Blue Ridge Ben

  Some of my fondest memories of middle school would be staying up late on certain nights when FX and maybe SciFi also played reruns of The X Files, I rarely missed one of these if I could despite the fact that they didn’t play in order so the mythology episodes never made complete sense to me until years later when I actually could sit down and watch the series from the beginning as doing so digitally became easier in the later 2000s. It remains a television series I love, even as the evolution of UFO and conspiracy theory culture has shifted towards right-wing grifters and zealots that actually significantly influence US public policy to some degree and thus a LOT less kooky and fun in practice than the early internet era the X Files represented. So it should be no surprise that despite not having a great love of it when it first came out, when I saw a beat up old Hollywood Video rental of The X Files: I Want to Believe on DVD last year I couldn’t resist picking it up for a doll...

  Most of the memories I have associated with Steven Seagal were my step-grandfather’s attempts to connect with me when I was younger. I hated having to spend a week with my grandmother every summer because she wasn’t a very kind person to me and showed very little interest in anything I cared about or had to say. However, her husband tried a lot more with me, taking me out to go karts or big arcades (they still had arcades at that time!) or renting movies for us to watch together. He had no clue the kind of stuff I actually liked to watch, so usually he just picked dumb action movies such as multiple Steven Seagal movies that I didn’t really enjoy much at that age, but I appreciated his efforts. So honestly, I don’t know what drove me to pick up this 4 pack of Steven Seagal films (used I should note, I would never do anything to financially benefit that man, he is a 100 different shades of awful) when I ran across it on Amazon other than how much I’ve been enjoying 80s and 90s a...

  I often start my classic horror movie posts on here telling you about how much it meant to me as a horror and particularly slasher-obsessed kid who spent most of his time in video stores looking at horror VHS covers. However, for some reason I had just never watched a Hellraiser film despite being well acquainted with Pinhead from pictures, probably if my mom had seen it she knew that even she should probably draw the line at such a film which would contain stuff I would not understand for a number of years during the first years of my slasher binging. I loved the covers and had always wanted to see one, but for some reason it wasn’t until I was in my early 20s when I did. I still lived with my mom, and her boyfriend at the time, and the boyfriend had a big smart TV and Netflix account in the early 10s and at the time they had pretty much the entire run of Hellraiser movies including the straight-to-movie sequels and I was drinking A LOT at that time cause they were really bad t...

  My love of horror films can really be traced directly to the different influences of my parents. My mom grew up in the 80s so she adored slasher films and introduced me to most of the major franchises, from classics like Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street to then-contemporary films I was definitely too young to be watching like Scream. My dad on the other hand was somebody who had bookshelves lined with Stephen King books and regularly brought out the VHS copy of the IT miniseries which definitely gave me and I’d bet my sister too a lot of nightmares as kids. That is a big reason that as a 32 year old I find all these things to be absolute comfort films, but few more than IT. As such, I tend to do a rewatch of it at least once every single year, even owning a version of it on DVD as part of a King box set I own. However, this one was a very special one cause it came just hours after I finished listening to the Steven Weber-read audiobook over the course of over a couple of m...

  The main things that I collect are DVD and Bluray box sets of various genre franchises or collections from a certain studio like Hammer or Cannon or even just those 4 movies for $5 DVDs at Wal-Mart. A lot of genuine classics from my favorite series from Alien to Star Trek to Nightmare on Elm Street and Universal Monsters are in my collection, but one of my newest probably doesn’t have as much prestige as some: I bought all 8 Leprechaun movies for less than 10 dollars. It was mostly a nostalgia purchase, as we owned all of the first three on VHS growing up and I watched them all the time as a kid who loved slashers at too far young an age, and I remember renting Leprechaun 4 as soon as it came out from a tiny little rental store in an alcove of the Kroger we lived near. I know none of these films qualifies as anything approaching art, but I always found them fun, light hearted, creative in strange ways. So I decided to revisit the first one. Nobody is gonna argue this movie is...

  I went a couple week period where I hardly watched any films, because sometimes that just happens, I spend my time consuming other media (some of which I am consuming for future special posts here at this blog) such as TV shows, audiobooks, 90s full-motion video game playthroughs, etc. Believe it or not, I do have competing interests with my love of B-movies. However, I am back in less than spectacular fashion to talk about my first time watching Urban Legend since I was probably a young teen catching it on a movie channel back in the digital cable days. I wanted to like this more than I did. The dialog is where the film suffers the most, swinging for the fences for some Kevin Williamson tit-a-tat but mostly just sounding dull or purposely provocative with caveman 90s sexuality in alternating bursts. When coupled with the twist reveal of a killer I think any average viewer would have picked up on early in the film, rather quick and fairly boring kills that don’t really live up...