The View From The Mountain

Satanic Panic fills me with nostalgia for two reasons: first, it’s a movie that’s been produced by Fangoria, the horror movie magazine that’s made a triumphant return recently (and welcome back); and second, it’s a horror comedy, which I haven’t seen since the heyday of Fango back in the 1980s. To be sure, there were plenty of horror films with humorous moments, and more than a few really bad horror films that were unintentionally funny, but it’s rare to get a full-bore horror film--complete with blood and guts--that also serves a healthy dose of satire, as well. Satanic Panic takes aim at the greedy top one percent in our beloved capitalist society, stating outright that the reason they’re so rich and powerful (as well as being cold, soulless bastards) is because they worship Satan, and Old Scratch apparently takes very good care of his followers. The major catch is a human sacrifice must be made every now and then, and Danica (Rebecca Romijn), the leader of the cult, already had...

Kaya Scodelario stars in Crawl as Haley, a college swimmer who’s struggling to maintain her scholarship at a Florida school when she realizes that she had bigger problems. After a swim meet, Haley receives a call from her sister, who hasn’t heard from their father in a while. There’s a major hurricane bearing down on Florida, and the fact that Haley’s father has gone silent--not answering calls or texts--is a bad sign. Despite the fact that she and her dad are not on speaking terms, Haley agrees to make the two hour drive to check in on him. Taking her four-wheel drive vehicle off road to avoid the safety roadblocks set up by the authorities, Haley drives ever closer to the outer fringes of the hurricane. The winds pick up, the rain falls horizontally, and the old neighborhood of her childhood house is completely abandoned--with the exception of Haley’s dad (Barry Pepper), who’s trapped in the basement of his house under some debris. But as the basement begins to flood from the hur...

You can tell, right off the bat, that there’s a problem with Men In Black International ( MIB:I ) from the way the movie opens. We get a flashback scene of the two MIB:I agents H (Chris Hemsworth) and High T (Liam Neeson) fighting aliens at the Eifel Tower in Paris. After watching this sequence--which falls flat with lame humor--we then flashback even further, to when a young Molly (Mandeiya Flory) watches her parents get zapped into forgetting their alien encounter by two MIB agents. But Molly herself retains her memory, and when she grows up (her adult role taken over by Tessa Thompson), she begins a rabid search for this mysterious organization, until the day she finds them and tries to bluff her way into their headquarters. Personally, I felt that MIB:I would have been a much more enjoyable movie had they begun it with little Molly watching her parents get zapped, and continued onward from just her POV. Just show us the fleeting glimpses of the MIB organization that Molly see...

When they announced that they were doing a reboot of Hellboy , I started sharpening my knives in preparation of slicing this ‘turkey-to-be’ right up. The original Hellboy , directed by Guillermo del Toro, and released fifteen years ago, was an enchanting dark fantasy that starred Ron Perlman as the titular character, a demon turned superhero who battles the forces of evil for a government agency. In 2008, del Toro wound up making a sequel that was even better, and it hinted at a third film that would wrap up the series in a very dark fashion. But instead of getting a trilogy of del Toro’s whimsical, imaginative take on Mike Mignola’s original comic book series, we got a Hellboy reboot in 2019. I have to admit that I was originally very happy to hear that the rebooted Hellboy bombed at the box office, and looked forward to seeing this on home video just so I could gleefully dissect it and explain why it sucked so badly and how wrong they were to even reboot this series when they coul...