The View From The Mountain

Like most people these days, I was suffering from zombie fatigue, and so when I heard about a new zombie series on Netflix called Black Summer , I was tempted to just ignore it, because, you know, zombies…ugh. However, with Stephen King giving the show a verbal thumbs up on Twitter, I decided to reconsider my embargo on all things zombies long enough to give Black Summer a chance. I was only going to watch the first episode of Black Summer , just to gauge how good the series is, and I wound up watching the first four episodes back to back before I finally reluctantly gave into sleep--yes, it’s that good. Taking place in the early days of a zombie outbreak, with civilization teetering on the verge of catastrophe, Black Summer details how an orderly march of suburbanites into an evacuation by the military quickly becomes a horrific fight for survival once things start going sideways. Jaime King plays Rose, who gets separated from her young daughter right at the start of the show. The...

When I saw a movie listed on the Amazon streaming service as Dead And Buried , I wondered if this was the very same Dead And Buried which scared the daylights out of me back when I first saw it as a VHS rental in the early eighties. The image that Amazon had was just a text title of the film’s name. So I cranked up the great Amazonian streaming machine and, lo and behold, there it truly was: Dead And Buried , freshly come back to life for me much like the characters in the film do. Taking place in a quiet coastal town, Sheriff Gillis (James Farentino--who I’ll always fondly remember as Cmdr Richard Owens from The Final Countdown ) deals with a series of grisly murders where the victims are either burned up or chopped up in vicious ways. On top of all of this is the fact that Gillis is also dealing with the strange behavior of his wife, Janet (Melody Anderson--best known as Dale Arden from the 1980 Flash Gordon ), who may be having an affair behind his back. There is one really shoc...

I was looking forward to seeing Aquaman when I first heard it was announced. Mainly because I had already seen Aquaman in Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (albeit in a small cameo) as well as Justice League . While the Justice League movie left a lot to be desired for me, Jason Momoa’s Aquaman was one of the few bright spots of that troubled production. His easy going ‘surfer dude’ take on Aquaman was a nice change of pace from the dark and brooding superheroes we’ve been getting up to that point from the DC comics movies (and even a few of the Marvel superhero films, too). The overly grim take on the DC superhero films (which also included Suicide Squad ) were a wrong turn courtesy of the Warner Brothers studio executives, who mistook the popularity of the Christopher Nolan Batman films to be that the audience preferred dreary superhero movies--when in fact the Nolan Batman films ( Batman Begin s/ The Dark Knight / The Dark Knight Rises ) were so popular because they were just v...

There was a movie released back in the 1980s that starred Tim Thomerson, Timothy Van Patten, and Art LaFleur that was called Zone Troopers . Released by the Charles Band studios (for whom Thomerson would star in Dollman , and the Trancers series) Zone Troopers was a fun B-movie about American soldiers who come across an alien spaceship in Italy during the Second World War, and their efforts to keep it out of the hands of the Nazis. Zone Troopers just couldn't be taken too seriously--it was just an enjoyable popcorn flick, and its makers knew it. When Overlord , with its same basic storyline--American soldiers during World War Two encounter an otherworldly threat--first premiered, I was looking forward to seeing it because of some of the great reviews that it received. Overlord was the code word for D-Day, the Allied assault on Nazi-occupied Europe that started on June 6, 1944. Overlord , the movie, deals with members of the 101st Airborne who dropped behind the lines the night ...