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Perhaps the funniest moment in Resident Evil: Extinction appears in the extras, where Paul W.S. Anderson, a true god among hacks, claims that he single-handedly reinvented the zombie film . “No one made a zombie film for fifteen years before Resident Evil,” he boasts, a claim which even a cursory glance at any list of zombie films will quickly debunk. Bold pioneer that he is Anderson claims goes on to brag about his daring choice to shoot a zombie in the daylight… ground well-tread not only in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead twenty-nine years previous, but also in the 2004 Zack Snyder remake. Yeah, Paul. You’re a real ground-breaker.

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• Things to note about Ghost Rider:
• At no point during this film does Henry Rollins bellow “Ghost Rider, Motorcycle HEE-RO.”
  Neither does anyone refer to Nicolas Cage as “drivin’ around with his head on FIRE.”
• The film does, however, feature a brief cover of the Johnny Cash song “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” during which an undead Texas ranger played by Sam Elliot thunders across the desert on a flaming skeleton horse.

Inexplicably, despite the presence of Sam Elliott playing the part of an undead Texas ranger thundering across the desert on a flaming skeleton horse, this movie is actually not good at all.Ghost Rider opens on a young Johnny Blaze accidentally cutting a deal with the Devil (an embarrassed-looking Peter Fonda) to save his father, who is dying from terminal movie cliche (he coughs ominously a lot and crumples up foreboding letters from the doctor). I say “accidentally” because while looking over the contract, Johnny accidentally pricks himself and drips blood on the bottom line, at which point the Devil hastily rolls it up and makes off with Johnny’s soul, muahahaha! In other words, Johnny never really seems to agree to this bargain, but instead just goes along with it because he’s too much of a nitwit to bother arguing. Heroic times are surely ahead.

Fast-forward twenty years. Johnny Blaze is now a successful stuntman, performing ever more dangerous feats because he has a death wish and his past haunts him, and so on. In a vague effort to make Blaze look like less of a cookie-cutter “tortured hero,” the movie shies away from the obvious alcohol-fueled tirades, instead showing Johnny eating M&Ms from martini glasses and giggling frantically at television shows with monkeys in them. Apparently, this is supposed to be some sort of characterization, but I’m only guessing.All is not well, however, because a group of leather-wearing B-movie demons have arrived to find some scroll that’s hidden in a cemetary that will unleash a global apocalypse… again. You’d think, with apocalypse-triggering knick-knacks more common than Cracker Jacks, some enterprising demon would have had a lucky break by now. I’ve literally lost count of the number of movies I’ve seen with this plot, but never mind. The head demon, Blackheart (Wes Bentley) is a trenchcoat-wearing ninny who looks like a mildly threatening Hal Sparks, and his cohorts — sporting a vaguely elemental theme — all look like they should be getting ripped on Mad Dog 20-20 and hitching to the Dokken concert. These grim scions of the underworld show off their terrifying bad-assery by ruthlessly dispatching unarmed waitresses and overweight gas station attendants in the middle of nowhere while searching for the sacred widget.

Meanwhile, Johnny Blaze has discovered that the Devil has “called in” his contract, and that every night when the sun goes down, he is now doomed to become a gruesome flaming skeleton with a bad-ass motorcycle, dispensing dark vigilante justice by frying the living shit out of random pickpockets and causing a lot of property damage. By day, he must hide this fact from his star-crossed love, Roxanne (Eva Mendes), while enduring cryptic, useless aphorisms from the wizened Caretaker (Sam Elliott) about his newfound powers.

It should be noted, by the way, that Mendes’ character Roxanne sets a new low for female love interests in crappy comic-book adaptations. Ostensibly a plucky cub reporter (comic book movies can never seem to get enough of those), she turns out to be an insecure, cloying waif who spends most of her time sitting in restaurants waiting for Johnny to show up, drinking like a fish and asking the waiter if he thinks she’s pretty. I know comic book movies have never been super-feminist, but come on, fellas. It’s the twenty-first century here.

