was in 1985, and even with that Guinness scene in the can it still took Waller eight years to raise the funding to make a full feature. During that time, he made some award-winning commercials and, along the way, wrote the Mute Witness screenplay. His original vision for the story was that it would be set in Chicago in the 1930s, but budgetary issues eventually convinced him to change the setting to modern day Moscow – and once that change had been made, he was able to secure a two million dollar budget from a German investor. According to Waller, the film would have cost four times more than that if it hadn’t been made in Moscow.
The version of Mute Witness that made it from script to screen stars Russian actress Marina Zudina in the silent role of Billy Hughes, a mute American special effects artist who is providing the blood for a slasher movie that American director Andy Clarke, played by Evan Richards, is filming in Moscow. Also part of the film’s crew is Billy’s sister Karen, who is played by Fay Ripley and happens to be in a relationship with Andy. These Americans don’t seem to be having a great time working in Russia, but things could be much worse – and they do get much worse when Billy goes back inside the studio after filming wraps one night and sees a couple crew members shooting a film of their own. A snuff film that ends with the killing of a prostitute.
From that point on, Mute Witness is packed with suspenseful, thrilling moments, as Billy tries to avoid becoming the killers’ next victim and struggles to convince the local authorities that a murder actually occurred. It doesn’t help that the snuff makers are associated with the mob, led by the Mystery Guest Star as a character called The Reaper, and that this mob owns some members of the police force. An investigator named Larsen, played by Oleg Yankovskiy, seems determined to bring The Reaper to justice, but it’s not clear whether or not he can be trusted.
BACKGROUND: Securing funding for Mute Witness was an eight year journey for Waller, but the troubles didn’t go away as soon as he had that two million at his disposal. Before production was scheduled to begin, there was a diphtheria epidemic in Moscow, which made it difficult to convince cast and crew members to work in the city. When the film equipment was flown in from Germany, it was seized by Russian customs agents, who demanded a fine of sixty thousand dollars be paid before they would release it. Waller was able to negotiate with them and liberated the equipment for just five thousand dollars and “a few bottles of vodka”. But that wasn’t the last time there were additional fees paid to keep the production rolling. Waller has said that the Russian co-producers claimed three separate crime organizations had to be paid off to make sure there wouldn’t be any disturbances. He’s just not sure if that’s true, or if it was a way to cover for missing funds.
The scheduled first day of filming was October 4, 1993, which happened to be the exact same day a constitutional crisis in Russia that saw the police and army fighting with demonstrators who opposed Russian president Boris Yeltsin culminated in a raid on the Russian White House that even included tanks opening fire on the upper floors of the building. Russia was on the edge of civil war, hundreds of people were killed or injured, and filming on Mute Witness was delayed. But despite how scary and dangerous the situation was, the delay only lasted one week.
Much like the characters in his movie, Waller found it difficult to work with the Russian crew, which he felt was painfully slow. He also had to deal with one unspecified actor’s drug addiction, and the fact that Yankovskiy tried to drop out of the project because he wasn’t confident in his English skills. After taking a crash course in the language, Yankovskiy decided to stick around. Filming exterior scenes during the winter also presented challenges, with the cast and crew facing temperatures as low as twenty-three degrees below zero… but in the end, it all worked out. Production wrapped at the end of 1993 after seventy-one shooting days, a schedule most directors of low budget films like this would be extremely jealous of.
Mute Witness received very positive reactions from its screenings, and landed distribution through Columbia TriStar in multiple territories. It didn’t receive a wide release in the United States, it only played in a total of two hundred and eighty-four theatres, and it didn’t rake in a lot of cash, barely over one million domestic, but it made its way out into the world and word of mouth was strong enough that Waller caught the attention of Hollywood studios. He happily took on the job of directing An American Werewolf in Paris, a long-awaited sequel to a film he had seen and loved when it was first released. Waller’s Werewolf movie was such a letdown, it seems to have retroactively made people forget how much positive attention he received for Mute Witness. At the time, this movie appeared to be the debut of a filmmaker who had a very promising career ahead of him… but while Waller continues to work, he has never reached the heights of Mute Witness and An American Werewolf in Paris again, and Mute Witness has become quite obscure.
