In celebration of Women in Horror Month, I picked out Gaylene Preston's 1984 Kiwi ghost tale Mr. Wrong
aka Dark of the Night.
After a few unexplainable events
involving her newly purchased Jaguar, Meg (Heather Bolton) starts to
suspect it may be haunted.
It would be easy to dismiss Mr. Wrong
as a Christine rip-off, but it's really more of a mash-up of several
classic urban legends. Adapted from a novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard,
it very much had the ingredients of a campfire tale. Mr. Wrong was
old school storytelling through and through with solid performances
and steady direction. It has that naturalistic vibe that a lot of
stuff from that corner of the world during that era.
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| Heather Bolton as Meg in Mr. Wrong |
I especially appreciated that the
moment something seemed off with the car, Meg was like, nope, and not only went about trying to sell it, but also immediately had the
thing towed back to her place. I think that might be one of the
smartest things I've seen a protagonist do in quite some time. My
only real gripe is that the ending featured a pretty anti-climactic
crash. I mean, do they not have cliffs in Wellington?
Mr. Wrong was pretty tame by today's
standards, but it's definitely the type of movie that I would
remember fondly if I'd seen it in my childhood when I was ingesting
stuff like Watcher in the Woods and Something Wicked This Way Comes.
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