The View From The Mountain

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...