DARK RIDER (1991) **

A small desert town is on the verge of becoming “the next Las Vegas”.  A shady businessman named Sandini (Joe Estevez) comes into town and offers to buy up several local businesses.  When the store owners refuse, they are murdered by Sandini’s thugs.  The sheriff (Doug Shanklin) does what he can, but without proof, he is unable to touch Sandini.  But as a black-clad motorcycle-riding vigilante, he can do plenty to thwart his schemes.  

Dark Rider is one of those movies that is just too low budget to adequately pull off what it’s trying to do.  I admire some of the quirky touches and more outlandish moments, but it almost always comes up short from really delivering, due to the meager finances behind it.  I mean you know you’re in trouble when the sheriff character just has a little tin star pinned to his shirt the whole time and always wears K-Mart brand clothes instead of a policeman’s uniform. 

One of the things I liked about it was that it was a shamelessly modernized western.  Instead of the railroad coming through town, it was the prospect of gambling that caused the money-grubbing villains to stick it to the townsfolk.  Instead of wearing a Lone Ranger mask and riding a white horse, our hero wore a helmet and rode a motorcycle.

There’s an occasionally clever bit here and there, but for the most part, Dark Rider is slow moving.  The action gets repetitive in a hurry and the plot chases its tail for most of the running time.  Because of that, it feels more like a TV pilot than an action movie.  (The toxic waste subplot that crops up late in the game feels like the second “episode”.)

Estevez equips himself as well as can be expected in the villain role.  He’s not exactly menacing or anything, but he certainly tries.  The big problem is that Shanklin makes for a dull hero.  He kind of looks and acts like a less charismatic version of Swayze… Don Swayze.  Probably the best performance comes from Pulp Fiction’s Duane Whitaker who briefly shows up as a crazed motorist who has a run-in with the sheriff in the opening scene.  This sequence has some spark to it, and the rest of the film struggles to recapture that sense of fun.  When it relies heavily on the cat-and-mouse between Shanklin and Estevez, Dark Rider runs out of gas.