Blue Ridge Ben

  When I was younger, I spent a lot of my time perusing lists of “cult films” to check out, paying special attention to anything horror-related which is my happy place as anybody who has read most of the entries in this blog could probably guess. This is how I first became acquainted with Stuart Gordon and his Lovecraft adaptations with Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton, Re-Animator and From Beyond, which instantly became all time favorite films of mine upon the very first viewing. For many years I was just happy with those two films, but in recent years every now and then I’ve been known to throw on one of the lower-budget productions Gordon has done which have always been entirely competently made even if there are highs and lows, but this is my first time watching this much later entry into his Lovecraft cycle. There are some signs that this didn’t have quite the backing his earlier Lovecraft films did. The lead actor doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, and he never quite sell...

  The very first sparks of my love of collecting box sets or “collection” DVDs and Bluray, which is my primary hobby that costs money these days and one of the biggest things that makes me happy, were looking through $5 DVDs at Wal-Mart and finding collections of low-budget horror films that had at least one or two gems on it. Some of the ones I had at the time (but sadly no longer) included a few Child’s Play sequels, one compilation with the fantastic May (2002) on it, and another that had both Wishmaster and Wishmaster 2 which was one of my favorites. However, it has maybe been over a decade since I have watched either Wishmaster film as most of those DVDs were eventually destroyed by a leak problem in my previous apartment while stored in a closet. After taking a bit of a break with my last few movies on this blog, I figured it was as good a time as any to get back into that b-movie genre garbo I love. Revisiting it, it is not surprising the series is easily found on DVD compi...

  There’s a deep, fascinating world out there of “Almost” drivers, young guys and gals who showed a lot of speed at lower levels and just seemed one good ride away from success in one of the national series but it just didn’t quite happen for them. These particularly picked up in NASCAR post-Jeff Gordon when you started regularly seeing folks in their late teens and early twenties trying to break into the ranks and later in the 2000s when the official driver development programs first became a big thing in stock car racing. Often times they showed flashes of brilliance or at least competitiveness but the full time rides never came. It was thinking about these kinds of drivers that led me to this journeyman spotlight, Nathan Buttke. A product of Randleman, North Carolina, the longtime home of the famous Petty family, Nathan Buttke was a mere 17 years old when he first started racing in the Busch Grand National Series in 1992 for a family owned team sponsored by Buttke Dairy Farms...

  Anybody who knows me knows my biggest vice in life is true crime as guilty and gross as I feel about it quite frequently, and unfortunately as a true crime junkie you end up hearing about a lot of cases involving abused or dead children. So of course I joked to my main group chat of friends when I decided to watch M the other day that I needed to take a break from all the stories about dead kids I’d watched that day so I was going to put on a movie about a serial child murderer. To be honest this might be kind of a short review compared to some I’ve written, because I don’t have that much negative to say. Some of the performances seem a little “big”, but so soon after the silent era that is to be expected and that is just kinda of body language analysis since I do not speak German at all. Also it does something that a lot of films of its era does, which I’m guessing had something to do with cameras speeds at that time, where instead of showcasing people naturally running it inst...

  My entire knowledge of the filmography of Jacques Cousteau, outside of clips here and there, comes through pop cultural osmosis. When I was a young teenager I became an instant fan of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou by Wes Anderson which I watched together with my stepfather who was a lifelong fan of cult/alternative comedy and we laughed our asses off no matter how dry the material is presented. When a few years younger still, like countless children of the 90s I became a dedicated fan of Spongebob Squarepants and its zany, often surreal sense of humor which included a French-accented narrator in certain “2 Hours Later” or whatever cutaway gags that it is obvious tribute to the great aquatic documentarian. So I knew certain stylistic things or stereotypes, but that is about it before I decided to watch World Without Sun at midnight on a weekday. This is the first documentary I’ve ever reviewed on here, so figuring the best way to go about it as I go along. The most strikin...

  My whole life since I was an elementary school aged kid I’ve always been fascinated by US political history, often much more than I am modern politics (particularly these days where everything political is just crushingly depressing and scary). I make it a regular habit to read books about 19 th and 20 th century political figures and events, and I am an absolute sucker for the subgenre of “HBO Political History Movie/Miniseries” that was so common in the 00s and early 10s on the network (shoutout to the amazing John Adams series maybe someday I’ll review here). So of course when I somehow only found out that Path to War existed for the first time yesterday while browsing through stuff on Max, I didn’t even think about it and just immediately pulled the trigger to watch it. First thing is first, I have heard many a bad attempt by British actors to do a convincing Southern accent like Jude Law a weird number of times, but Michael Gambon here trying to accomplish a convincing T...