A Fourth Film Challenge Emerges: Mighty Mick

While watching Halloween but thinking about The Shining miniseries from 1997 I had tried to find on YouTube earlier in the day but couldn't, and admittedly being influenced by a handful of bottles of Yuengling on this Monday night, I decided that I was going to add a much bigger master challenge to the three I earlier discussed: I wanted to watch the entire film and TV miniseries filmography of Mick Garris, plus the episodes of Masters of Horror and Fear Itself (both of which he created) that he himself directed.

Mick became known as one of Stephen King's preferred directors, doing The Sleepwalkers on the big screen for him and The Stand which I just recently purchased on VHS and The Shining from 1997 which just tonight I purchased on VHS when I decided I was going to embark on this project and later doing Bag of Bones in the early 10s too. However, it was through his creation of Masters of Horror and Fear Itself, and then as one of the top horror-focused podcast hosts in the business where he truly became a big name in the genre and I'm a huge fan of Masters of Horror and own the first season on DVD.

Let's give a spotlight to one of the true working men of horror filmmaking.

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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

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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

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