The View From The Mountain

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Masters of the Universe -- a review

If I had been ten years younger at the time, I might have been a huge fan of Masters of the Universe —aka He-Man —when it first premiered on TV back in the 1980s. But I never watched the original cartoon, nor did I buy any of the action figures (and these days, I wish I had bought some, seeing how several of the original MOTU figures are now worth big bucks). Despite the silliness of its overall concept, like characters with goofy names such as Lock Jaw, Ram Man, and Fisto (!!!), I still enjoyed the first live action MOTU movie, back when that was released in 1987. I thought Frank Langella ( Dracula ; Those Lips, Those Eyes ) gave a great performance as Skeletor, the evil villain of the MOTU fantasy world known as Eternia. I tried to watch the Netflix animated series of MOTU , produced by Kevin Smith ( Clerks ), but I just couldn’t get into that version at all and so I tapped out midway through. After the Netflix version, it looked like that was finally the end for MOTU —but Matt...

The Mortuary Assistant -- a review

Willa Holland stars as Rebecca Owens, a young woman who’s trying to put her life back together by finishing her training as a mortician’s assistant, while also receiving her one year sober chip from Narcotics Anonymous. All in all, things are going swimmingly for Rebecca—until her boss, Raymond Delver (Paul Sparks), unexpectedly calls her back in to work overnight after her first day, because the mortuary has just seen a large influx of fresh corpses. But Rebecca still easily manages the extra work, despite the raging thunderstorm outside that plays havoc with the electricity. The flickering lights keep making Rebecca see things in the darkened corners of the mortuary. She sees some really creepy, unnerving imagery—like the corpses moving ever so subtly on the tables, or one corpse that suddenly has a mouth filled with fangs—but everything weird she’s seeing is strictly a result of the spotty lighting. Right? Right?! I first saw Willa Holland on the Arrow CW sh...

Project Hail Mary -- a review

Former microbiologist and present day science schoolteacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) awakens inside of a body bag while being tended to by an automated robot medic. Fighting off the automated medic, Grace stumbles around a strange structure that turns out to be the interior of an interstellar spaceship. At first, he has no idea why he’s aboard the ship, or where in space the ship is located. But as his memories slowly come back to him, in the form of flashbacks, we learn that Grace is part of a three-man crew aboard the Hail Mary, a spaceship traveling towards the Tau Ceti system, located just under twelve light years from Earth. It turns out that the very same sun that has lit Earth with its light and warmth for billions of years is slowly dimming, threatening all life on the planet as it freezes into an icy ball. What’s causing the sun to dim are particles that are dubbed astrophages, and our sun isn’t the only victim of these particles. Other stars out in space are also...

Lee Cronin's The Mummy -- a review

I was still flush with the recent pleasant news that Brendan Fraser and cinematic goddess Rachel Weisz (woof!) were returning in a new (and hopefully better than the third entry) Mummy movie when I first heard about Lee Cronin’s The Mummy , which premiered in theaters this past April. LC’s The Mummy tries to reanimate bandage boy for the twenty first century, but with a twist. TV correspondent Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) is living with his family in Cairo, Egypt for his job when his eight year old daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) is abducted from her home by a stranger. The girl seemingly vanishes into thin air, and the heart-broken Cannon family move back to the US. Eight years later, the US embassy in Egypt calls them to report that Katie has been found alive...kinda...sort of. Katie (now played by Natalie Grace) had been a bound prisoner in a sealed ancient Egyptian sarcophagus, and the experience has left her in a horrific zombie-like state. If you’...

Spider-Noir -- a review

Spider-Man Into The Spider-Verse (2018) was a fantastic superhero film that just happened to be an animated feature. Starring Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) as Spider-Man, the film dealt with the multi-verse—which is a scientific theory that states there are a multitude of universes out there, each existing on its own plane of reality. This idea isn’t new to comics; I’ve read countless stories about superheroes dealing with denizens from other universes—and it’s also an idea that’s been used often in science fiction, like the In A Mirror Darkly episode of the original Star Trek . Recently, the MCU has used this theory in the last ten or so of its films. Into the Spider-Verse has Morales dealing with several different Spider-Men, and Spider-Women, from alternate Earths—one of whom is Spider-Man Noir, voiced by Nicolas Cage. The Spider (as he’s known in the TV series) is the Spider-Man from a 1930s era New York City. He’s a private eye named Ben Reilly (played on screen by ...

Logan's Run -- a review

I first saw Logan’s Run in a New Jersey movie theater fifty years ago, when I was a boy. The theater, somewhere in the suburban wilds of the Garden State, was packed to the gills with people. I wasn’t sure what to expect with the movie back then—all I cared about that it was a brand new science fiction film, in an age when big budget SF properties on both TV and the big screen was very rare (of course, Star Wars , which would be released the very next year, would change all of that). Based on the 1967 novel of the same name by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, Logan’s Run is a futuristic tale about a man named Logan 5 (Michael York) who has a special job in a place filled with hedonistic leisure. Logan lives within the splendor of a Utopian society whose population dwells within large domes. The interior is presented as a vast, upscale shopping mall where its citizens want for nothing. Every need, every whim, and every fantasy is met. Of course, there’s a catc...