The View From The Mountain

I came across a movie on Amazon Prime called Schizoid, starring the infamous Klaus Kinski, who is maybe better known for his starring role in the 1979 German remake of Nosferatu (as well as his strange and inexcusable behavior). In Schizoid, released in 1980, Kinski plays a Los Angles psychiatrist who runs a group therapy session that features Julie (Mariana Hill, from Blood Beach), a newspaper columnist who is receiving threats in the mail from a stalker. Things heat up when people in Julie’s group therapy start turning up dead. For what it is--a low budget horror thriller--Schizoid is not bad, not bad at all. Despite it’s slasher trappings, writer/director David Paulsen manages to create a decent murder mystery amidst the gory kill scenes. The cast of suspects include Donna Wilkes (Angel) as the doctor’s volatile daughter, Craig Wasson (Ghost Story) as Julie’s ex-husband, Flo Gerrish (Don’t Answer The Phone), and Christopher Lloyd (Back To The Future), as anoth...

Babylon 5 was a science fiction TV series that aired back in the 1990s. It was about a massive space station that was under the command of Earth. It was a fantastic series, and is available on physical media, as well as HBO-Max. In the show, the space station was protected by several wings of space fighters known as Starfuries. They were one of the best-designed, and coolest-looking space fighters to ever launch from a TV series. This is a model kit of the B-5 Starfury that was released by Revell/Monogram in 1/72 scale. But instead of doing the standard Starfury assigned to Babylon 5, I decided to do mine up as a Psi Corps version. The Psi Corps was a telepath group whose fascist ideals threatened B5, as well as Earth itself. The Psi Corps version of the Starfury was black in color, although...

"Satre said, 'Hell is other people.' He was my first crush." -- Wednesday Addams. Back when I heard they were making a TV series out of the Addams Family character Wednesday for Netflix, I really didn’t have much faith that it would be very good. And when I read what the basic plot would be: that Wednesday would be sent to a special school of the dark and wicked, I figured this was going to be much worse than I had initially thought. The Addams Family had been around for decades; it didn’t need to be “modernized” with a bastardized format that merged it with Harry Potter (and I’m really sick and tired of the frigging “magical school for kids” plot that has seemingly overtaken nearly every movie and TV show within the last twenty years). But when I finally saw Wednesday , you know what? It didn’t suck. In fact, the new Wednesday show on Netflix is really very good. What the heck happened? It’s several things. The firs...

Looking at the reviews for Andor , the latest Star Wars series produced by and exclusively for Disney Plus, they all say the same thing: that Andor is a vastly mature TV series--and it is. But many of these reviews also appear to be a back-handed insult to the Star Wars franchise in general, by stating how Andor was made for the adults in the room, and how it lacked the dopey ‘pew-pew-pew’ action of space wizards fighting each other with their laser swords that we get in Star Wars . And yeah, Star Wars does have its silly moments (and that’s pretty much all of Return of the Jedi ). But the very best of Star Wars (the original Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back , Rogue One , The Last Jedi ) strived mightily to be far more than the simple space operas they appeared to be. And even the films that didn’t have such lofty goals ( Solo , SW: Revenge of the Sith ) are still vastly entertaining. But it doesn’t appear that most people are really complaining abo...