The View From The Mountain

Would you swim in a place called The Devil’s Mouth ? A bunch of dipshits young thrill seekers do exactly that. Led by Maxine (Lana Condor; To All The Boys ), the group’s unofficial pleasure coordinator, a group of flaming morons college students, not satisfied with already vacationing in Thailand, decide to go exploring a network of underground freshwater caves with a local guide named Wat (Tayme Thapthimthong; The White Lotus ). Despite the fact that sharks only like the salty ocean, they all encounter a bull shark in the deep waters of the caves, through which they must swim, because they couldn’t at least have made this trip on a boat—oh no, that would have made too much sense. The Devil’s Mouth isn’t a truly terrible film, but it’s far from being a good one, as well. It’s the type of annoying “thriller” where the characters act so stupidly that you’re reduced to just waiting (and hoping) for the shark to pick them off, one by one, which it does (and ...

Steven Spielberg introduced me to aliens. I had seen aliens in many movies and TV shows before I watched his Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the movie theater as a kid. But Close Encounters was the first film I saw back then to really treat the subject seriously for me, opening my mind up to the fact that aliens might be visiting our planet, and that—for once—they were benevolent. With Disclosure Day , Spielberg returns to the ‘benevolent aliens are here’ genre, but with a darker twist. Disclosure Day opens with Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) rescuing his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) from the clutches of Wardex, a corporation run by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). It’s the singular mission of Wardex to suppress all knowledge of aliens on Earth. Daniel and Jane go on the run with the Archive, a physical media library of documents and films about alien visitations to Earth, starting with Roswell. Meanwhile, in Kansas City, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a TV meteorologist, abru...

Forty two years after the Helen Slater cinematic Supergirl , DC Comics tries it again. After first playing Supergirl in an amusing cameo at the end of 2025’s Superman , Milly Alcock ( House of the Dragon ) plays her again as the lead character in 2026’s Supergirl , which turned out to be one of the really big bombs of the year (so far). And, seeing how it took a big dive financially, that must mean Supergirl ‘26 must be pretty bad, right? No, not at all. Having just seen it, I have to say that, while far from being a cinematic masterpiece, Supergirl was still pretty enjoyable for me. After the unbridled optimism of 2025’s Superman , Supergirl aims for a darker, more intense interpretation of the superhero tale. And it’s very gritty: the film opens with an off screen Krypto the Super Dog pissing on a newspaper in Supergirl’s spaceship/RV, with a still-in-bed Supergirl congratulating Krypto on getting most of it on target. Maybe this down and dirty tone was what turned off...

If I had been ten years younger at the time, I might have been a huge fan of Masters of the Universe —aka He-Man —when it first premiered on TV back in the 1980s. But I never watched the original cartoon, nor did I buy any of the action figures (and these days, I wish I had bought some, seeing how several of the original MOTU figures are now worth big bucks). Despite the silliness of its overall concept, like characters with goofy names such as Lock Jaw, Ram Man, and Fisto (!!!), I still enjoyed the first live action MOTU movie, back when that was released in 1987. I thought Frank Langella ( Dracula ; Those Lips, Those Eyes ) gave a great performance as Skeletor, the evil villain of the MOTU fantasy world known as Eternia. I tried to watch the Netflix animated series of MOTU , produced by Kevin Smith ( Clerks ), but I just couldn’t get into that version at all and so I tapped out midway through. After the Netflix version, it looked like that was finally the end for MOTU —but Matt...

Willa Holland stars as Rebecca Owens, a young woman who’s trying to put her life back together by finishing her training as a mortician’s assistant, while also receiving her one year sober chip from Narcotics Anonymous. All in all, things are going swimmingly for Rebecca—until her boss, Raymond Delver (Paul Sparks), unexpectedly calls her back in to work overnight after her first day, because the mortuary has just seen a large influx of fresh corpses. But Rebecca still easily manages the extra work, despite the raging thunderstorm outside that plays havoc with the electricity. The flickering lights keep making Rebecca see things in the darkened corners of the mortuary. She sees some really creepy, unnerving imagery—like the corpses moving ever so subtly on the tables, or one corpse that suddenly has a mouth filled with fangs—but everything weird she’s seeing is strictly a result of the spotty lighting. Right? Right?! I first saw Willa Holland on the Arrow CW sh...

Former microbiologist and present day science schoolteacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) awakens inside of a body bag while being tended to by an automated robot medic. Fighting off the automated medic, Grace stumbles around a strange structure that turns out to be the interior of an interstellar spaceship. At first, he has no idea why he’s aboard the ship, or where in space the ship is located. But as his memories slowly come back to him, in the form of flashbacks, we learn that Grace is part of a three-man crew aboard the Hail Mary, a spaceship traveling towards the Tau Ceti system, located just under twelve light years from Earth. It turns out that the very same sun that has lit Earth with its light and warmth for billions of years is slowly dimming, threatening all life on the planet as it freezes into an icy ball. What’s causing the sun to dim are particles that are dubbed astrophages, and our sun isn’t the only victim of these particles. Other stars out in space are also...

