Blue Ridge Ben

  There are two important facts about me, two important obsessions that haunt me: a love of anthology series and a love of Stephen King adaptations of all shapes and colors. As sometimes I imply on here, I’m a regular collector of physical media from VHS and Laserdiscs to DVDs and Blurays, and a big bulk of my DVD and Bluray collection are horror or other genre anthology TV series and you better bet I own physical copies of a number of anthology films too including both closely associated with King (as part of the same $20 box set): Creepshow and Cat’s Eye. One day I will formally write a review of Creepshow but I’ll spoil my feelings about it by saying it is absolutely one of my favorite horror films of all time to the point that it is almost certainly in my top 20, maybe top 10 favorite films of all time. So the first time I watched Cat’s Eye, which I believe was maybe pre-Covid, I had one of my favorite films ever made to compare it to and it sagged in my estimation as a result...

  Linnea Quigley is an absolute Goddess of low brow horror shlock and it is almost entirely because of her that Night of the Demons has occupied a spot on my Peacock watchlist for a long, long time now. I was excited the the situation finally arose to watch it, when I got about 30 minutes into Downfall (the Hitler movie) on Peacock and decided it was far too heavy for my mood at the time but didn’t watch to have to search another streaming service for something to watch or deal with ads at so many of them. I only have a couple big criticisms of the experience. The first is that outside of Quigley and Amelia Kinkade the acting here ranges from “passably bad” to “Omg, get this person in the next 5 acting classes you can find just to function” awful. This isn’t too uncommon in low budget horror films of any era but especially the late mid-to-late 80s where they saved money on unknown slaughter fodder and frequently hired women from the modeling world who would be more comfortable with...

  A fair amount of my life just via being a pop culture junkie I’ve made many jokes at Dean Koontz’s expense suggesting he is the poor man’s Stephen King or “The K Mart Stephen King”. Recently though, I realized how unfair this was when I had never even read a Koontz book, so I sought out to find one that sounded interesting on audiobook and settled on Phantoms because I am obviously a genre film nerd and knew very well that they had adapted it into a film when I was a kid and could thus compare the two down the line. To my mild surprise, I did generally enjoy the book, I wouldn’t call it great or anything but it was a pretty solid chunk of somewhat Lovecraftian storytelling that was pretty engaging at most times. However, this is not the kind of review that compares the book to the film, I want to judge the film on its own merits and thus will try to limit how often I refer back to the book for some reason. There are definitely flaws here. Despite being, on paper, the lead of t...

  T he Family Dollar a little bit of a trek down the street from me frequently sells DVD 4 packs of films, of which along the way I’ve picked up a couple: all the Burton/Schumacher Batman films and 4/5 of the Final Destination films which was like appointment viewing for me as a kid, I still remember seeing some of the later sequels in theater with friends as a teenager including 3 which I own and believe is the best of the bunch because it understands exactly what it is and constantly delivers. However, what I am reviewing today is the original film in the series. I don’t think this will particularly be one of my longer reviews cause I don’t have a whole lot that I can pick apart here. The writing and acting for some of the characters can be extremely one-note stereotype, like Kerr Smith as the high octane asshole for the entire film until the plot needs him in the stinger and Seann William Scott who in particular feels like he’s out of a totally different film tone wise as the ...

  I’ve had good luck recently with randomly picking films I thought I wouldn’t enjoy much but gave a shot and ended up really having a good time with, so I thought The Frighteners was a can’t miss prospect. I grew up the biggest Michael J. Fox fan and I worship the ground Jeffrey Combs walks on. Peter Jackson’s earliest films were all pretty good, I’d generally consider myself a fan of them, particularly Heavenly Creatures. It is billed as a horror-comedy, one of my absolute favorite subgenres to which many of my most beloved films belong. I genuinely believed I would at least mildly enjoy it despite its mixed reputation. Welp, I kind of hated it. The biggest thing for me is how broad, obvious, corny and often just outright cartoonish all of the comedy was. Outside of a couple performances, the acting throughout was like the most lowest common denominator sitcoms of the era and the film’s sense of humor shared this quality twofold. I found myself outright cringing at times at som...

  Like many I’m sure, I can often spend an hour just browsing various streaming platforms available to me just trying to settle on one thing to watch. Sometimes more than an hour if I’m being honest. So sometimes I just simply have to put my foot down with myself and say “Okay, you’re just going to throw on the next thing that sounds remotely interesting for the next reason” with whatever streamer I’m on at the time. Well this time, I was on the Roku Channel, and for some reason the film that was chosen was Timecop. The first thing that’s notable is that they use my favorite cheapass stunt in 80s and 90s low budget time travel movies, which is setting it in the future so that the primary time travel is to the year the film was released so most of the time they don’t have to do anything to dress things up. Sometimes, such as Terminator, this device can be used quite effectively, most of the time though it is clearly pretty low effort like here. Jean-Claude Van Damme is a pretty aw...

  Well it is that time. Saw IV. Huzzah. Okay it honestly isn’t that bad but like always, we start with what doesn’t work. While I believe in the last installment I complimented a once again returning Darren Lynn Bousman’s more varied angles and lighting choices, but a lot of this film is just pure garish yet somehow filthy neon lights, pukey greens and blinding reds. Likewise, this film has a couple of the most jarringly bad transitions I’ve ever seen a mainstream film attempt and the editing seems to have regressed back to seizure inducing standards of the first couple of movies. There are so much more law enforcement characters jammed into this film that its hard to really give a damn about any of them or their personal journeys, and a couple don’t even have names, just a random scene or two. While I appreciate that the well was starting to run dry on Jigsaw lore for the flashbacks but they couldn’t really lose that key aspect of the film, a melodrama about his happy-turned-tra...

  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 purposefull...

  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 st...

  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 g...