Movies
[BD Review] ‘Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance 3D’ Is A Boring Waste Of Potential
Opening in theaters today is Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance 3D. And I’m pretty much going to tell you that you shouldn’t go see it. While it has some promising moments, it’s way too satisfied doing way too little.
Stay away unless you’re a Neveldine/Taylor or Nic Cage completionist. Or unless you want to see Idris Elba as a drunk French priest. Or unless you want to see Ciaran Hinds kick some ass. Gah! See, I’m listing all these things that kind of work! But they don’t. They’re just little awesome buoys in a sea of “is this over yet?”
“It’s just a shame that the sum of these positive parts doesn’t make a compelling whole. When I first heard that Neveldine and Taylor would be doing this movie, I was excited to see what they could do with a bigger budget and how they could subvert the genre. It turns out they did exactly what I expected and still somehow let me down. Perhaps I didn’t factor in that they might think it was enough to execute this film in the exact way they’ve executed everything else. Only, this time, so much more is put in front of them but they never extend their reach.”
Click here for the review! And don’t forget to check back in after you see the film with your review here!
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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