Blue Ridge Ben

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Masters of the Universe (1987) - Cannon...Makes a Pretty Decent Film?

Last year I bought a used copy of a DVD box set called The Bombs, Babes & Blockbusters of Cannon Films because I am totally fascinated by the story and products of Golan and Globus which gets told well in an excellent documentary (Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films) included in the set. However, other than said documentary, it has just sat on my shelf untouched and unwatched for months so I thought what a better way than to break out of the horror realm for this blog briefly. So I decided to watch Masters of the Universe as the only one on the collection that could be described as having a genuine cult following. There are definitely issues. The Skeletor mask looks hilariously awful, like a bad Spirit Halloween costume, and it has a common problem with any of the facial prosthetics used in the film which is that they could not figure out how to keep the mouth moving looking weird and fake. None of the protagonists except Billy Barty as the purposefully hi

Ghost Rider (2007) - Hell, It Ain't Awful

Last year when my best friends came back from a trip during which I watched their dogs, they came baring a gift knowing I am a sucker for box sets and DVD compilations: a used DVD two-pack of Ghost Rider and Hellboy. I’ve seen Hellboy enough times in my life to know I’m a fan, but I barely remember anything about Ghost Rider so yesterday I got it into my head that it might be a fun review for my blog that is something other than a straight forward horror film (although obviously having a lot of horror elements) and since I got too tired last night I watched it at the most appropriate period of time of the middle of morning while I was killing time until an afternoon appointment. As always, we start with the bad. The skull absolutely looks like it is out of PS2 game, how are you going to make a movie about a flaming skull dude and not just invest most of your budget into making sure the flaming skull looks good? On that note, most of the CGI also looks pretty bad even by 2007 standa

Jaws II (1978): We're Gonna Need an Even Bigger Boat

Many months back I picked up a DVD with all the Jaws sequels for pretty cheap in a Family Dollar DVD rack, and because I’m a completionist I went ahead and picked up a used copy of the original Jaws on BluRay which I watched pretty quickly after I got it and enjoyed just as much if not even more than every previous viewing, it is almost a perfect film for what it is trying to accomplish, very few notes. Welp, it was finally time that I got around to justifying the original purchase that started it all. I watched Jaws 2. The most obvious changes for this sequel is that they apparently saw all the tickets they sold to teenagers for the original and thought “Hey, we’ll sell even more if we just put a bunch of random teenagers in the center of the film” without much though to giving them any real personality beyond a few stereotypical, throwaway lines in the early parts of the film and the fact that Sheriff Brody is now a very lonely man. Whereas so much of what made the original great

Journeyman Files: Eddie Bierschwale

Whether you consider Texas part of the South, Midwest, Southwest or some combination of those, many normal people I talk to with only a passing knowledge of NASCAR are always surprised to learn when I tell them that historically there have not been many Texans in stock car racing. Of course, there are some really notable champions like Terry Labonte (2 time Cup), Bobby Labonte (1 Cup, 1 Xfinity), Chris Buescher (Xfinity) and James Buescher (Truck) but they are the exception to the rule all being drivers who relocated to North Carolina very early in their careers to pursue racing and the Bueschers coming after the period where sprint and midget racers coming to NASCAR had been normalized of which Texas has always had a culture dating back to the days of AJ Foyt, aided by Oklahoma being a sacred place in that world. However, historically the bulk of asphalt short tracks in Texas has been located in San Antonio and when those eventually closed there was very little left for late model

Saw III (2006): The Scariest Halloween Episode of ER

I had a rough couple of weeks for various reasons but most notably being sick, and I just barely watched anything other than YouTube videos and some episodes of old TV series I’m working on that maybe might get posts on this blog later on, but today I’m finally feeling a decent bit better though not entirely over my cold and in good spirits so decided it was time to take on Saw III. As always, let’s get the nasty bad part of the review out of the way first. The entire storyline of the Jeff character is pretty uninteresting as they didn’t learn the lessons of the first film that having significant interactions between multiple instead of an angry guy just standing there contemplating not killing people like a total prick is a significant part of developing them. Also, the traps really lost their ironic basis entirely and none of them until the last one are particularly clever or interesting, they just sound like they were lazily picked out of a hat submitted by production staff. Lik

Saw II (2005): Anybody Else's Needle Phobia Got Them Itchy?

Finally getting around to watching Saw II as part of my complete series rewatch after a few weeks since the first, this time watched on the Roku Channel instead of my beat up DVDs because it is a marginally crisper picture and I cannot do a disservice to the cinematographer, of course. Oddly enough I believe that this is the Saw film that I have seen the most times in my life, just because it’d sometimes pop up on random streamers or back in the day cable movie channels. As often with these reviews, we’ll get to the bad first. The cast is a huge downgrade, no offense to Beverley Mitchell who I loved as a kid who sometimes watched 7 th Heaven with my older sister, from the original with none of the victims being nearly as compelling as the two originals and Donnie Wahlberg’s one-note performance being a huge downgrade from in terms of nuance from Danny Glover in the lead detective role. The nu metal music video editing isn’t quite as intense as the original, but unfortunately it is