Among Red Ezra's most obscure titles, I finally caught up with RIDERS, a foray into sci-fi which proves not to be among the auteur's strongest suits. Fortunately the casting and sex are good enough to overcome this flaw.

Rather poorly developed premise is a familiar one dating back to '50s Roger Corman movies: a couple of life forces personified by electrical energy have come to Earth apparently to take over human bodies and have sex. Nothing new there, and it is unfortunately not enacted but explained (sort of) in lots of narration at the camera by stars Carmen LuVana and Julian.

That's because Red likes to "roll the videotape" to quote sportscaster Warner Wolf - he jettisons narrative in favor of his carefully designed sex vignettes. One of these, in which one of my all-time favorite X actresses Ann Marie Rios takes on the huge (reminds me of Tony Perez's "hook" back in the Golden Age) cock of Lee Stone, is artfully staged on a smoky set aping Ridley Scott's famous ALIEN space ship interior and looking quite good at a tiny fraction of the 20th Century Fox movie's design cost.

The six sex scenes are all satisfying and have an unusual aspect (for 2002 if my memory serves) of casting unusually huge cocks: Stone having to compete with Julian and Dillon. Star LuVana earns her stripes in both a lesbian hookup and later servicing Julian, the two of them cast as unlikely government agents, I believe called FIB (a made-up acronym) rather than FBI.

Special effect for the green force traveling along the power lines to possess people is minor, and the DVD from Digital Sin/New Sensations hits a new low in "Bonus" by showing an asinine alternate ending and then an equally stupid "making of" that alternate -quite embarrassing. The old, tried and true practice of throwing away (or at least hiding from sight) your false starts and cutting room floor footage was quite a wise one.

The sci-fi genre, short for science fiction, features imaginative and futuristic concepts that are often rooted in scientific principles, technology, and possibilities. These stories delve into "what if" questions and can serve as a platform to address contemporary social, political, and ethical issues by projecting them onto future or alternate settings.

James Earl Jones and David Prowse in Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

A couple of life forces personified by electrical energy have come to Earth apparently to take over human bodies and have sex.

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