Blue Ridge Ben

  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 mo...

  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....

  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 i...

  I’m always torn, if it isn’t part of one of my specific watch projects, as to whether or not I should review films that are considered all time classics if all I’m gonna say is “Yep, I love it as much as you do” but I also think that my very limited audience for these blog posts might appreciate if I’m not just always writing about B and C grade slashers or TV movies. So since I recently picked up a beat up, but still very playable, DVD copy of the entire Poltergeist trilogy, yesterday I decided to sit down and revisit the original for the first time in a few years. As the first paragraph heavily implies, I still really, really love this movie. I often start my reviews with what I didn’t like first so that I can end on a more positive note even when the film doesn’t deserve it, but the list is very, very short here. Some of special effects have aged pretty poorly, such as the “face” scene, and it is a little uncomfortable how much effort they put in for gratuitous underwear sh...

  I was a fan of the first 2 or 3 Saw films when they came out, as a nearly lifelong horror fan who was excited about whatever slasher-related content I could get after the post-Scream boom started to dry up in the 2000s. A 13 year old who spent much of his time consuming an endless stream of music videos is exactly the target audience for this first film. However, it has been many years since I last watched it in full, so I was genuinely curious as to how I’d look at it in my 30s. Right off the bat, let’s get to the “music video” thing. Every flashback kill and some just normal procedural action is done in this hyper, quickcut editing style that just screams late 90s and early 00s hard and alternative rock music videos, and it is truly appalling. It has aged like raw milk, and it honestly makes the chief appeal of this franchise in their creative kills downright hard to watch let alone enjoy, a total cringefest but far from in the torture porn way they intended. However, removi...

  It kind of worked out that I had recently purchased the Psycho collection on BluRay and thus owned the first film in HD, which might be the last thing I watch in HD in this series, in my Mick Garris project and was naturally at that point in my rewatch of the series (in short, Psycho is great, Psycho II is very good, Psycho III is surprisingly solid). Psycho IV: The Beginning was a made-for-TV movie produced by Showtime in 1990, towards the beginning of them spending a large chunk of the 90s producing low budget original genre films and projects tying to popular film IPs. At this point Mick had directed a few episodes of anthology shows like Amazing Stories and Freddy’s Nightmares (one of the better episodes I’ve seen of that series, but I’ll get to that after I watch through the films/tv films/miniseries down the line) and was known to have some friends in the broad Amblin world from his time shooting behind the scenes documentaries for their films and writing a number of episo...

  In the world of auto racing, there is always an inherent populist bias against the concept of a “pay driver”, somebody who gets a good car more by the virtue of the budget they bring through family money, sponsorship, or a mixture of both than by sheer talent alone. Everybody is guilty of it, including myself, despite the reality that almost all drivers in the modern era get their first opportunities because they are bringing a budget unless they land in a particularly good driver development program, and there are plenty of good drivers who just happened to have landed good partnerships who buy their rides nearly just as much. Anyway, today’s entry is one of the most well known pay drivers in the history of NASCAR: Paul Menard. John Menard founded Menards hardware stores in 1964, which grew into one of the biggest chains of stores in the midwest over the following decades, even rivaling Home Depot and Lowe’s in the area. An auto racing enthusiast, he also became a team owner i...