The View From The Mountain

You could have gone one of two ways with The Meg , play it straight, just like Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece Jaws , or go the comedic route, a la the Sharknado series. The main problem with The Meg is that it tries to have it both ways: it tries to be a deadly serious drama about a super-sized shark that terrorizes coastal China while also having goofy humor, and the result is that The Meg is just…meh. Based on the popular novel by Steve Alten, the concept of The Meg is based on a real life monster shark, the Megalodon, that lived back in the dinosaur age but went extinct millions of years ago. But The Meg posits that there’s more Megs than you can shake a shark cage at living under a layer of gas at the bottom of one of the deepest trenches in the ocean. And when a three person submarine pierces this layer of gas, it helps the Meg to reach the surface (Note: there’s virtually no mention of anybody going through decompression in this movie, much like how there’s virtually no men...

Not having seen the original Sabrina TV series (and not really having any great desire to) I went into the brand new Chilling Adventures of Sabrina completely cold and unknowing of whatever the previous incarnation was about. But I wound up enjoying the new version immensely. Thankfully, the new Sabrina has ditched the cheesy sitcom trappings of its predecessor in favor of an hour-long drama format--and thanks to it being on Netflix, we really get full-hour episodes. Also thanks to Netflix, the new Sabrina series is allowed to fully embrace its horror-movie inspirations. This was the first great thing that the new series has done: diving head-first into the horror genre with full-on gore and some genuinely frightening scare moments that managed to catch this old horror movie fan off guard. Like the original sitcom, Sabrina is a teenage witch who lives with her two witch aunts and whose familiar is a cat named Salem. Unlike the sitcom, the cat never speaks but transforms into a rea...

When I first started watching Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House , I out-right hated it. I loved the original novel, which is a classic horror novel, written by Shirley Jackson, that deals with the excursion into a famously (or infamously) haunted house by a team of paranormal investigators. It was turned into a masterpiece of a film, titled The Haunting , directed by Robert Wise, back in 1963. It was then remade into a really shitty movie in 1999 (despite having a great cast, the remake was pretty bad). This time, Netflix has turned The Haunting of Hill House into a ten episode mini-series, and they’ve made some major changes, which was why I initially hated the first episode. Three of the characters from the book who were a part of the paranormal team, Nell, Theo and Luke, have been turned into siblings in the series, now part of a large family that moved into Hill House when they were children. Their parents, Hugh and Olivia Crain (Henry Thomas and Carla Gugino) are hoping to “...