Riders On the Cheap

Like many baby boomers and space race babies I've been a fan of comics and comic heroes all my life. In particular I always loved those characters who dwelled in that grey area between good and evil. Were they hero or villain? A rogues' gallery would include Morbius, Silver Surfer, Swamp Thing, Werewolf By Night, Man Thing and Moon Knight. But the king of them all was Ghost Rider, he of the flaming skull and hell-fire bike.

Ghost first appeared in the 70's but very few toys came out. The most well-known amongst collectors is the Fleetwood plastic action figure pictured below, which I was lucky enough to get hold of a few years back.

Ghost Rider had a welcome come-back with Nicholas Cage's first film a couple of years ago, which I thoroughly enjoyed. So you can imagine how excited I was last night when I went to see the second Rider film, Spirit of Vengeance. I needn't have been. It was absolutely awful!

[This next bit contains Spoilers!] What's wrong with it? Were can I start! Doesn't really matter so I'll kick off with Nic Cage's acting. Well it's really the lack of it that's the issue. He's as wooden as a milk-stool and he desperately needs his thinning hair styling. He's meagre dialogue is seemingly dragged out of him by an outside force to reveal itself in a tedious drawl. It matters not as no-one else around him could act either as they'd all been rounded up from a Budapest boxing club. Which segways neatly to location. Ghost Rider is an all-American flaming skull, with his comic roots in the Wild Western past. This new film is set in Eastern Europe!


This fact alone explains many of the film's myriad flaws as the Rider should not be there. Made by a largely Eastern European team, the already paltry budget I suspect was largely blown on the Rider's flaming head, bike and chains, leaving precious little for set design. Located in a quarry, the colour scheme is that God-awful silvery-browny mess seen in countless straight-to-DVD-B-Movies, which occasionally cut to vaseline-smeared shots of zero budget big holes and piles of spoil. Even the main event of the film, a blazing Mining machine, is a big yellow mess. Comparing this shameful Marvel effort to say the recent Iron Man movie is like comparing a fag end with a solar flare. I can't believe that Stan Lee put his name to this garbage. Jonny Blaze should have ridden straight over it to DVD hell.