El enigma del Jaguar gris

In a stroke for independence, a young woman buys a car for a road- trip to see her parents only for the car's increasingly odd and creepy behavior to lead her to find out the truth about its strange past and when she learns the dark secret tries to keep it from controlling her.

This was quite the fun and somewhat enjoyable effort. One of the more fruitful areas with this one is the fact that it does engage in quite a lot of really appealing work to convince the car's actually haunted. The fact that it's completely innocuous looking on the outside makes the events that happen in the car all the more frightening, with the strange eerie moaning and the gasping noises from the backseat despite her being the only one in the car, the continuous incidents that she believes have played out yet no one else can corroborate her story or the way it won't leave her alone to carry on her life and keeps dragging her back into the fray makes for some creepy times here. The way this continues on throughout here, from the different points of her breaking insanity due to her false hysterics freaking out over incidents everyone laughs off afterward to the great action presented at the back-end which features her going through the last trick to get them out of the car out on the highway that gives this a solid, action-packed finale. Now, there are a few flaws to be found here. The film's biggest problem is that it isn't really all that well-versed in offering plenty of jump-scares or even features a lot of suspenseful moments here, content to play to the slow-burn as it features her going insane over what the cars' actually doing to her rather than featuring the ghostly actions driving this along. The film really seems to slow down once she gets to the town and visits her family, which really doesn't have much in the way of action that generates any kind of excitement in what's happening. The middle section here ends being so slowly paced that it doesn't really feature any kind of action as it's basically more about her pleading with others to believe her stories and going around to investigate the past that it doesn't feature any kind of ghostly actions at all, and some of the activity featured isn't all that creepy anyway. The idea that the film consists a lot more on her behavior twists at that point onward so it doesn't get any kind of impressive chills out of the scenes with the way it takes rather bland setups as supposedly creepy and can make this one drag during these parts so it does have some problems to point out.

Rated R: Violence and Language.

Of course any movie buff will think about THE CAR or CHRISTINE, an evil, ghost car, but also psychopath story and he will be damn right. A TV movie from New Zeland and that seems to be inspired by a TV show anthology episode such as THRILLER, ONE STEP BEYOND or TWILIGHT ZONE. It is pleasant to watch and no boring at all. Intriguing film, I guess the non American film industries provide many of those underrated features, and we have to be lucky to find them. Yes, it is tense, with no length to interfere with the pace. It is unusual to melt two genres, psychopath killer and ghost scheme. Yes, unusual.

New Zealander Heather Bolton buys a jaguar from a car lot, takes a long drive home to see the folks, and on her return trip sees a strange woman(who she had already seen in a dream) get in her back seat...then a man gets in the passenger seat. She stops car for gas, man gets out, and she drives back home. She works, gets some roses, realizes car belonged to a woman that disappeared mysteriously, and then for an interminable amount of time - tries to sell her car. But what happens...the door won't open when buyers try to look at it. And that, except for the rather tame and lame denouement, is the height of suspense for this literal "sleeper" from New Zealand. Rather than saying I laughed, I cried, and I ran the whole gambit of emotions, I can say with honest frankness, I stretched, I sighed, and I yawned...repeatedly! Who would have thought life with a jaguar could be this boring and dull. A real snooze-fest!

This movie probably looked a lot better in 1985, when it came out. By modern standards, it's a little too light and too slow for a horror movie, a little too mild and obvious for suspense, and not quite quirky enough as pure film.

That said, it's not badly made. Nicely filmed, with decent performances, and both a truly beautiful vintage Jaguar and truly beautiful New Zealand scenery. The story cleverly combines and twists a few urban legends and ghost stories which -- through no fault of the filmmakers -- have become cliches by now. Again, they would have seemed much fresher in 1985.

The twist ending is pretty clever, although it's foreshadowed a little too broadly. For a small-budget suspense/horror film, it all adds up to 'not bad', but not fantastic either. I'd say that it has the feeling of a made-for-TV film.

What's strange about this movie -- released in the US on video as "Dark of the Night", for some reason -- is that the box boasted half a dozen strong reviews, from "Playboy" and the Village Voice among other sources. It's worth a rental if you like gentler suspense films (no gore in this one) or are a particular fan of 80's and/or New Zealand horror films.

Young frump Meg (a likeable turn by Heather Bolton) buys a second hand Jaguar only to learn that the car is haunted by the ghost of Mary Carmichael (Perry Piercy), a murdered woman whose body was never found. Worse still, Mary's killer begins to stalk Meg with the intention of making her his next victim.

Dark of the Night (AKA Mr. Wrong) is a gentle ghost story/thriller from New Zealand - a little too gentle for most of the time, with very little in the way of genuinely scary stuff. For much of the film, the supernatural happenings take a back set (pun intended) to Meg and her relationships (with friends, parents and romantic interest Wayne, played by Danny Mulheron), none of which is particularly interesting.

Only in the final five minutes, in which the killer (David Letch) finally makes his move, does the film achieve any level of tension or suspense, but it's too little, too late.