The View From The Mountain

So many horror movies start out with a really great concept that when you see the basic idea introduced in the trailer, you’re eager to watch the film, just to see how this plays out--only for the movie to fall flat on its face, thanks to the filmmakers being unable to run with the idea. Weapons is one such horror movie that deftly avoids this pitfall. The main intriguing idea that Weapons has is the mysterious disappearance of an entire classroom of students at a specific time--2:17 am--one dark night. But these children don’t just vanish. They’re each seen running out of their homes on security cameras, still clad in their pajamas, with their arms bent back as they run, as if they’re flying. Once out of sight of the cameras, the children--17 in all--seemingly disappear off the face of the earth. If they were abducted by strangers, it would actually make for an easier case for the police to work. But it’s an even more bizarre mystery with the children having all ran off ...

October is a rare month for boys. That’s what author Ray Bradbury reminds us at the beginning of both his novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes , and the movie that was made from it some twenty years later. Bradbury (1920-2012) was a celebrated grandmaster of science fiction, fantasy and dark fantasy--writing novels, short stories and screenplays throughout the better part of the twentieth century. He would also write The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and Fahrenheit 451 . Something Wicked This Way Comes started out as the short story Black Ferris . Bradbury later turned it into a film script, but when plans fell through, he adapted the script into a novel, publishing it in 1962. Taking place in a small town in the early 20th century, SWTWC deals with a pair of boys who face a malevolent force that seeks to destroy everyone and everything they hold dear. Will Holloway (Vidal Peterson) and Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson) are best friends who are innocently enjoy...

With 28 Years Later , director Danny Boyle returns to the zombie saga that he began with 28 Days Later. The direct sequel, 28 Weeks Later , was directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. At the end of 28 Weeks Later , the zombies were busting out of England and sprawling onto the European continent. But in 28 Years Later , the “zombies” (who are still-living humans infected with a rage virus) have been pushed back into England, and the entire British Isles has now become something like New York City in John Carpenter’s Escape From New York : a vast wasteland that has been placed under quarantine by the outside world. But the British Isles are not all gloom and doom. A small village of non-infected humans are thriving on an island off the Scottish coast. Despite being shunned by the rest of the world, these hardy people have formed their own way of life and customs. They’re protected by a natural causeway that connects their island to the mainland--a causeway that sinks below the ...

Superman is back, again. Writer/director James Gunn, who gave us some fun superhero movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is now working the other side of the street for the DC Comics’ cinematic equivalent, starting with writing and directing the fantastic The Suicide Squad (2021) and then moving onto writing the HBO-Max animated series Creature Commandos , which was a freaky superhero team show that was ultimately about as entertaining as watching paint dry. Thankfully, his new project, a feature film dealing with the Last Son of Krypton, Superman, is much better. Gunn presents David Corenswet as Superman in a film that smartly eschews the creaky exploding planet origin story in favor of ‘a day in the life’ storyline where this Man of Steel has already been established as a beloved hero of the people of the city of Metropolis. It opens with Superman crash landing in the artic, after a bruising battle with another super powered being called the Hero of Boravia. The wee...

I recently completed this 1/24 scale model kit of the Ford Interceptor from the Mad Max films. From the Japanese model kit company Aoshima, I've had this kit sitting unbuilt in a box for way too long, and I thought it was time to finally build it. After painting it black, I gave it a weathering of light tan dust over the hood and roof, and along the sides. It comes complete with all of the details from the movie, including the gas tanks, a spare tire, and a can of dog food that serves as Max's dinner. This was an enjoyable build that was out of my wheelhouse. I don't build many car models, but this was the hero car from my favorite post apocalyptic movies, the Mad Max saga. So I couldn't resist building this one. And I'm glad I did it.

Released 32 years after the original Jurassic Park , and ten years after the first reboot, Jurassic World , the latest film, Jurassic World: Rebirth , is the seventh entry in the long-running cinematic series and, judging from its strong box office take, it won’t be the last. Scarlett Johansson, who was nine years old when the first JP film was released, is now the lead of Rebirth , starring as Zora Bennett, a mercenary who gets hired for a special mission in the jungles on the equator. And she convincingly plays the part with casual ease. The dinosaurs that had been returned to the modern day through science have not been doing too well in the intervening years, with their numbers dwindling to the point to where they now only thrive in areas along the equator, which is designated off limits to humans. Zora is hired to take a team of her fellow mercenaries to one of these forbidden locations that plays host to the dinosaurs because a pharmaceutical company wants them to e...

I first saw actress Florence Pugh as part of an unplanned double feature with the movies Fighting With My Family and Malevolent . Fighting was a biography based on the life of British-born wrestler Saraya Bevis, better known as Paige in the ring. Malevolent was a horror movie about a brother and sister team of con artists who pretend to be ghost hunters so they can bilk their clients--until they run into some real life terrors. Both movies were very good, and I was really impressed with how completely different Pugh was from one film to the next. And so I followed her career, which wasn’t hard to do, seeing how Pugh kept popping up in just about everything since then, including Dune: Part Two , and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Pugh debuted in the MCU as Yelena Belova, the little sister of Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) in the enjoyable Black Widow . Pugh also reprised Yelena later that year in the shitty Disney+ series Hawkeye (Pugh imbued her scenes with some mu...

It’s Friday night during the summer in Beutter county, an idyllic farming community in Indiana, and the good folks are settling in for what should be another humdinger of an evening. Until their plans are shattered by the arrival of an Explorer From Another World! This turns out to be an alien (Gemma Sterling) who starts savagely killing people from the moment it disembarks from its flying saucer. Local kids Eddie (Colin McCorquodale), Marybeth (Sage Marchand) and Culpepper (Nolan Gay) are planning on seeing a movie, but it looks like they’ll be battling for the very survival of the human race instead! Explorer From Another World is a wonderfully done throwback to the B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Ably directed by Woody Edwards (who gives himself a small cameo as Hank in the sheriff’s jail cell), the film is forty five minutes long, but manages to tell its torrid but funny story very effectively in the time allotted. And the short running time tracks when you...

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is returning (finally!) on the 17th of July with an all-new third season. To celebrate the return what has become my favorite of the new Star Trek shows on Paramount+, I decided to create a list of my top five episodes from the first two seasons. Memento Mori After several episodes of hinting at their presence, Memento Mori is the first big confrontation between the Federation and the Gorn. First introduced in the TOS episode Arena , with a memorable fight between Captain Kirk and a slow moving, green-skinned humanoid lizard, the Gorn have popped up in the episode The Time Trap of ST: The Animated Series , and in the In A Mirror, Darkly Part Two episode of ST: Enterprise (using really bad CGI that wasn’t much of an improvement over the Gorn suit used in Arena ). We never actually see the Gorn in Memento Mori , except for their ships, which look like angry claws ripping their way through space. This is a wise move, because not showing the...