Blending the horror and Western genres never has a film been so dull as Ghost Riders turned out to be. To be fair, the movie had a small budget and was as far from a big release as one could get and one has to wonder if the makers of this picture watched it back or not when editing and saw what the audience would ultimately see.

At the very least, there is a fair bit of action to keep it all moving at a decent pace which means the movie never lags and that is a good thing, for if it had to rely on the acting within, that would be an entirely different story. The horror is fairly light, the resurrected cowboys just being regular-looking guys without any sort of makeup and altogether it was not all that bad but if they were supposed to be ghosts or ghouls or zombies or whatever, a little makeup or some sort of special effect to indicate that would have been appreciated and might have made it all a bit more interesting. Such as it is, these gunslingers come back from the dead to exact vengeance upon the ancestors of those who had them killed and they mean to collect.

The gun battles which are featured are not too bad and if one is looking for a little blood, there is just that as some of those gunshot wounds look a little nasty. That being said, the dead do not stay dead and keep coming back until an old shotgun is brought into play, one that was more than likely used at the time and when hit with that, the ghost-men are no more. The action is the saving grace of this film; though it is not the greatest, it keeps the viewer interested, which is key.

As for those that star in this picture, they do a fair job of it but the script is not the greatest and the young guy pines away over his waitress friend far too much as she is clearly interesting in the Vietnam vet around whom most of this movie seems to be centered around. As for the vet, he seems far more interested in smoking all the time than in the beautiful young lady who is just trying to get with him which sure, could be some kind of personal choice or some such but it is just silly when one sees it.

As for the small budget which was evident throughout, it did play into it in a positive way as the locales looked like someone’s backyard at times and the bush in the park and so forth. It was all very normal and that was a good thing as it looked like this could actually happen and it helped to make the audience think of these characters as regular people and empathize with them a little. So while it might have been fairly dull in a few respects, it did have some positives to go along with it which in the end, made it at least a tolerable watch.

2 out of 5