The View From The Mountain

The description for The Blackcoat’s Daughter on Amazon states that it’s a mystery thriller about two young students who must deal with the supernatural while staying over at their empty boarding school during the winter break. It sort of makes it sound like Nancy Drew meets Scooby Doo, and I wasn't too sure about seeing this. Imagine my pleasant surprise when, instead of a family-friendly mystery that Disney would have aired on its Sunday night show way back in the day, I receive a truly scary horror film about demonic possession that’s directed by the son of Norman Bates himself. The Blackcoat’s Daughter --which was originally called February , because that was when the story takes place--is the directorial debut of Oz Perkins (credited in the film as Osgood Perkins), one of the sons of the late Anthony Perkins, who was best known for his role in Hitchcock’s dark masterpiece Psycho . Oz Perkins has fashioned a genuinely creepy tale here about two students at an all-girls boardi...

Way back in 1981, when dinosaurs still walked the earth and only the birds tweeted, my father and I went to the movies as sort of a father and son type of bonding experience. The film we saw was Saturday the 14th , starring the husband and wife acting team of Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss, who play a couple with kids who inherit a creepy old mansion that just happens to be cursed. In short, the movie was awful--it was an ineptly made film that tried to be a spoof of the horror movie genre that had just exploded at that time, with Friday the 13th (from which Saturday got its title) being chief among them. Recently we observed a Friday the 13th, and it was while viewing all of the customary Friday the 13th memes online that I was reminded of this film, and decided to watch it the next day. While there’s an inspired moment, when Prentiss is attacked by bats in the same manner as the classic scene that took place in Hitchcock’s The Birds , watching Saturday the 14th on Saturday...

Despite a title that reminds me of Oscar-bait movies (you know, those earnest, “serious” dramas that nobody remembers or gives a damn about a year after they win their awards), I wanted to see Life because it was a science fiction/horror hybrid, much like how the Alien films are, and they’re among my favorite in that sub genre. Life deals with the crew of the International Space Station, which is a real thing, floating up there yonder right above your head now. Life is going by routinely for the six astronauts stationed on the ISS, until they are called to capture a wayward probe. The automated probe, sent to collect dirt specimens from Mars, has suffered some damage on its way back to Earth and has gone haywire, and it’s up to Jake Gyllenhaal to “catch” it using the station’s mechanical arm. He does so, and when the probe’s contents are examined and experimented on by Ariyon Bakare, playing one of the station’s scientists, he manages to revive the long-dormant cells, proving tha...