This is a movie that deserves more popularity, as it really was a great debut for Waller. Watching it now, knowing how his career would go, it makes you wonder how many awesome thrillers we could have gotten from him if only he could have maintained this quality, if the sophomore slump of An American Werewolf in Paris hadn’t ruined his momentum.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Mute Witness starts off looking like it’s going to be a terrible slasher, a bottom of the barrel Halloween knock-off about an escaped mental patient, but the opening scene is actually a glimpse at the movie Andy Clarke is making in Moscow. Judging by the quality of the scene we see, this thing was not worth coming to Moscow to make. It seems like the behind-the-scenes look at the making of Andy’s movie may have been something Waller shot late in production, as a way to parody the troubles he was having making a movie in Moscow himself. There are language barriers on set, slow crew members, and the filming day ends before Andy can get anything good shot. This is also a great way to introduce viewers to three very important characters; Andy, Billy, and Karen. Not only are they established, but Billy also has notable interactions with the two crew members she will soon catch shooting a snuff film.
Waller doesn’t waste any time getting to the action; Billy finds herself stuck in the dark, closed-down studio right away, and she has witnessed the murder by the 20 minute mark. This kicks off a masterful, thrilling cat and mouse sequence, with Billy trying to escape the studio without being spotted by the killers. There are shades of Hitchcock and De Palma in the way Waller handles the suspense sequences; that’s not to say he was working on their level, but this was very impressive for a first-time filmmaker.
There are more great thriller sequences throughout the movie, as Billy continues to deal with killers and corrupt authority figures, and it’s amazing to watch Marina Zudina handle everything her character goes through without being able to speak or scream. Every bit of Zudina’s performance is conveyed with facial expressions, and the actress did an impeccable job. She has had a lengthy career, but aside from Mute Witness has worked entirely in Russian productions. If she and Waller had any communication issues, they’re not evident in the finished film. Zudina was the perfect choice to bring Billy Hughes to life, and she made the viewer care about her and root for her.
Evan Richards and Fay Ripley are also very entertaining to watch as Andy and Karen get mixed up in the mess Billy has found herself in. With their reactions to dangerous situations, Waller brings a strong sense of humor into the movie. He said, “I wanted to give the audience a cinematic roller coaster. I was interested in the mix between fear, tension and comedy, and using those elements to give relief to each other. The end result, hopefully, is exhilaration.”
Watching the film, it’s tough to imagine the version that Waller originally envisioned, where the story was set in 1930s Chicago. That would have made the whole thing very different, and probably not as effective. The language barrier isn’t just shown as a complication on the set of Andy’s movie, the fact that the American characters can’t speak Russian – or, in Billy’s case, can’t speak at all – causes them trouble every step of the way, and it adds to the tension of the film that our lead characters can’t communicate with the people around them. Changing the setting to modern day Moscow wasn’t only beneficial financially, the characters being in a country where they can barely function makes the story even more involving. Waller agreed that the Moscow setting added to the film, saying it provided an extra “feeling of danger, isolation, and helplessness in which our American heroes have to fight for their survival.”
BEST SCENE(S): Many viewers may feel that Mute Witness reaches its peak with the sequence in which Billy is trapped in the film studio with the two killers, and it’s hard to argue that. Those 13 minutes of Billy sneaking through dark rooms and climbing around in an elevator shaft, fearing for her life every second, are when Waller first shows himself to be a filmmaker worth keeping an eye on. However, it does have some serious competition from a sequence later in the film where the killers come to Billy’s apartment and bust in while she desperately tries to call the police through a text-to-speech program. When she can’t get help fast enough, Billy has to directly fight for her life. She can’t run and hide anymore.
Andy and Karen have their own standout moments while facing killers in Billy’s apartment, and these stand out due to how different the tone is when their lives are in danger. When killers are after Billy, it’s pure thrills and suspense, but when Andy and Karen are in trouble it’s quite amusing.
PARTING SHOT: Mute Witness is a really entertaining movie, carried on the shoulders of an incredible performance from Marina Zudina. With a few seconds of Alec Guinness in there to really make the whole thing feel prestigious.