While most of Ghost Rider is a predictable bore, a few scattered bits are genuinely amusing. The sequence where Ghost Rider supernaturally tricks out his motorcycle to blasting heavy metal music is like an Iron Maiden fan’s wet dream made flesh. Ghost Rider’s voice is also unintentionally hilarious, sounding like nothing so much as Nic Cage in dire need of a Clorets. Also particularly amusing are the evil supernatural henchmen, who are by far the most worthless comic book heavies I’ve ever seen. They show up, mildly inconvenience Ghost Rider for about ten seconds apiece, and then scream and weep for mercy as they are brutally dispatched. Not a one of them so much as even slows him down. Also, after each “battle,” Ghost Rider grimly winds his supernatural bike chain around himself and poses dramatically. This would be more convincing if besting any one of these demonic schmucks had taken more effort than putting an English muffin into the toaster.

At any rate, the movie lumbers to its inevitable conclusion, the highlight of which is, as previously mentioned, Sam Elliott thundering across the desert on a flaming skeleton horse. All other considerations aside, the awesomeness of this moment is not to be denied; unfortunately, it’s both completely irrelevant to the plot and lasts about forty-five seconds. Frankly, I found myself frequently wishing the movie had been about the Caretaker instead — ninety minutes of Sam Elliott leaning on his shovel and winking by day, then turning into a terrifying specter at nightfall and immolating people who park in the handicap zones. Now that’s a movie.

The climax of Ghost Rider comes when Frost is possessed by the blood god La Magra, who then goes on a rampage — oh, no, wait, that’s the ending to 1998′s Blade. I got confused because the ending to Ghost Rider is pretty much exactly the same. Finding the mystical super-scroll, the villain makes much noise about an “apocalypse” and the “Hell on earth,” where “Hell on earth” is apparently a metaphor for some CGI ghosts flying around and the bad guy becoming slightly tougher for five minutes. If Wes Bentley had only said “fuck” a few more times, like Stephen Dorf did in Blade, the two endings would have so indistinguishable as to be legally actionable. (But don’t worry — the final scene isn’t entirely ripped off from Blade. If you watch closely, you can find the part where it also rips off The Crow.) There then follows a heartfelt denoument where Cage points awkwardly into the camera and swears on his very soul that he’ll be back for the sequel.

But Is It Fun?

Overall, I found Ghost Rider cliched and boring (even by comic-book movie standards), with disposable, irritating villains, a shoddy script made up of the mediocre parts of other comic-book scripts, and an ending that literally had nothing new to offer. As a movie, it’s roughly akin to those old direct-to-video Full Moon Features epics like Dollman Vs. Demonic Toys and Robot Jox than it is a mainstream film. If you standards are very low, you might want to give Ghost Rider a shot. Otherwise, there are more amusing ways to waste your time.

Not recommended.

Well, let’s get it out of the way straight off. Flash! Ahh-ahhh! He’ll save every one of us! You have to do that when discussing Flash Gordon, you know. It’s like a drinking game without the booze. The deathless battle cry of this movie is well-known even to those who have never even seen it. Full of color, verve, and the rocking, operatic sounds of Queen, the 1980 Flash Gordon takes Eighties camp to a level matched by few of its big-haired contemporaries. It’s a damn shame the 2007 series can’t say the same thing. At least then, there would be a reason to recommend it.

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I’m back, gentle readers! Sorry for being away for so long, and thanks to Craig and Reverend Matt for keeping hope alive while I endured my apartment-moving adventure. To celebrate my triumphant return, I eviscerate 300! Enjoy.

Loud, obnoxious, and completely devoid of irony, 300 is one of the few films in modern history to achieve stratospheric levels of self-parody long before its release. The bombastic trailer (complete with blaring Nine Inch Nails music) inspired more self-conscious giggling than awe, and by the time the film hit theaters, an endless series Internet memes featuring bellows of “THIS… IS… (noun)” and animated images of Gerard Butler’s screaming face had proliferated nearly everywhere on the Internet. Soon, Michael J. Nelson’s Rifftrax will feature a humorous commentary on the movie which is, to my mind, almost certainly redundant. 300 is its own best parody.

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In yesterday’s review of the highly enjoyable Hellboy Animated: Blood and Iron, I promised a review of the limited-edition action figure included with certain editions of the DVD. A reader informed me that this particular figure is only available at Best Buy, and I note that they’re already going for grossly inflated prices on Amazon — so if you’re into action figure collecting (which I’m not, by the way), you’ll want to pick this up as soon as you can — because it rocks.

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