Furnace Face

Ghost Rider is a leather jacket wearing skeleton with a flaming head who drives a demon-fueled motorcycle up the sides of buildings. He also has a flaming whip with which to snap your crime ass.

Before he was a flaming skeleton vigilante, Ghost Rider was Johnny Blaze, a daredevil motorcycle stunt performer. Sheer coincidence about the whole flame/blaze connection.

So how did he get to be such a hot head? The old west town of San Venganza is populated by 1,000 corrupt souls. Mephistopheles sends a Ghost Rider to round ‘em up. GR doesn’t want to do it and runs away. Time to hire a new Ghost Rider. Blaze is offered a deal: his father’s cancer will be cured if he’d sign over his soul. But as in all deal’s with evil, you ultimately get f’d in the b-hole. Hence, the flaming lips.

Blaze takes the job in order to get his soul back. (The deal for his father went up in smoke.) But what a dumbass – you can drive up walls, man! That said, Ghost Rider (2007) is loaded with comic book thrills and PG-language. Needed more flames, though.

Thong vs. Wrong

In The Witch’s Curse (1963), an Italian fantasy horror sword ’n sorcery thong fest, a freshly-married couple arrives in a Scottish village (where no one has an accent) and everyone believes the woman of them to be the reincarnation of a 500 year-old witch. So burn they must.

But wait, isn’t that Hercul…uh, no, guess not. It’s Maciste, a man of strong man in a thong. He’ll tell us what to do. He half-ass rescues the couple and in order to get to the bottom of this witch B.S., he goes to a cursed tree, pushes it over, revealing a well-lit hole that leads to…HELL. What the heck – another adventure.

Descending into the Earth’s alimentary canal, Maciste (what a metro name) battles a Sasquatch Wild Boar Man, who gets in a few slobber-knockers. Then he runs into another Hercul…uh, a strong man in a thong, whose chained up with a vulture eating/pecking his guts. That doesn’t stop him from carrying on a conversation with Maciste, though. Maciste also takes on a lion, a giant ogre, a cyclops and a herd of charging Texas Longhorns (!) before forcing the witch to lift her curse.

Meanwhile, the married couple on the Earth’ surface are being burned at the stake. Can Maciste get there before this campfire banquet reaches its charcoal-y conclusion? Is there a way to possibly make it rain on the fire but not everyone else? Will Maciste ride off into the sunset on a horse that’s clearly not his? If you can’t figure out the answers to these burning questions, I hereby curse you for 500 years.

Be Witched

The rich tapestry of witches seems to have taken root these days, fueled possibly by the success of the TV series Salem (2014), an annoyingly hard-to-follow depiction of fevered witch paranoia life in stinky Massachusetts in the late 1600s. (If your neighbor thought you to be in league with Big D, you were proved it merely by hearsay in a court of law and burned alive in the public square, the colonial version of a tailgate party.

Rock dude/horror filmmaker Rob Zombie even tried his hand at some lovin’ from the coven in 2013 with the The Lords of Salem. (I’m generally a fan of Zombie’s music and film work, but that thing is outright laughable and does great disservice to our witchy women.)

Regardless, the market fire burns hot for Wiccans and their vibrant community. Vin Diesel (Riddick himself!) is set to release The Last Witch Hunter (2015), followed by The Witch (2016), a period horror piece that promises some wicked wickedness.

Here’s what The Witch is conjuring (heh): “Evil takes many forms in this vintage horror thriller set in New England in the 1600s about a family and their suddenly missing children.”

Okay, not a lot to go on. But the trailer is a tasty appetizer. And early reviews gush that The Witch “blends The Crucible, The Shining and The Exorcist in a frightening New England folktale.”

You can find more information about witches in Wiccapedia: A Modern-Day White Witch’s Guide (2011), written by “spiritual life coaches” and celebrity witches Shawn Robbins and Leanna Greenaway. If those aren’t kick ass credentials, then you’re likely a non-believer. I fear for your very soul.

P.S. For a really fun/funny/f’d up witch movie, check out Spain-made Witching & Bitching (2013). The first 15 minutes alone will put a spell on you (heh).