The View From The Mountain

I saw the original Alien film in the theaters when it first came out back in 1979, and I was instantly a fan of the film, as well as its director, Ridley Scott. I followed this film series as one movie after the other was released over the years, and found myself really enjoying them, even if some of the films weren’t that great. The last film in this series was 2017’s Alien Covenant , a Scott-directed sequel to a prequel (!!!) which did so badly that I figured the Alien film franchise was finally over and done with. But, forty five years after the release of the first Alien , we finally get another in the series: Alien Romulus . I was genuinely (and pleasantly) surprised to see this, with 20th Century Fox, the studio that made and distributed the Alien films, having been gobbled up by Disney. The behind the scenes story was that Alien Romulus was only going to be released on Hulu, but that Disney executives saw something in the rough cut that made them chang...

When I saw a movie listed on the Amazon streaming service as Dead And Buried , I wondered if this was the very same Dead And Buried which scared the daylights out of me back when I first saw it as a VHS rental in the early eighties. The image that Amazon had was just a text title of the film’s name. So I cranked up the great Amazonian streaming machine and, lo and behold, there it truly was: Dead And Buried , freshly come back to life for me much like the characters in the film do. Taking place in a quiet coastal town, Sheriff Gillis (James Farentino--who I’ll always fondly remember as Cmdr Richard Owens from The Final Countdown ) deals with a series of grisly murders where the victims are either burned up or chopped up in vicious ways. On top of all of this is the fact that Gillis is also dealing with the strange behavior of his wife, Janet (Melody Anderson--best known as Dale Arden from the 1980 Flash Gordon ), who may be having an affair behind his back. There is one really shoc...

Although I had seen Alien Covenant more than a month ago, around when it first came out, I could not review it because--technically--I didn’t really see it, thanks to some loud jackasses who thought the general rule of being quiet in the theater while the movie was playing didn’t apply to them. The nonstop chattering started during the opening scene where a newly “born” David (Michael Fassbender) is speaking with his creator Peter Weyland (an uncredited Guy Pearce). This opening scene may not make much sense at first, but the reason why it’s included snaps into sharp focus the deeper you get into Alien: Covenant , which is very much a sequel to Prometheus (and is all the better for it). But, being the overexcited screech-weasels my fellow movie watchers were, once the chattering began it just got worse, with people speaking loudly to each other or into their cell phones, as if they were anywhere else but a movie theater. Leaving midway through the film, I managed to impress upon the...

I was watching a movie talk show the other day and one of the pundits on the panel mentioned just how awful Alien Vs. Predator ( AVP ) was. It made me realize that I haven’t watched this film in a while. I had been a huge Alien fan since seeing the original Alien in theaters back in 1979 (and had seen Aliens , Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection ) in theaters, also. I had never been a big Predator fan, seeing how the first film with Arnold (“Get to da Choppa!”) is really the only one that’s best of that bunch. But I enjoyed AVP when I first saw it on DVD back in 2004. Granted, the movie takes liberties with the backstory of both franchises--which may be the major sticking point for most fans of the Aliens and Predators, but upon re-watching this flick I realized that the backstory that AVP creates for Aliens actually fits into the mythology by having Lance Henriksen return to play the original owner of the Weyland Corporation, an early version of the firm that keeps popping up in o...