The View From The Mountain

I had this 1/1000th scale model kit (from Polar Lights) of the Klingon D-7 battleship from Star Trek on my hands. So I decided to build a space dock for it. I knew I wanted some kind of gantry covering the ship on top, so I used these plastic girders from Evergreen and assembled them into the basic shape of the D-7. I scratch-built the buildings you see on the gantry from styrene sheet. Then I covered them with greeblies--these are bits and pieces of model kits that I placed on the surface of the buildings to give them some texture. I also made sure to give the D-7 plenty of battle damage, so as to give it a good reason to come in for repairs. And so, after a really rambunctious time on the Romulan DMZ, the Klingon Battlecruiser K'Prang pulls in for repairs and some blood wine. Then it...

Back in January of this year, Netflix premiered Woman of the Dead , a crime thriller from Austria with slight supernatural overtones. I figured I’d give it a shot, since I was in the mood for a good Lifetime-type crime story. Do you know what I mean when I refer to these Lifetime TV movies? They’re goofy crime “thrillers” regarding soccer moms who become amateur sleuths that wind up being so silly that they’re more unintentionally funny than anything else. But within the first fifteen minutes of its first episode, Woman of the Dead proves itself to be more of a Hitchcockian thriller: a darker, high-brow, and sophisticated thriller that’s genuinely exciting. Anna Maria Mühe stars as Brunhilde Blum (everybody calls her Blum), an undertaker in a small Austrian mountain town where it seemingly snows all year round. Her beloved husband works as a cop with the local police force--until the moment when he gets savagely run down on his motorcycle by a black Range Rover that abr...

Released in June of 1973, The Legend of Hell House was a supernatural gothic horror movie that was based on the book, Hell House , written by Richard Matheson. On the surface, The Legend of Hell House can be seen as a remake of The Haunting , the 1963 classic ghost story movie that was adapted from The Haunting of Hill House , the equally classic Shirley Jackson novel. Both films deal with paranormal investigators probing a legendary haunted house, but Matheson’s take on the story was different in that science played a stronger role, and Hell House had a very nice twist at the end. Directed by John Hough (he also helmed Twins of Evil , and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry , among others), Hell House abruptly begins when physicist Dr. Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill) is called to the estate of a millionaire (Roland Culver), who makes him an enticing offer: take a paranormal team to The Belasco House, otherwise known as “the Mount Everest of haunted houses,” to determine if ...