I was still flush with the recent pleasant news that Brendan Fraser and cinematic goddess Rachel Weisz (woof!) were returning in a new (and hopefully better than the third entry) Mummy movie when I first heard about Lee Cronin’s The Mummy , which premiered in theaters this past April. LC’s The Mummy tries to reanimate bandage boy for the twenty first century, but with a twist. TV correspondent Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) is living with his family in Cairo, Egypt for his job when his eight year old daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) is abducted from her home by a stranger. The girl seemingly vanishes into thin air, and the heart-broken Cannon family move back to the US. Eight years later, the US embassy in Egypt calls them to report that Katie has been found alive...kinda...sort of. Katie (now played by Natalie Grace) had been a bound prisoner in a sealed ancient Egyptian sarcophagus, and the experience has left her in a horrific zombie-like state. If you’...

Spider-Man Into The Spider-Verse (2018) was a fantastic superhero film that just happened to be an animated feature. Starring Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) as Spider-Man, the film dealt with the multi-verse—which is a scientific theory that states there are a multitude of universes out there, each existing on its own plane of reality. This idea isn’t new to comics; I’ve read countless stories about superheroes dealing with denizens from other universes—and it’s also an idea that’s been used often in science fiction, like the In A Mirror Darkly episode of the original Star Trek . Recently, the MCU has used this theory in the last ten or so of its films. Into the Spider-Verse has Morales dealing with several different Spider-Men, and Spider-Women, from alternate Earths—one of whom is Spider-Man Noir, voiced by Nicolas Cage. The Spider (as he’s known in the TV series) is the Spider-Man from a 1930s era New York City. He’s a private eye named Ben Reilly (played on screen by ...

I first saw Logan’s Run in a New Jersey movie theater fifty years ago, when I was a boy. The theater, somewhere in the suburban wilds of the Garden State, was packed to the gills with people. I wasn’t sure what to expect with the movie back then—all I cared about that it was a brand new science fiction film, in an age when big budget SF properties on both TV and the big screen was very rare (of course, Star Wars , which would be released the very next year, would change all of that). Based on the 1967 novel of the same name by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, Logan’s Run is a futuristic tale about a man named Logan 5 (Michael York) who has a special job in a place filled with hedonistic leisure. Logan lives within the splendor of a Utopian society whose population dwells within large domes. The interior is presented as a vast, upscale shopping mall where its citizens want for nothing. Every need, every whim, and every fantasy is met. Of course, there’s a catc...

The town of Fairwood, located in New England, is undergoing an intense mayoral election, which is coming just a few days after it celebrates its 300th anniversary. Harold Faulkner (Jayce Bartok) is running for mayor against the incumbent Blair Gladwell (Amy Hargreaves), and the campaign is already a fierce one. Tensions among the townsfolk are so thick you could cut it with a knife. And somebody’s been busy cutting up the townsfolk with an actual knife, along with whatever other weapon that’s lying around. An assailant clad in a judge’s mask and robe is slaughtering people in the town, starting with Allison’s (Naomi Grace) girlfriend, Melissa (Olivia Nikkanen—The Society). Is he just another wacky slasher, or something much more? Founder’s Day is an almost halfway decent slasher movie that tries to be more than the usual slash fest, and it’s for that reason alone that I really wanted to like it. Naomi Grace ( Gridiron Grid ) is superb as Allison, who is hit with one traged...

The Housemaid (from 2025—not to be confused with the 2010 film of the same name) is based on the first book in a psychological thriller series by author Freida McFadden. Sydney Sweeney stars as Millie Calloway. a young woman down on her luck who’s struggling after being released on parole from jail. While living in her car, Millie applies for a live-in maid position with a wealthy family, Nina (Amanda Seyfried) & Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) Winchester, and their young daughter, Cecelia (Indiana Elle) and—to her delight—she gets the job. But, of course, once Millie starts working her maid gig, that’s when the real horror show begins. Despite acting like she was in Millie’s corner in the beginning, Nina deliberately creates problems for Millie that make her look bad. It turns out that Nina is a whack-job who’s served time at a mental facility for trying to kill her own daughter when she was a baby, and now Nina’s got Millie in her sights. If The Housemaid sounds like some ...

I was halfway through Avatar: Fire and Ash when a thought struck me: Did director James Cameron basically remake the Tarzan movies as a science fiction epic? I’m not suggesting that Cameron stole anything from Edgar Rice Burroughs. But the basic themes are present in both sagas. Young John Clayton is a nobleman who is left to fend for himself as a child in the jungles of Africa, only to become Tarzan, the Lord of the Jungle. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a disabled vet sent to Pandora, a moon in orbit of a Jupiter-like gas giant, where he becomes that planet’s version of the Lord of the Jungles, thanks to a technology that enables him to possess the body of a Na’vi, one of its native peoples. The Avatar saga is an otherworldly tale that chronicles the efforts of a low-tech society—the Na’vi—battling high-tech invaders—evil Earthlings—who try to possess the planet Pandora, much like how they have possessed the bodies of Na’vi clones. Although I wasn’t really a...

Film director Dan Trachtenberg, who revived the previously moribund Predator franchise with the surprise Hulu hit Prey , and then continued the Predator revival with the superb animated film Predator: Killer of Killers , continues to redefine the alien hunter/killers with his latest, Predator: Badlands . Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is a young Predator—whose race have been identified in this film for the first time as the Yautja—who has been considered the useless runt of his clan and is about to be killed because of it by his own father, until his brother saves him at the cost of his own life. Dek escapes in his brother’s spaceship to an alien world, where he must regain his status within his clan by bringing them the head of the Kalisk, a supreme apex predator who has never been defeated by any of the Yautja that were sent to hunt it. When he arrives (more like crash-lands) on the planet, Dek finds an unlikely ally in the form of Thia (Elle Fann...