The View From The Mountain

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...

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’...

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 Black Phone was a horror movie that was based on author Joe Hill’s short story about a boy held captive by a killer in his basement who receives messages from the killer’s deceased victims over an old, broken phone. I thought The Black Phone was very well done, having been smartly directed by Scott Derrickson ( Sinister , the first Doctor Strange ), but, seeing how TBP ended, I never figured a sequel would be on the horizon--at least until last year. I follow Derrickson’s writing collaborator, C. Robert Cargill, on social media, and it was from Cargill that I first learned about The Black Phone 2 being brought to life. The Black Phone 2 originally started as an idea from Joe Hill (who’s the son of Stephen King), and Derrickson and Cargill quickly turned it into a movie, with filming running from late 2024 into early 2025. Taking place in 1982, four years after the events of the first film, Mason Thames returns as Finney, who escaped the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) in t...

Whether you believe in the “true” exploits of demonologists Ed & Lorraine Warren or not (I don’t), The Conjuring series of films, based on their “true” stories, have all been very entertaining, with everything now supposedly coming to an end with The Conjuring: Last Rites . After a prologue in 1964, where we witness the traumatic birth of the Warren’s daughter, Judy, the rest of the movie advances to 1986, with the Warrens now somewhat retired. They’re still speaking at colleges, before giggly students who crack Ghostbusters jokes at them, but the Warrens have ceased personally investigating creepy cases on their own. That is, until their good friend Father Gordon (Steve Coulter) winds up hanging from a noose, thanks to a demonic attack. Father Gordon had been trying to get the Warrens to investigate the case of the Smurls--a family in Pennsylvania who are suffering through a severe haunting in their house, and when the Warrens finally do get involved, the demons come...

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 ...

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 ...

Presence, the latest film from director Steven Soderbergh ( Sex, Lies and Videotape, Out Of Sight ), is based on his real life experiences with what he believes is a ghost in his own home. Inspired by his spectral roommate, Soderbergh wrote a few pages of a script, which he handed to David Koepp ( Panic Room, Jurassic Park ), who finished it. The film was shot in a house in Crandall, New Jersey, over just eleven days in September 2023 (they received an interim SAG-AFTRA agreement during the strike that year). Soderbergh shot this in the ‘found footage’ style, using only one camera, with himself as the camera operator. The result is that Presence is a haunted house story that is told from the point of view of the ghost. And it’s marvelous. But instead of the typical ’found footage’ movie, which is supposed to be culled together from film or video that is literally found after the fact, we see everything that’s happening in this house through the ‘eye...

There have been many horror movies over the years that have been hailed as “a new horror classic,” but so few of them actually live up to that title. It Follows is that rare film that is truly a classic. Released to theaters ten years ago this year, It Follows very quickly proved that it wasn’t just another tired rehash of the tropes found in the slasher genre, and wound up becoming a horror film that’s truly scary and unnerving. After a tense opening scene showing a teenage girl (Bailey Spry) running in a panic from an unseen threat--only to be found dead the following morning, the movie then focuses on Jay (Maika Monroe), a nineteen year old college student who’s trying to find some fun in her mundane life. But after a sexual encounter with her boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary), things get very weird. Hugh knocks out Jay with chloroform, then ties her to a wheelchair in an abandoned building. And it gets even stranger ...

Director Robert Eggers remaking Nosferatu is a perfect fit. Eggers, whose films are all period pieces that are expertly researched down to how people speak in a specific time period, manages to entice the viewer into his stories by making them believe they are really in the era they are watching onscreen. The mundane complaint that Hollywood is running out of ideas is constantly being proved wrong by Eggers, who is telling his stories from across the breadth of time. And his take on Nosferatu is no exception. The original 1922 silent film Nosferatu was born out of the desire of telling the Dracula story from Bram Stoker’s seminal novel, but without paying for the rights. So certain names and locations were changed, and presto: we wound up with a classic silent film that still holds up exceedingly well, thanks to its extremely creepy vampire that became an enduring menace in his own right. Egger’s Nosferatu is a ...

Halloween is coming. We’re still in the throes of summer right now, but not for long. It’s already getting cooler, and I’m seeing some slight color in the trees. I thought I’d give an early welcome to my favorite holiday by watching three new horror films that were released this year. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire -- I really enjoyed Ghostbusters: Afterlife for two reasons: the introduction of a new, younger cast to the franchise, and the fact that it takes place in the completely different setting of Oklahoma. Frozen Empire takes place back in New York City, eliminating the freshness of having the story be in a new place, and the new cast is basically reduced to being guest stars. There are just too many people, here. The old Ghostbusters are shoehorned into the story, along with new characters who have been introduced in Frozen Empire. This doesn’t give the new cast much room to shine. And the nostalgia factor is getting very annoying; we have to see Slim...