The View From The Mountain

3 Body Problem , Netflix’s latest TV series, is loosely based on the first novel in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, by Chinese author Liu Cixin (who also wrote the book The Wandering Earth ). Simply put, it’s an alien invasion story, but one that’s a lot more sophisticated than your average ‘pew-pew-pew’ cliché-fest. For one thing, this series begins in the 1960s, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, which was the nationwide purge instigated within China by then-Chairman Mao to keep himself in power. A young woman named Ye Wenjie arises from the chaos to become a central figure in the overall story. The 3 Body Problem of this series’ name refers to a far-flung solar system that has three suns. Any planet within this tri-sun system would have a hard time of it, taking turns orbiting one belligerent sun after another, and it just so happens that the aliens who set their eyes on invading Earth--known as the San-Ti--come from this embattled world. ...

Back in January of this year, Netflix premiered Woman of the Dead , a crime thriller from Austria with slight supernatural overtones. I figured I’d give it a shot, since I was in the mood for a good Lifetime-type crime story. Do you know what I mean when I refer to these Lifetime TV movies? They’re goofy crime “thrillers” regarding soccer moms who become amateur sleuths that wind up being so silly that they’re more unintentionally funny than anything else. But within the first fifteen minutes of its first episode, Woman of the Dead proves itself to be more of a Hitchcockian thriller: a darker, high-brow, and sophisticated thriller that’s genuinely exciting. Anna Maria Mühe stars as Brunhilde Blum (everybody calls her Blum), an undertaker in a small Austrian mountain town where it seemingly snows all year round. Her beloved husband works as a cop with the local police force--until the moment when he gets savagely run down on his motorcycle by a black Range Rover that abr...

"Satre said, 'Hell is other people.' He was my first crush." -- Wednesday Addams. Back when I heard they were making a TV series out of the Addams Family character Wednesday for Netflix, I really didn’t have much faith that it would be very good. And when I read what the basic plot would be: that Wednesday would be sent to a special school of the dark and wicked, I figured this was going to be much worse than I had initially thought. The Addams Family had been around for decades; it didn’t need to be “modernized” with a bastardized format that merged it with Harry Potter (and I’m really sick and tired of the frigging “magical school for kids” plot that has seemingly overtaken nearly every movie and TV show within the last twenty years). But when I finally saw Wednesday , you know what? It didn’t suck. In fact, the new Wednesday show on Netflix is really very good. What the heck happened? It’s several things. The firs...

I guess this means no mall for us.  Not having read the R.L. Stine novels (I wasn’t the target audience), I wasn’t sure what to expect from this three part horror movie series based on Stine’s Fear Street series on Netflix. I decided to give the first film a shot, and if I didn’t like it then I wouldn’t bother with the rest. Well, I wound up enjoying these so much I watched the entire three part series.  All three Fear Street films are ably directed by Leigh Janiak, who also co-wrote the screenplays. The first film, Fear Street: Part One: 1994 , warms my heart from the very opening scene, where we see a woman buying a book from a B. Daltons--a long-gone book store that I fondly remember buying the better part of my book collection from as a kid and a teenager. Unfortunately the clerk at this bookstore winds up being savagely murdered by a psycho in a Halloween mask. You sure he's coming from THAT way?! And while it starts out as an unflinching (all three movies are rated-R and...

I was watching Doom on Netflix recently, and throughout the movie, I kept thinking of a much better take on the same material. Based on a video game, Doom starred Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a super Marine in charge of a team of super Marines who are sent to Mars when the interplanetary colony suffers a strange outbreak of videogame violence. Despite all the shooting and alien gore, Doom managed to be extremely boring, which made me reach for the OTHER “there’s trouble on Mars” movie, Ghosts of Mars . Released just a few years before Doom , Ghosts of Mars was helmed by legendary director John Carpenter and starred Ice Cube and Natasha Henstridge. Instead of a team being dispatched from Earth to solve whatever problem has arisen on the Red Planet, in Ghosts of Mars , it’s the Martian colonists who deal with the red menace. Henstridge plays a member of the Mars Police Force who is sent with a team of other officers to pick up the notorious criminal Desolation Williams (Ice Cube). Bu...

When I first started watching Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House , I out-right hated it. I loved the original novel, which is a classic horror novel, written by Shirley Jackson, that deals with the excursion into a famously (or infamously) haunted house by a team of paranormal investigators. It was turned into a masterpiece of a film, titled The Haunting , directed by Robert Wise, back in 1963. It was then remade into a really shitty movie in 1999 (despite having a great cast, the remake was pretty bad). This time, Netflix has turned The Haunting of Hill House into a ten episode mini-series, and they’ve made some major changes, which was why I initially hated the first episode. Three of the characters from the book who were a part of the paranormal team, Nell, Theo and Luke, have been turned into siblings in the series, now part of a large family that moved into Hill House when they were children. Their parents, Hugh and Olivia Crain (Henry Thomas and Carla Gugino) are hoping to “...