Satanic Living Dead and Cowboys on motorbikes

Rating: 7/10 (18 March 2007)

After the spaghetti westerns of Ennio Morricone or Sergio Leone or Clint Eastwood, we had to have a gruesome living dead western sooner or later. And here is one that goes beyond all imaginable limits with Mephistopheles, his son, though we don't know his mother who could be any shady lady in the world, and a ghost-rider in the wings of a desolate megapolistic urban neighborhood, the expected horse being replaced by another metal horse of some kind, a motorbike, and that enables Peter Fonda to come up from his grave in Easy Rider and nostalgically become the master of ceremony of this hell's angelic mess. Apart from that, the film is filled with too many special effects for it to be effective, too much fire for it to be hot enough to sear our minds with fear or thrill, too simplistic human relations and satanic tricks for us to be in anyway impressed. It is frankly impossible to rewrite Goethe's Faust, or Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, or any impersonification of the devil, in such a blind alley of a dead end impasse. It leads nowhere and redemption in this context means the end of the film and a sigh of relief when the lights come back on and we can go home for a nightcap, the first excitement of the evening.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne