The View From The Mountain

It’s Friday night during the summer in Beutter county, an idyllic farming community in Indiana, and the good folks are settling in for what should be another humdinger of an evening. Until their plans are shattered by the arrival of an Explorer From Another World! This turns out to be an alien (Gemma Sterling) who starts savagely killing people from the moment it disembarks from its flying saucer. Local kids Eddie (Colin McCorquodale), Marybeth (Sage Marchand) and Culpepper (Nolan Gay) are planning on seeing a movie, but it looks like they’ll be battling for the very survival of the human race instead! Explorer From Another World is a wonderfully done throwback to the B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Ably directed by Woody Edwards (who gives himself a small cameo as Hank in the sheriff’s jail cell), the film is forty five minutes long, but manages to tell its torrid but funny story very effectively in the time allotted. And the short running time tracks when you...

Director Tobe Hooper is best known for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre . I admit to never really having been a big fan of TCM, instead I was more partial to Hooper’s TV miniseries of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot , which aired in 1979. And while there was a bit of a controversy over whether he or Steven Spielberg actually directed 1982’s Poltergeist , the success of that film, which brought supernatural horror to the suburbs, enabled Hooper to swing for the fences with Lifeforce , a science fiction horror extravaganza that was released in 1985, forty years ago this year. Based on the book Space Vampires by Colin Wilson, the screenplay for Lifeforce was written by Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakoby--with O'Bannon being a writer on the first Alien film. Taking place in 1986, when the real life Halley’s Comet was due to return to Earth, Lifeforce has Steve Railsback ( The Stunt Man ) in command of a tricked out space shuttle with an American/British crew of astronauts called the Chu...

Despite coming out thirty six years after the first film, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice , once again directed by Tim Burton, wound up being vastly entertaining, adding lots of pleasant surprises, like the use of stop-motion animation. The sequel takes place within the same real-life time frame, with Lydia Deetz, played with wry humor by Winona Ryder, now the host of a ghost hunting show. She’s also the mother of Astrid, a teenager played by Jenna Ortega. They live with Delia Deetz (the always great Catherine O'Hara), Lydia’s step-mother and Astrid’s step-grandmother. After the death of Charles--Delia’s husband and Lydia’s father--during a bird-watching accident involving sharks, the Deetz ladies must go back up to the creepy house in Winter River, Connecticut for his funeral. This is the same place where Lydia first encountered Beetlejuice all those years ago, and she is understandably reluctant to even mention his name, lest she accidentally calls forth Beet...

Osgood Perkins is the eldest son of actor Anthony Perkins, who was best known for his role as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film, Psycho . Osgood Perkins would make his acting debut as a twelve year old Norman within a flashback sequence in 1983’s Psycho II . After writing several screenplays, Osgood Perkins made his directorial debut (also writing the script) in 2015 with The Blackcoat’s Daughter , a mesmerizing horror film that wound up being an elegant, if horrifying, twist on The Exorcist . Original, imaginative, and deeply disturbing, The Blackcoat’s Daughter contains images that are truly chilling. It’s a hard film to talk about without giving away a major plot point, so I won’t, but it’s highly recommended. The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a darkly brilliant horror film with some great performances by its entire cast: Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, Lauren Holly, and James Remar. It’s also one of the most coldest films ever mad...

It’s been forty two years since the death of legendary master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock, but his influence lives on the a new generation of filmmakers. The recently released Watcher, ably directed by Chloe Okuno, is another thriller with a Hitchcockian flair. Julia (Maika Monroe) moves to Bucharest with her husband Francis (Karl Glusman), who’s been transferred to the Romanian office by his company. Francis speaks Romanian fluently, having been raised by a Romanian mother, but Julia--who’s still trying to learn the language--is lost at sea. Okuno makes a point of not translating any of the Romanian that’s spoken in the film, making us feel Julia’s isolation and frustration at being left out of conversations and life in general. But life gets even harder for Julia when she starts seeing a shadowy figure watching her from one of the windows in the apartment building across the street. Soon, she starts seeing a strange man who appears to be following her where...

