The View From The Mountain

I built the 1/48 model kit of the AT-ST Walker from Ban Dai. This is actually the second of these that I built. The first AT-ST I built, I painted it a forest camouflage pattern. With this second walker, I decided to paint it in a desert scheme. I used "sand" colored Americana acrylic hobby paint. This Ban Dai model is so good because it has such great little details that make the model seem more realistic. I dirtied up the walker with "dark brown" acrylic paint. The decals are from another kit in my decal collection.

You could have gone one of two ways with The Meg , play it straight, just like Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece Jaws , or go the comedic route, a la the Sharknado series. The main problem with The Meg is that it tries to have it both ways: it tries to be a deadly serious drama about a super-sized shark that terrorizes coastal China while also having goofy humor, and the result is that The Meg is just…meh. Based on the popular novel by Steve Alten, the concept of The Meg is based on a real life monster shark, the Megalodon, that lived back in the dinosaur age but went extinct millions of years ago. But The Meg posits that there’s more Megs than you can shake a shark cage at living under a layer of gas at the bottom of one of the deepest trenches in the ocean. And when a three person submarine pierces this layer of gas, it helps the Meg to reach the surface (Note: there’s virtually no mention of anybody going through decompression in this movie, much like how there’s virtually no men

Not having seen the original Sabrina TV series (and not really having any great desire to) I went into the brand new Chilling Adventures of Sabrina completely cold and unknowing of whatever the previous incarnation was about. But I wound up enjoying the new version immensely. Thankfully, the new Sabrina has ditched the cheesy sitcom trappings of its predecessor in favor of an hour-long drama format--and thanks to it being on Netflix, we really get full-hour episodes. Also thanks to Netflix, the new Sabrina series is allowed to fully embrace its horror-movie inspirations. This was the first great thing that the new series has done: diving head-first into the horror genre with full-on gore and some genuinely frightening scare moments that managed to catch this old horror movie fan off guard. Like the original sitcom, Sabrina is a teenage witch who lives with her two witch aunts and whose familiar is a cat named Salem. Unlike the sitcom, the cat never speaks but transforms into a rea

When I first started watching Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House , I out-right hated it. I loved the original novel, which is a classic horror novel, written by Shirley Jackson, that deals with the excursion into a famously (or infamously) haunted house by a team of paranormal investigators. It was turned into a masterpiece of a film, titled The Haunting , directed by Robert Wise, back in 1963. It was then remade into a really shitty movie in 1999 (despite having a great cast, the remake was pretty bad). This time, Netflix has turned The Haunting of Hill House into a ten episode mini-series, and they’ve made some major changes, which was why I initially hated the first episode. Three of the characters from the book who were a part of the paranormal team, Nell, Theo and Luke, have been turned into siblings in the series, now part of a large family that moved into Hill House when they were children. Their parents, Hugh and Olivia Crain (Henry Thomas and Carla Gugino) are hoping to “

Back in 2003, they released Freddy Vs. Jason, which paired up Freddy from the Nightmare on Elm Street film with the machete-wielding star of the Friday the Thirteenth films, Jason. At the same time, Andrea Miniatures had released this great 1/32 scale figure of Freddy. I was tempted to build a diorama of these two Horror movie icons meeting. I created a Jason figure from a 1/32 scale blank. His clothes and mask were sculpted from Apopxie putty. Jason's machete was cut from a styrene sheet. I built the Freddy figure straight out of the box. He comes with this great, atmospheric stand that has a grate, girders and even a chain. I put both Freddy and Jason on a watery, dream-like base. The arms sticking out of the "water" (it was actually Flex-Paste) were extra parts from the blank figure box. May you all have a Happy Halloween!

I have this model kit of the Klingon D-7 battlecruiser in 1/1000 scale. It's a small kit, without any surface detail, and so although it had already been built an painted, I decided to rework it. I added styrene sheet on the main body and created impulse engines and a rear torpedo bay with spare parts that I had on hand. When I painted it, I used a two-tone green color, and the styrene sheets really stand out. I tried to make the repaint of this look more like the ship has been out in space (and in several battles) for a while. It sits on a nice stand. I always loved this Klingon ship design, which gave the ship a nice predator vibe.

When The Man in the High Castle first premiered on the Amazon streaming service, it was a hard show to watch. Don’t get me wrong, TMITHC was superbly done, with great scripts and marvelous acting that created the dire, dread-filled feeling of living in a world where the Axis powers won the Second World War. It was hard seeing an America that had been crushed and demoralized and was now occupied by the Nazi Reich on the east coast, and the Japanese Empire on the west coast. The Neutral Zone offered some freedom, but being lawless, the NZ didn’t really have much in the way of hope. Yet despite this down-beat scenario, I kept watching the show because it was just very well-done overall. And I was also a major fan of series star Alexa Davalos, who plays Juliana Crain. But there was something else that intrigued me, a scene at the very end of the first season which changed the tone of the series completely--much in the same way how the first season of Game of Thrones had no magic, save

I saw this model at a Chiller Horror convention many years ago and I just had to have it. It's The Invasion of the Saucer Men, from Mad Lab models, based on the 1950s film. I was never really a big fan of the Saucer Men movie, it's just that I bought this model because I thought it was so cool. It even comes with a mini-poster of the movie, and the base is a movie theater lobby. The kit was made of solid resin, and I had a lot of fun with it. It was cool re-creating a 1950s' style theater lobby floor. Sadly, this piece is no longer being made, so I consider myself really lucky to have it.

I remember the hysteria surrounding the release of Solo: A Star Wars story. It was a two-pronged attack: the first was the hand-wringing over the fact that they released a Star Wars movie barely six months after the last one ( The Last Jedi , which managed to scare up some mass hysteria on its own), and the other being the “fact” that Solo was yet another brain-washing piece of excrement (along with The Last Jedi —jeez, that flick really knew how to make new friends and influence people, didn’t it?) that had been released by the “evil” Kathleen Kennedy, who runs Lucasfilm—and who should now fall on her sword, since Solo didn’t make the mega trillions that it was expected to haul in. But amidst all of this panic and frenzied second guessing remains a very important question. Is Solo: A Star Wars Story any good? Yes, it is. Not only is Solo good, it’s an extremely well-made space adventure that actually manages to be a fun ride. Pushing aside all of the hysteria that surrounded this

What can I say about my love for The Shape Of Water that hasn’t already been expressed in the glowing reviews that it has already received? It’s even been warmly embraced by the Oscar voters, who gave it the Best Picture Oscar of 2017. Guillermo del Toro’s wondrous fairy tale, about an unusual love story taking place at the height of the Cold War, is at times charming, warm and loving, and extremely weird. And it’s all good. The mesmerizing Sally Hawkins plays Elisa, a mute woman who works as a cleaning woman at a government facility. One day, a special item is brought into the facility, a strange fish-man (played by Doug Jones in a performance that’s just as challenging--and silent--as Hawkins’). This fish man comes with his own jailer, the man who caught him in South America, Richard Strickland, a hard-nosed martinet played by Michael Shannon, whose black-hearted performance feels just a little over the top at times. But this story is framed as a fairy tale that’s being told to us