The View From The Mountain

I have to admit I wasn’t looking forward to seeing the new It . I enjoyed the book, having bought It back when it was first published, thirty years ago this year. But I never considered It to be the best of Stephen King’s works (that would be ’Salem’s Lot , with The Shining a close second; a more recent favorite would be Mister Mercedes , followed closely by Doctor Sleep ). I thought that It , the book, felt a little too long-winded to me back then, and the concept of an evil being taking the shape of a clown felt more silly to me than scary. The 1990 TV miniseries that was adapted from the book was good, up to a point. Tim Curry gave an enthusiastic and enjoyable performance as Pennywise the clown, and the first half, with the child actors, was superb, but the scares in the miniseries wound up being pretty lame, thanks in no small part to the fact that the 1990 version of It aired on broadcast TV, and was severely restricted in what horrors it could show by the standards and prac...

Fifteen years ago Timeline hit the movie screens. Based on the novel of the same name by Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton, Timeline dealt with a group of archeologists working a castle ruin site in present day France where the French overthrew the English occupying force back in the 1300s. When the leader of the expedition (Billy Connoly) starts getting suspicious about his backers--who keep giving them amazing tips on where to find things that nobody could know the location of--he goes back to the US to speak with them. After his father has been gone without a trace for several days, the expedition leader’s son Chris (Paul Walker) calls the backers to demand to know the whereabouts of his father. Chris travels to the headquarters of the expedition’s backers, which is a tech company that has managed to invent a time machine. This was how they were able to give the expedition in France such good tips, because they traveled back in time to the actual battle in the 1300s. It’s ex...

Netflix gave us a special surprise right after the Superbowl ended when they premiered Cloverfield: Paradox , the third in the SF/Horror anthology film series that got started ten years ago with the original Cloverfield . I’ve recently read that there’s now a fourth Cloverfield film on the horizon. Can’t wait to see that one, but lets take a look at the first three: Cloverfield: Paradox takes place aboard a space station in the somewhat distant future. Humanity is on the brink of an all-out war over the last dwindling reserves of oil, with people waiting on lines that stretch for blocks just to gas up (much like the gas lines of the 1970s). The Cloverfield space station is testing a gizmo that will supposedly end the energy crisis, but once they get it running, the device transports the station to another universe, where they find the Earth is missing and an extra crew member (played by Elizabeth Debicki) in the wall of their space station. Awkward! Even weirder stuff starts happe...