This film makes it clear that Waller could have and should have gone on to bigger and better things. He had the talent, and no matter how poorly An American Werewolf in Paris turned out, he should have had more opportunities to prove himself. It’s a shame we don’t have a lot more solid Anthony Waller thrillers to watch at this point, but at least we have Mute Witness to go back and take a look at, and it still holds up as something special all this time later. If you haven’t seen Mute Witness before, seek it out and give it a chance – and while you’re watching it, try not to think about that werewolf movie Waller made. Just enjoy how well he told the story of Billy Hughes.
And again for The Best Horror Movie You Never Saw, I got to write for one of my all-time favorites, a movie that has been very important to me since my childhood, Mike Marvin's action-packed supernatural revenge film The Wraith. I was overjoyed when I found out that Marvin actually saw this video and had a very positive reaction to it, saying it's "by far the best view on the movie and accurate as hell in the writing".
The Wraith:
What happens when you blend the supernatural Western vibe of the Clint Eastwood movie High Plains Drifter with the vehicular mayhem of George Miller’s action masterpiece The Road Warrior, and bring that mixture to the screen in the middle of the 1980s? The result is writer/director Mike Marvin’s action-packed supernatural revenge film The Wraith, which we’re taking a look at in this episode of The Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: Mike Marvin got his start shooting skiing documentaries in the early 1970s, then shifted his career into the realm of narrative features in the ‘80s. After writing Hot Dog: The Movie and directing Hamburger: The Motion Picture, he ditched the food theme to bring the world The Wraith, which seems a lot like a precursor to The Crow when you break it down to the basics. Although The Crow wasn’t published until 1989, James O’Barr started writing it in 1981, five years before The Wraith was released, so obviously he didn’t lift the concept from this film. They just happen to have a similar set-up.
The cause for all the trouble here is a group of road pirates with jolly pirate nicknames like Skank, Gutterboy, and Rughead. One of them is named Minty, in honor of Emil Minty, the child actor who played the Feral Kid in The Road Warrior. These guys get their kicks forcing people with nice cars to race them for pink slips, but that’s not the worst crime they have committed. The head of the group is Packard Walsh, who has an unrequited passion for roller skating burger joint carhop Keri Johnson. Although Packard tells Keri no one in the world loves her like he does, he’ll also have sex with other girls on the side while he waits for her to come to her senses. But he’s so intensely possessive of her, that when she started going out with a guy named Jamie Hankins, he and his gang murdered Jamie. Sometime later, a stranger named Jake comes riding into town – and Jake’s arrival coincides with the appearance of a helmeted, shotgun-toting figure who drives around in an otherworldly Dodge M4S Turbo Interceptor. The driver of this Interceptor proceeds to wipe out the road pirates, and it’s clear they’re some kind of supernatural entity that’s avenging the death of Jamie Hankins.
Marvin assembled a cool cast to bring his characters to life, starting with Charlie Sheen as Jake and Nick Cassavetes, who would go on to direct The Notebook, as Packard. Jake very quickly gets on Packard’s bad side by striking up a romance with Keri, who is played by Sherilyn Fenn. Marvin didn’t actually want Fenn for the role, as he felt she wasn’t a good actress, but the producers picked her over his choices, which included Melora Hardin.
Matthew Barry has a prominent role as Jamie’s brother and Keri’s co-worker Billy Hankins, Randy Quaid is the local sheriff Loomis, and filling out Packard’s gang are Clint Howard as Rughead; David Sherrill and Jamie Bozian as the memorable double act of Skank and Gutterboy; Chris Nash as Minty, who barely registers as a character, since the only notable thing about him is his letterman jacket; and Griffin O’Neal of April Fool’s Day as Oggie. Oggie doesn’t have a lot to do, but he would have been drawing a lot people into viewings of this film over the years if Marvin had been able to cast the actor he wanted for the role: Johnny Depp. Depp was another casting choice he couldn’t get past the higher-ups, but Depp was still around the set during production because he was dating Fenn at the time. He just didn’t end up in front of the camera.
