The View From The Mountain

You want a piece of me?! King Kong has been remade several times since the original film’s release back in 1933. The Japanese movie firm Toho, which produced the Godzilla movies, did the first remake of Kong with 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla , which was a fun romp. Toho followed this with an even better romp in 1967 called King Kong Escapes , an enjoyable lark that had Kong battling a mechanized version of himself. The first American remake of King Kong followed in 1976, and wound up being an unimaginative and dreary mess. 1986 saw Linda Hamilton ( The Terminator and T2 ) starring in a really bad fiasco called King Kong Lives , and Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson directed another remake of King Kong that saw release in 2005. Although Jackson’s Kong is considered by many to be the first “proper” remake, it’s a movie that’s not without its flaws--especially seeing how they tried to make King Kong more realistic, which resulted in him looking like a giant silverback ...

The Scooby Gang never had to deal with this crap! Satanic is one of those “see, I can act” movies. It’s a movie that features an actor or actress from a long-running TV show who wants to demonstrate that they can do something other than the same part they’ve been playing for years. In this case, it’s Sarah Hyland, the star of this flick who has played Haley Dunphy on the sitcom Modern Family (a series which I have not seen and, to be blunt, don’t really feel the need to see). I’m not bashing Miss Hyland for wanting to try something different--far from it, she’s to be commended for stretching her acting wings. And while I can’t compare her performance here with her work on Modern Family , I liked her performance in Satanic , where she does a superb job at playing the sympathetic “good girl” role in this horror film, sort of like Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween . If only Satanic was as good as Halloween . Hyland stars as Chloe, who’s on a tour of Los Angles murder sites with her ...

Once upon a time, Warner Brothers released Batman Vs Superman , and while it was a financial hit, the movie took a critical drubbing from both professional critics, as well as the viewing public. Warner Brothers’ executives, running scared, decided that everybody didn’t like BVS because it was “too dark” (apparently missing the fact that the movie just wasn’t very good overall) and thus decided to overhaul Suicide Squad , its other big superhero movie that was coming out later that same year. The studio reportedly took the film away from its director, David Ayer, and had it recut by a firm that normally cuts trailers for movie studios. Hey, what could go wrong? The behind the scenes story of Suicide Squad (which is chronicled in this fascinating article by the Hollywood Reporter) is actually better than the film itself, which is about a group of super villains that are recruited to fight a great evil. Based on the second version of the Suicide Squad that debuted in 1987 under crea...