I avoided seeing Ghostbusters Afterlife because the 2016 remake of Ghostbusters wasn’t very good. Neither was the 1989 sequel to Ghostbusters--and, admittedly, I wasn’t a huge fan of the original 1984 Ghostbusters, either. I didn’t hate the original movie, but I was never caught up in the wave of adoration for it that swept through the country back then. I guess you can say I’m not a Ghosthead, one of the rabid fans of the franchise, and the subject of a very well-made documentary that you should see, especially if you really enjoy the movies. But I eventually saw Ghostbusters Afterlife because--well, why not? I assumed beforehand that I would dislike it, but that it wouldn’t matter, because I’d only watch it once, and just forget about it, just like I did with the other Ghostbusters films. But something interesting happened: I would up enjoying Ghostbusters Afterlife a great deal. The new Ghostbusters film tries to be the true sequel to the original film, despi...

I re-watched some old episodes of Stargate: Atlantis, the sequel series to Stargate: SG-1 (which was the TV sequel to Stargate, the movie, released back in 1994), and I came across the fifth season episode Whispers. Whispers was this series' loving take on horror movies, and re-watching it some ten years later, I have to say that it holds up very well. Directed by William Waring, Whispers uses all of the cliches of the horror genre--but instead of being a jokey (and forgettable) send off, the episode treats its threat very seriously, and winds up giving us some truly scary moments. The SG team consists of Sheppard (Joe Flanigan) and Dr. Beckett (Paul McGillion), along with an all-women Stargate unit led by Christina Cox (Blood Ties), with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Nicole de Boer rounding out the team as its science expert.  While the episode has plenty of jump scares, many of which feature real threats, it's the overall creepiness of Whispers that makes it so good--espec...

I wasn’t expecting to love Underwater as much as I did. In fact, I was in no hurry to even see this movie at all were it not for the rave reviews for it from John Squires, editor of Bloody Disgusting, as well as reviewers from several other horror outlets. They championed Underwater so much that I rented it digitally, and I wound up loving it myself so much that I promptly bought a physical media copy of the film the day after seeing the rental. Underwater deals with the crew of an undersea drilling rig--a massive, ringed city at the bottom of the Pacific that houses several hundred--that suffers a cataclysmic event in the opening few minutes of the film. Norah Price (wonderfully played by Kristen Stewart), is so caught off guard by the crushing devastation that it’s all that she can do to just run to the nearest safety zone barely in time without her shoes. Stewart, who proved her acting chops in such great films as Personal Shopper , is fantastic as the cynical Norah--a young w...

It’s interesting that, just as I sit down to watch Ready Or Not , there’s a huge flare up in the media about how Royal lovebirds Meghan and Harry have made the decision to step back from their duties as members of the British Royal family, and will only stay in England part time from now on. As a fan of the democratic process, I was never a cheerleader of royalty, but when I heard that Meghan and Harry had basically said, “Thanks, but no thanks,” I was actually pleased to hear this. All through history, the British Royal family have proven themselves to be one of the biggest pack of scumbags to ever slither across the earth. The original thirteen colonies had a revolution just to get away from them, after all. And if Meghan and Harry really want to put some distance between themselves and these demented dipshits, all I can say is “Godspeed, kids, and keep running….” And I'm not the only one who feels this way. Some folks have taken this view even further. 2019 saw the release ...

Like most people these days, I was suffering from zombie fatigue, and so when I heard about a new zombie series on Netflix called Black Summer , I was tempted to just ignore it, because, you know, zombies…ugh. However, with Stephen King giving the show a verbal thumbs up on Twitter, I decided to reconsider my embargo on all things zombies long enough to give Black Summer a chance. I was only going to watch the first episode of Black Summer , just to gauge how good the series is, and I wound up watching the first four episodes back to back before I finally reluctantly gave into sleep--yes, it’s that good. Taking place in the early days of a zombie outbreak, with civilization teetering on the verge of catastrophe, Black Summer details how an orderly march of suburbanites into an evacuation by the military quickly becomes a horrific fight for survival once things start going sideways. Jaime King plays Rose, who gets separated from her young daughter right at the start of the show. The...