The View From The Mountain

I was watching Doom on Netflix recently, and throughout the movie, I kept thinking of a much better take on the same material. Based on a video game, Doom starred Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a super Marine in charge of a team of super Marines who are sent to Mars when the interplanetary colony suffers a strange outbreak of videogame violence. Despite all the shooting and alien gore, Doom managed to be extremely boring, which made me reach for the OTHER “there’s trouble on Mars” movie, Ghosts of Mars . Released just a few years before Doom , Ghosts of Mars was helmed by legendary director John Carpenter and starred Ice Cube and Natasha Henstridge. Instead of a team being dispatched from Earth to solve whatever problem has arisen on the Red Planet, in Ghosts of Mars , it’s the Martian colonists who deal with the red menace. Henstridge plays a member of the Mars Police Force who is sent with a team of other officers to pick up the notorious criminal Desolation Williams (Ice Cube). Bu...

The House With A Clock In Its Walls is the latest attempt to jump-start a movie franchise that’s based on a series of children’s books. The only difference here is that the original book that this film is based on was written back in 1973 by the late author John Bellairs, and was illustrated by the late Edward Gorey, the writer/artist probably best known for his delightfully quaint ghoulish artwork as seen on the opening titles of the PBS Mystery! series. Another notable difference here is that THWACIIW (even the acronym for this is long) has been directed by Eli Roth, who’s better known for the first two Hostel movies, as well as The Green Inferno , all three movies being hard core horror flicks with stomach-churning gore. So does this House work? Yes, and quite nicely, too. As been noted in the DVD commentary for THWAC (I even have to cut down the acronym!), sometimes when you’re restricted, the restrictions can make you be even more creative. The PG rating doesn’t hamper Roth,...

I had this model kit of Mothra in his larva stage, and I was wondering just what the heck to do with it, when I recalled a scene where Larva Mothra was swimming in the ocean in one of the Godzilla films. I also had a model kit of a Coast Guard cutter, which could double as a US Navy destroyer, and bingo, I had a diorama. The "water" you see the models in is actually Flex paste from Woodland Scenics. I laid the paste down and placed the models within it. After it dried, I painted it a bluish ocean color. I then placed a layer of Water Effects (also from WS) over this, to give the "ocean" a nice watery sheen. This Navy ship has had many duties in its storied career, but none as strange as when it escorted Mothra across the ocean on a journey to join Godzilla in battle.

I had stopped reading comics by the time Venom made his debut. So my first exposure to the character of Venom came in the third Spider-Man film, released in 2008 and directed by Sam Riami. After a powerhouse second outing with Spider-Man 2 , the third and final Riami-directed Spider-Man movie was a huge let down, thanks to the multitude of villains that the Wall-Crawler had to contend with--Venom, being one of a trio of baddies gunning for Spidey, really should have been the sole villain of that film (reportedly studio interference was responsible for the multi-villain story line). Now, ten years after Spider-Man 3 , Venom returns, but in his own movie without Spider-Man. Tom Hardy is the star, appearing as Eddie Brock, a reporter in San Francisco who’s trying to seek the truth about an Elon Musk-type of tech tycoon named Charlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), who’s rumored to be doing illegal experiments. The rumors turn out to be true. One of Drake’s spaceships crash lands on earth, bringing ...