The View From The Mountain

I first caught Lost In Space while it ran in syndication back when I was a little spud. I loved the otherworldly adventures featuring a loving family who always had each other’s back regardless of what crazed situation they faced. As I got older, I realized that LIS wasn’t exactly Shakespeare (“ The Great Vegetable Rebellion ,” anyone?). Episodes that seemed like an engrossing adventure to an eight year old looked very silly when viewed by my older self. But despite the fact that LIS didn’t age well, it still held a warm place within my heart for all of these years. The Lost In Space movie that was released twenty years ago was a misbegotten mess that tried to keep the camp while updating the overall concept with disastrous results. As if that wasn't bad enough, the same writer of that debacle became one of the executive producers on Star Trek: Discovery , promptly screwing up yet another one of my childhood favorites with terrible, clueless scripts. It made me extremely relu...

A Quiet Place is a post-apocalyptic story about a family struggling to survive in a devastated world that’s been infested with viciously savage monsters that hunt down and kill anything that makes noise. When we first meet the Abbotts, they are raiding an empty store of its last merchandise, and from the quiet and careful way that Evelyn (Emily Blunt) handles pill bottles on a shelf (she’s moving them very delicately, as if they might explode) it’s quickly and effectively established that making any sort of noise in this scary new world is a very dangerous thing. We’re briefly introduced to one of the monsters in a horrific moment, just barely ten minutes into the film, that shows us that it is indeed a very dangerous world where nobody is safe. John Krasinski, Blunt’s real life husband, plays her husband, Lee, and he also directs the film with a sure, steady hand. For the better part of the film’s running time, the story is conveyed visually, with the actors speaking through Americ...

Insidious: The Last Key is supposedly the final chapter in the horror movie franchise that began back in 2010 with the original Insidious , an ingeniously made chiller about the supernatural that was directed by James Wan. The story of the first film is pretty straightforward enough, a young family asks Elise (Lin Shaye), a psychic, for help when they come under attack by ghostly beings that haunt them no matter where they go. Things get complicated when the family’s youngest son, Dalton, won’t wake up from what looks like a coma. Elise determines that Dalton’s soul is being held captive in a dimension of the dead by a demonic entity, and it looks like a dangerous rescue mission is in order. The original Insidious remains a classic horror movie that manages to be extremely scary without the use of excessive gore. Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne are very good as the embattled parents, and the villain, a black and red monstrous creep--that’s actually played by the film’s composer--is u...