Adam and I caught the panel for Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance and you can click here to read his thoughts on what we saw.  Personally, I thought that the presentation was fighting tooth and nail to convince a skeptical audience that A) Ghost Rider is cool, B) This movie will be way better than the first film.  I probably will never think Ghost Rider is cool but I think he can be silly and directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (Crank) seem to understand how to have some fun with the character.  While we can have some laughs about the notion that anything Ghost Rider rides will become a hell-version of that thing (/Film's Russ Fischer speculated on hookers and toilets), I have to admire the film's lunacy.The first images from the film have gone online and you can see that the biggest physical change is that Ghost Rider's skull has gone from white to a charred black.  Hit the jump to check out the images which also include a look at Idris Elba doing some motorcyclin'.  Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance opens in 3D on February 17, 2012.Images from the latest issue of Empire and scanned by The Film Stage.

Here's the synopsis for Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance:

The film sees Johnny Blaze, aka Ghost Rider (Cage), hiding out in remote Eastern Europe and struggling to repress his curse. Blaze is recruited by a sect to take on the devil (Ciaran Hinds), who wants to take over his mortal son’s body on the kid’s birthday.