You may notice that several of the cast members are related to other popular movie stars and filmmakers. Charlie Sheen, son of Martin Sheen and brother of Emilio Estevez. Nick Cassavetes, son of John Cassavetes. Clint Howard, son of Rance Howard and brother of Ron Howard. Griffin O’Neal, son of Ryan O’Neal. Randy Quaid, brother of Dennis Quaid. This wasn’t a coincidence, Marvin was told to pack the film with Hollywood royalty.
BACKGROUND: The origin of The Wraith can be traced back to Disney, where Marvin set up a project about Los Angeles street racers that was going to be called Banzai Runner, which is what racers in California called themselves at the time. As development went on, the story drifted away from the initial idea, and while a movie with the title Banzai Runner was released in 1987, it didn’t have anything to do with what Marvin was working on at Disney earlier in the decade. Marvin spent years developing and writing the script, and the story of L.A. street racers – the sort of characters The Fast and the Furious would be based on more than a decade later – became a modern take on High Plains Drifter. Eventually Disney put the project into turnaround, so Marvin took it to Buck Houghton, producer of the original Twilight Zone. And that’s when it finally got rolling into production.
Unfortunately, once Marvin got on the set in Tucson, Arizona, he and producer John Kemeny ended up butting heads a lot, and because of this you won’t hear Marvin say very positive things about his experience working on The Wraith. Even though he enjoyed his time with the cast and remains friends with some of them, he has said that every day of filming the movie was miserable because of the producer. One of his biggest complaints about Kemeny is that the original schedule had called for second unit to spend eighteen days filming the car chase sequences, but the producer cut the schedule down to just eight days because he was in a hurry to get The Wraith wrapped up so he could move on to his next film.
The second unit crew was only two days into filming the chases on winding mountain roads when tragedy struck. While filming the action, a vehicle that was overloaded with crew members and equipment went around a curve too quickly and turned over. Several crew members were injured, and camera operator Bruce Ingram was killed in the crash. The film is dedicated to his memory, and with this in mind it’s understandable that Marvin finds it difficult to look back on the production fondly.
The chase sequences weren’t the only things compromised by a shortened schedule; Marvin also had to remove fifteen pages from the script, pages that would have provided more information on the Wraith character and how exactly this supernatural revenge scenario works. This exposition was going to come from someone Marvin describes as a “prairie witch”, a character who is consulted by Sheriff Loomis as he tries to figure out why all the criminals in his town keep dying in mysterious, fiery car crashes. The prairie witch didn’t make it into the movie at all, and it doesn’t feel lacking without that character and their explanations in it. There are some lingering questions, but that doesn’t stop the film from being awesome. Besides, the movie has the perfect running time at ninety-three minutes, it didn’t need to be any longer.
There were other behind-the-scenes issues that made The Wraith a less-than-enjoyable experience for Marvin, like bad attitudes from certain crew members and the fact that the editor quit before he was finished cutting the film together and had to be replaced by an assistant, so it’s kind of surprising that none of this negativity can be detected in the finished film, and that it all cuts together as well as it does. The movie comes across as a fun romp, it feels like everyone must have had a blast while making it, but that was not the case for the director.
Marvin’s complaints extend to the distribution of the film, as he claims the producers cheaped out on the film prints, resulting in sound problems when it was released to 600 theatres. As far as he’s concerned, that may be why The Wraith only made three-point-five million dollars at the U.S. box office, because viewers had trouble hearing the muffled audio when they went to see it. Since the film was shot on a budget of two-point-nine million, three-point-five was not considered a successful haul. The Wraith came and went in theatres – but then luck finally turned in the film’s favor, because it was able to reach an appreciative audience through VHS rentals and regular airings on cable. It has still never been an extremely popular film, but it has a solid cult following, and that cult is growing all the time. That’s a fact that Marvin finds baffling, but I think anyone who watches it without his personal connection to the material will find it easy to see why this movie has so many fans and continues to gain more.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: The Wraith is especially strongly recommended to viewers who have nostalgia or appreciation for the 1980s, because this movie is about as thoroughly ‘80s as you can get. This wouldn’t have come out of any other decade. Every frame is a gloriously ‘80s visual, not just due to the fashions and locations, but also due to the cinematography by Reed Smoot, who gives us sights like blue-lit nights; flashbacks soaked in red lighting; a colorfully lit, foggy cemetery; and don’t forget all the neon in the road pirates’ hangout.
