The View From The Mountain

I re-watched some old episodes of Stargate: Atlantis, the sequel series to Stargate: SG-1 (which was the TV sequel to Stargate, the movie, released back in 1994), and I came across the fifth season episode Whispers. Whispers was this series' loving take on horror movies, and re-watching it some ten years later, I have to say that it holds up very well. Directed by William Waring, Whispers uses all of the cliches of the horror genre--but instead of being a jokey (and forgettable) send off, the episode treats its threat very seriously, and winds up giving us some truly scary moments. The SG team consists of Sheppard (Joe Flanigan) and Dr. Beckett (Paul McGillion), along with an all-women Stargate unit led by Christina Cox (Blood Ties), with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Nicole de Boer rounding out the team as its science expert.  While the episode has plenty of jump scares, many of which feature real threats, it's the overall creepiness of Whispers that makes it so good--espec

I bought this resin figure of a Starfleet alien from a Chiller convention about twenty--twenty five--years ago. And ever since then he's been knocking around unpainted...until now.  No assembly was required on the figure itself. I just had to paint him. Since he was clad in the standard uniform of Starfleet in the Next Generation era, I decided to make him an engineer.  So I gave him the gold shirt and trimmings of the Starfleet engineer of that era. I also gave him a blue skin tone, setting down a darker blue base that was highlighted with a lighter blue dry-brushing. I painted his eyes red, which tend to pop nicely in these pictures. The base is one of those wooden jobs that you get in the hobby store for really cheap. I covered it with a layer of Sculpt-A-Mold, then painted it to look like the surface of an alien planet. The plant was cut from a branch of a plastic aquarium plant and painted purple with yellow for that 'alien plant' look. Working on this took a couple of

Despite the fact that I never believed in the so-called real-life “paranormal investigators” whose adventures they were based on, I still greatly enjoyed the two Conjuring films that were directed by James Wan. Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson were extremely engaging as the husband and wife ghost/demon hunting team from those two films, and when I heard that they were coming back in Annabelle Comes Home (the title makes this sound like a TV movie on the Lifetime Network--“Annabelle Comes Home, To Find Love!”), I was eager to see this film whenever it came out.   It turned out that Annabelle actually Came Home last year, in 2019, and I completely missed it. But, considering the multitude of real-life horrors--both personal and public--that 2020 would eventually present to us, I think can be excused for not catching this film in a timely fashion. Once I finally did see Annabelle Comes Home , I was immediately struck at how Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson only appeared at the beginning a

Universal had been trying to jump-start its classic monster movies into a new ‘cinematic universe’ (hey, it worked for the Marvel Superhero movies, right?) for a while now, starting with a new version of Dracula that was pretty forgettable, and ending with a new version of the Mummy that was so bad--as well as being a big bomb at the box office--that it abruptly ended Universal’s attempt to create its ’Dark Universe.’ I thought this was a shame, because the Classic Universal Monsters--Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Mummy (in a better film), and the Invisible Man--really deserve to have a comeback. So I was very happy when Universal released a new version of The Invisible Man , written and directed by Leigh Whannell, a highly creative actor/writer/director who has given us the Saw films, as well as the Insidious series (he made his directing debut on the third Insidious film). The Invisible Man was also produced by Jason Blum, whose Blumhouse studio was responsible for

The Hunt is yet another tired adaptation of The Most Dangerous Game , a short story written by Richard Connell in 1924 and has been turned into motion pictures at least several dozen times (both officially and unofficially), starting with the 1932 film of the same name (which starred Fay Wray, who shot this film at night on the very same jungle sets where she shot King Kong during the day) and including the very silly (but still vastly entertaining) Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity in 1987. The basic story is that of a famous hunter who, growing bored with animals, decides to hunt humans for sport on his private island, instead. The Hunt is a variation of this theme, where a group of people are kidnapped and brought to the private hunting grounds belonging to wealthy elites who hunt them for sport. But for some strange reason, the people being hunted are given working guns and other assorted weapons--which was something that not even the hunter in the origi

Although I bought this Horizon vinyl mode kit of Catwoman back in the late 1990s, I didn't actually build it until now, in 2020. A long time, yes, I know. Two things prompted me to get this done now: stress relief from the current situation (situations?) that we're all going through, as well as the fact that 2020 is Catwoman's 80th birthday. The whip that she's cracking is a thin wire that came with the kit. I put putty on the end that she's holding to build up the grip. She's 1/8th scale, and I painted her outfit black and purple. The whip was painted dark brown. Her face was painted with a darker flesh tone, with her lips painted ruby red. Her eyes are painted a chocolate brown. Although she came with her own stand, I didn't use it. I

I recently saw this model kit of the Romulan Bird of Prey (from Star Trek) online from Polar Lights. It was cheap enough, and not so large that it would take up too much room on my shelf, so I got it. It wound up being the perfect model to build during a pandemic lockdown. Not too hard, but not that easy, either. The hardest part of this kit is the water-slide decal of the bird of prey that fits underneath the ship. I wound up breaking it up into five separate sections, and that did the trick. Once all of the decals were on, it became a very striking ship. With this Bird of Prey on patrol, Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise had better watch their backs!

One of the best things to come out of 2016’s Suicide Squad --if not the only good thing to come out of that piece of shit movie--was Margot Robbie’s engaging performance as Harley Quinn. Originally created by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm for the Batman: The Animated Series as a new super villain for the Dark Knight, Harley was voiced on that show by Arleen Sorkin, who lovingly referred to her boyfriend, the psychotic Joker, as “Mistah J!” Harley proved so popular that she was officially adopted into the Batman comics. Robbie was the first live-action actress to portray Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad , and when I heard that Robbie was reprising the character in her own film, I was more than happy to see it. Although it has a goofy title, Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn is an extremely enjoyable and vastly entertaining film. It eschews the dreary and depressing ennui of the recent, extremely overrated Joker film for a more comical,

Janis Joplin was my first dead celebrity. She was one of my parents’ favorite singers back when I was a kid, and I vividly recall being informed by my mother that Joplin had died. One of Joplin’s albums was playing at that moment on our stereo’s 8-Track player, and I went over and listened to the voice of a dead woman singing. That blew my mind as a young boy, and it also creeped me out big time, as well. I had that same creeped-out feeling while watching re-animated Carrie Fisher casually walking around and talking in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker . Although she had passed away long before her appearance in The Last Jedi , it didn’t bother me watching Fisher in Last Jedi because I knew that she was alive and well while filming that movie (and that it was one of the last things she had shot). But for Rise of Skywalker , Fisher’s performance had been created using old, unused footage leftover from The Force Awakens , and yet I could never shake the unpleasant feeling that the dec

I added a new ship to my Rag tag Fleet. It's a starliner--a spaceship version of an ocean liner--that I made from a piece of the Galaxy Quest spaceship. I added the fin on the back. This starliner joined the Rag Tag Fleet after the fall of the Twelve Colonies, when the Cylons attacked them. Here's the starliner with the Galactica and the other RTF ships. The Galactica is the Moebius model kit. The other two Rag Tag Fleet ships were kit-bashed vessels of my own design. I plan to add more ships to the Rag Tag Fleet over time.