| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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MR WRONG
aka
DARK OF THE NIGHT
Rating: 
New Zealand. 1985.
Director – Gaylene Preston, Screenplay – Gaylene Preston, Geoff Murphy & Graeme Tetly, Based on the Novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard, Producers – Gaylene Preston & Robin Laing, Photography – Thom Burstyn, Music – Jonathan Crayford, Visual Effects – Burstyn & Alun Bollinger, Art Direction – Mike Beecroft. Production Company – The New Zealand Film Commission.
Cast:
Heather Bolton (Meg Alexander), David Letch (The Man), Perry Piercy (Mary Carmichael), Margaret Umbers (Samantha), Suzanne Lee (Val), Gary Stalker (Bruce), Danny Mulheron (Wayne), Michael Haigh (Mr Whitehorn)
Plot: Meg Alexander gets a job in the city and buys a large old Daimler car to drive home to her parents in the country at the weekends. Returning to the city after the first weekend, she stops at a railway crossing where a mystery man and woman get into the car. The man appears threatening but both of them vanish when Meg pulls up at a gas station. Back in the city the car appears to be haunted. Meg discovers that the woman she saw was the ghost of the car’s previous owner and that the sinister man may have killed the woman and is now stalking her.
Up until the 1980s the horror film was an entirely unknown genre within New Zealand filmmaking – the sole film that was even vaguely horror was the comic Gothic The Scarecrow (1982). But around 1984 we saw a gateshed beginning with David Blyth’s zombie splatter film Death Warmed Up (1984) (which also featured a sinister David Letch). Although the oddest part of this was a duo of feminist slasher films, with Melanie Reed’s limp Trial Run (1984) and Mr Wrong, both of which were directed by women and seemed to set out to tell stories about women being stalked that countered the inherent misogyny of the slasher film.
Mr Wrong is certainly a better-made venture into the feminist horror film than Trial Run was. Unfortunately it is by no means a success either. The opening with David Letch and Perry Piercy getting into the car and unnerving Heather Bolton is handled with style and a nicely offbeat sense of humour. It all works quite well up until Bolton returns to the flat after which the film drops into standard Woman Alone in Peril Jumping at Every Bump schtick. And every bump we get to feel too. More than two-thirds of the film consists of Bolton’s wandering around the flat being scared by red herrings or various men popping out of the shadows. Gaylene Preston produces one or two good jumps, but the plot runs to a standstill in the interim.
Furthermore the mix of stalker and supernatural do not gel easily and is confusing. It is never explained whether the Man (a nicely chilling performance by David Letch, a dead ringer for Talking Head David Byrne) is ghost or man. If the latter, as the film seems to finally decide, how does he appear and disappear so suddenly? Does it not strain coincidence that he is waiting in the middle of nowhere to get a ride when the car of the woman he has killed just happens to be stopped waiting for a train to pass? What is the deep breathing from inside the car? What causes the fuel gauge in the car to play up? It’s a film that by its failure to keep the middle afloat cannot help but allow one to ponder such loose ends.
Director Gaylene Preston later returned to the Woman in Peril genre with the superior Perfect Strangers (2003), a quite strange abduction thriller that turns into a bizarre ghost story.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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