The movie is pure joy to look at and to listen to, as the ‘80s feeling gets a boost from the incredible soundtrack, which features the likes of Ozzy Osbourne, Motley Crue, Robert Palmer, Tim Feehan, Stan Bush, Lion, Bonnie Tyler, and more. Strangely, Marvin actually fought against the rock soundtrack, wanting the film to rely more on the original score from Michael Hoenig and J. Peter Robinson instead of needle drop songs. This is a rare instance of a director not really knowing what was right for his own film, because the soundtrack for The Wraith greatly enhances its entertainment value.
Charlie Sheen is fittingly enigmatic as Jake. Matthew Barry is quite likeable as Billy, and has a stunning dramatic moment near the end of the film. Despite the director’s objections to her casting, Sherilyn Fenn does a fine job as the girl being fought over by the homicidal and the undead. Randy Quaid’s presence is always welcome in any film. But the true MVPs are the villains, with Nick Cassavetes coming off as suitably unhinged in the role of Packard, perfectly selling lines like his threat to Keri: “If you’re not gonna be my girl, you’re not gonna be anybody’s.” Clint Howard is reliably odd as the tech expert Rughead, whose hairstyle was an homage to Eraserhead. And then you have David Sherrill and Jamie Bozian as the tweaked-out Skank and his dimwitted sidekick Gutterboy. These guys are hilarious in their roles, tossing out dopey lines as well as lines lifted directly from classics like The Thing and Rebel Without a Cause. Skank is perpetually whacked out of his mind on substances, but not the usual narcotics. This guy drinks brake fluid and hydraulic fluid and snorts WD-40. When he consumes these things, he reacts in the way you would expect someone to react – assuming it wouldn’t just cause them to drop dead on the spot.
BEST SCENE(S): The car races and chases may not have been all they were intended to be, since the filming schedule was cut in half and because of the tragic accident, but they still turned out well on screen. When planning these sequences, Marvin turned to one of the all-time greats. He admitted, “I wanted to emulate George Miller’s Road Warrior, and if you look at the way I structured the crashes, we went through Road Warrior frame by frame, literally. We discovered how he cut his movie together and we did the same thing. … Nobody can out-do George Miller, but I was trying to.”
These vehicular sequences come along quite frequently, the movie never goes too long without throwing some high speed action your way. It’s all awesome, but Marvin made sure to save the best, biggest, and longest chase for the climax, when it all comes down to the Wraith vs. Packard – and some police cars in the mix as well.
With all the action, the ‘80s sights and sounds, and the amusing moments with characters like Skank and Gutterboy, it’s tough to choose what the best scenes in the movie are; the best thing about this movie is the entire ninety-three minute experience. Of course, there are some highlights, with one being the scene in which the Wraith walks into the villains’ garage hangout and confronts them with a shotgun, which is part of the revenge mission because a shotgun was used in the murder of Jamie Hankins. The Wraith only uses the shotgun in this one scene and doesn’t shoot anybody with it, but that gun is used to cause a lot of property damage, and the road pirates can’t do anything but watch.
PARTING SHOT: The making of The Wraith was a nightmare for the director and it will always have the tragic loss of a crew member hanging over it, but this movie still manages to be one of the most purely entertaining releases of the ‘80s. While Mike Marvin may be at a loss as to why his film endures to this day, someone who gets it is Clint Howard, who counts himself among the fans of The Wraith.
The legendary character actor has said that he had a wonderful time working on the film and still enjoys it whenever he sees it, especially the driving scenes. Howard said, “I admire quite a bit of that movie. Some of (it) doesn’t ring true to me, but generally speaking I thought it was great.”
And if Clint Howard thinks it’s great, who are we to argue?
More video scripts are in the works, so another batch of videos will be shared here on Life Between Frames eventually. In the meantime, keep an eye on JoBlo Horror Videos!
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