Ghost Riders

I was disappointed in this movie.I found this movie on a discount shelf and bought it looking for a good "bad" movie. what I found was a bad "bad" movie. The plot was your basic "ghost seeks revenge on family of man who killed him",but it was never quite clear then,why the family wasn't wiped out years ago. Many of the scenes really had nothing to do with the plot and several of the final scenes appeared to be influenced by Night of the Living Dead though not as well executed.The outlaws were not very convincing and Bill Shaw, in the roles of the preacher and his grandson, was not very effective. The sound quality was bad in spots,but that could just have been on my tape.In any case it meant I didn't have to listen to the poor delivery of some really bad dialog.

I can't recommend this film.I gave it a 2 only because it wasn't as bad as Kazaam.

If you never heard of this movie before don't be surprised, as apparently it never made it into DVD and after a viewing it's no wonder why. The idea of the movie was rather cool, tho - A bunch of gunslingers come back to life to revenge their somewhat unjust killings 100 years later, and instead they take it out on a group of hikers - but sadly it is somewhat clumsy executed. As someone said in other review, the film mixes a lot of genres - horror, western, action, romance... - but none of them really works. But without a doubt the most disappointing thing for me was its misleading cover and title, since by no means the cowboys return to life as ghosts but in their human form and can be perfectly shot and killed. All in all, after watching the movie I was left with a sense of entertainment, and I think the actors did a great job overall. Too bad the pretty Cari Powell never made another movie after this one, she really stands out from the rest of the crew and I think she would have deserved much better. Final rating: 5 out of 10.

I have to admit that I am fascinated by the concept of crossing the Western with horror movie elements and while this may not be the best example there are some pretty compelling movies out there existing as Horror Western hybrids: CURSE OF DEMON MOUNTAIN, THE STRANGER'S GUNDOWN, HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER, the notorious CUT THROATS NINE, good old GRIM PRAIRIE TALES and Charles Band's GHOST TOWN are amongst the best I can name off the top of my head.

GHOST RIDERS is another Prism Video release of yet another ultra low budget regional horror affair, along with THE FOREST and SATAN'S BLADE, seemingly inept more or less direct to video efforts by young filmmakers starting out who simply didn't have the budget or talent to really score an EVIL DEAD like classic. This one was made in and around Waco, Texas, and concerns itself with a bunch of ideas copped from just as many sources. From HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER (via STRANGER'S GUNDOWN) we get the idea of gunfighters returning from the grave to avenge their somewhat unjust killings, though imported from Euro Horrors like HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB the targets of their wrath are the present day descendants of those who executed them, and finally a NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD type ending.

Toss in a smattering of teen horror themes and a slightly unstable Vietnam vet who didn't find time to change out of his camouflage fatigues & walks around packing a nickel-plated .45 and we have the makings of 85 minutes of dreck that actually isn't as bad as the average ratings here reflect. The plot concerns an elder researcher who stumbles across the story of a mass execution 100 years before that sent a gang of crooks to their tombs with a vow to avenge themselves. At more or less the same time a group of young misfits embarks on an excursion to find the old cemetery to find the resting place of their relatives who find themselves pursued by a posse of cowboys who pick them off one by one, eventually leading to a NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD like climax where the survivors barricade themselves into a ranch house and try to fight them off.

There are some decent moments of gunslinger gore, a nice explosion or two, and a pretty young leading lady who doesn't shirk at the idea of stripping down to her undies for a dip in the ole' swimmin hole. One of the misfits is a Vietnam vet and helps to guide the youngsters to relative safety, and there is some not so subtle commentary on 1980s youth culture fixations like the Walkman craze and the idiotic fashions that we appallingly wore back then. None of it really amounts to anything though, and after a protracted ending showdown the movie just sort of ends -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing, though none of it is hardly memorable.

One curious aspect of the film regards this undead cowboy posse, who are not shown as "ghosts" or zombies or even some kind of spectral presence like Clint Eastwood's Preacher from PALE RIDER, but are reborn as actual cowboys who can be shot & killed all over again. While probably owing more to the production's limited budget than to a directorial choice, the decision to depict them as such sort of defeats the purpose of having them be undead gunslingers in the first place. Why have a movie about ghost cowboys and not have them be actual ghosts? Until the very ending of course, when it is convenient for the plot.

The one thing I did like about the film is it's totally ordinary look. None of the scenery or interiors looks particularly cinematic or out of the ordinary run of experience for most viewers. It looks like any old river running down any old stretch of rural Texas, and the characters don't wear costumes so much as whatever clothes they had onhand: Even the cowboys seem to be wearing Levis jeans and work shirts rather than "authentic" Western gear, so I can see how some viewers may be disappointed that the film doesn't have the filmic look of something like THE EVIL DEAD. It's all plain and ordinary but that's Waco for you, I guess, and the video is still another rare example of an attempt to blend Western themes with an outright horror movie setting (or the other way around, maybe) and I kind of like that.

5/10

Santa Rio, Texas, 17th September 1886: Reverand Thadeous Sutton (Bill Shaw) hangs ruthless outlaw Frank Clements (Mike Ammons); one hundred years later, the spirit of Clements returns with his ghostly gang to take revenge on the reverand's descendants, historian Jim and his son Hampton (Jim Peters).

The plot for Ghost Riders is extremely derivative - it's John Carpenter's The Fog given a Wild West spin, with an ending that copies Night of the Living Dead, as the protagonists barricade themselves in a cabin and try to keep the ghosts from breaking in. Of course, it's nowhere near as good as either of those classics.

The majority of the film follows pilot Hampton, his friend Cory (Ricky Long) and token beauty Pam (Cari Powell) as they try to avoid being shot by the undead outlaws; this involves lots of running through the woods, scrabbling through underbrush and swimming through rivers, pausing occasionally to shoot the spooks (who fall down dead, but soon return). The direction is pedestrian, the acting weak, and there's an awful lot of tedious padding to stretch the film to feature length.

Ghost Riders was shot for a measly budget of $58,000, which is an impressive feat, and it looks like it cost a lot more, but none of this means that the film is any good.

3/10 for the bloody squibs.

The other night my mate really wanted to watch a Western, but I insisted on watching a horror film. What do you do in that sort of situations? You search for a compromise and choose to watch a horror-western. Now, experience already taught me that these genre amalgamations are usually very substandard. "Ghost Riders" definitely confirms this unwritten rule. This obscure and righteously forgotten late 80's flick is indescribably dull, derivative and gore-free. The plot, as you can undoubtedly guess from the title, revolves on the vengeful return of an outlaw posse in ghostly format. In the late 1800's, they were lynched by an angry mob and now they are back to extract revenge on the descendants. I wish I got a nickel for each time I wrote this synopsis down in a user comment! I'd be rich by now! The ghost riders can only be killed with an antique shotgun that lies hidden underneath the bed of one of the descendants, but he lies half dead in an old cemetery throughout half of the movie. The screenplay is full of dull and completely irrelevant dialogs as well as completely gratuitous padding footage. There's even an extended scene following the hunting method of a spider that caught a mosquito in her net! If I wanted to see that, I would have switched to the National Geographic channel. There's absolutely no gore or gruesome make-up effects, since the ghosts use guns, and their costumes look like cheap leftovers from a thrift store. The only good thing I can write about "Ghost Riders" is that it caused me to have Johnny Cash's awesome song "Ghost Riders in the Sky" stuck in my head for several days already now. I suggest you listen to that on You Tube instead of seeking out this film.