The View From The Mountain

I first heard of The Primevals when I was a kid. Back in the day, which was the 1970s, I received all of my movie news from magazines, which was where I first discovered the work in progress fantasy film that was being directed by special effects master David Allen. Using stop motion animation, a technique that was pioneered by Willis Harold O'Brien, Allen created a story of an expedition that travels to Nepal after an incident where a Yeti had been killed during a confrontation with a group of Sherpa. Having received the body of the Yeti (and it was promptly put on display in their museum), this expedition, led by Claire Collier (Juliet Mills, the daughter of actor John Mills, and the sister of Haley Mills), wants to see if they can find more Yeti and perhaps save them from extinction. Hiring a safari guide with the super heroic name of Rondo Montana (!!!), they go looking for more Yeti in the Himalayas, only to find a lost civilization. Don’t you hat...

I wasn’t expecting to love Underwater as much as I did. In fact, I was in no hurry to even see this movie at all were it not for the rave reviews for it from John Squires, editor of Bloody Disgusting, as well as reviewers from several other horror outlets. They championed Underwater so much that I rented it digitally, and I wound up loving it myself so much that I promptly bought a physical media copy of the film the day after seeing the rental. Underwater deals with the crew of an undersea drilling rig--a massive, ringed city at the bottom of the Pacific that houses several hundred--that suffers a cataclysmic event in the opening few minutes of the film. Norah Price (wonderfully played by Kristen Stewart), is so caught off guard by the crushing devastation that it’s all that she can do to just run to the nearest safety zone barely in time without her shoes. Stewart, who proved her acting chops in such great films as Personal Shopper , is fantastic as the cynical Norah--a young w...

“Broke into the wrong goddamn rec room, didn't ya, you bastard!” I was reminded by a Twitter post that the movie Tremors just recently celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. I had seen this movie back when it first came out (in the olden days when we went to the video store to rent movies on VHS), and had enjoyed it very much then. Seeing that Tremors was playing on Netflix, I decided it was time for a re-watch. And I was very glad I revisited the little town of Perfection, Nevada once more. Tremors is a great, remarkably smart horror/comedy about a pair of handymen named Earl and Valentine, superbly played by Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon, respectively, who come across massive killer subterranean worms under the dirt of their one-horse desert town. If this sounds silly, it is. But the movie works so well because it leans into the goofiness of its situation and characters by playing up the humor of the eccentricities on display. However, the film (well-directed by Ron Underwood--...

Warning, this review contains a mild spoiler Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a sequel to the 2014 Godzilla film that many people trashed because Godzilla wasn’t shown onscreen nearly enough in the film. Personally, while I understand the criticism, I still enjoyed the 2014 movie, which re-introduce the Big G to modern day audiences, and it was successful enough to start a whole new universe of film sequels that started with Kong: Skull Island . That universe-building continues with Godzilla: King of the Monsters , which is directed by Michael Dougherty, who also helmed the Halloween classic Trick R Treat . There are monsters galore in the new Godzilla , which heeded the complaints about the earlier film by showing all of them onscreen in their full glory. The most intimidating of these monsters--next to the Big G himself--is Monster Zero, a three-headed, winged beast that is also known as Gidorah. When he’s released from the antarctic ice beneath a secret base, Monster Zero imm...

I had this model kit of Mothra in his larva stage, and I was wondering just what the heck to do with it, when I recalled a scene where Larva Mothra was swimming in the ocean in one of the Godzilla films. I also had a model kit of a Coast Guard cutter, which could double as a US Navy destroyer, and bingo, I had a diorama. The "water" you see the models in is actually Flex paste from Woodland Scenics. I laid the paste down and placed the models within it. After it dried, I painted it a bluish ocean color. I then placed a layer of Water Effects (also from WS) over this, to give the "ocean" a nice watery sheen. This Navy ship has had many duties in its storied career, but none as strange as when it escorted Mothra across the ocean on a journey to join Godzilla in battle.

You want a piece of me?! King Kong has been remade several times since the original film’s release back in 1933. The Japanese movie firm Toho, which produced the Godzilla movies, did the first remake of Kong with 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla , which was a fun romp. Toho followed this with an even better romp in 1967 called King Kong Escapes , an enjoyable lark that had Kong battling a mechanized version of himself. The first American remake of King Kong followed in 1976, and wound up being an unimaginative and dreary mess. 1986 saw Linda Hamilton ( The Terminator and T2 ) starring in a really bad fiasco called King Kong Lives , and Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson directed another remake of King Kong that saw release in 2005. Although Jackson’s Kong is considered by many to be the first “proper” remake, it’s a movie that’s not without its flaws--especially seeing how they tried to make King Kong more realistic, which resulted in him looking like a giant silverback ...