The View From The Mountain

Kate Beckinsale stars Dana Barrow, an architect who moves to the country with her husband and young son after suffering a grievous tragedy with her infant daughter. They move into a mansion that was formerly owned by a Judge Blacker (Gerald McRaney) back in the olden days. Dana discovers that her new home has a secret room, one where the door is only locked from the outside, making it a prison cell. Consulting with a local historian, Dana discovers that the room is what’s known as a disappointment room. Back in the olden days, if a child was born with any form of disability that was not deemed to be “suitable” for their wealthy family, they would be hidden from society, locked away in the disappointment room. Dana discovers that Judge Blacker had done this to his young daughter, locking her away in the disappointment room in the upstairs of her new country home. But Judge Blacker’s daughter, along with the good judge himself, are not at rest, for they still wander the halls of the ho...

Full disclosure time here: I’ve had a mad (simply mad, I tell you!) crush on actress Lauren Cohan since I first laid eyes on her during the second season of The Walking Dead . And although her presence on that zombie soap opera isn’t enough to keep me watching it, I still keep an eye out for her whenever she shows up in other projects, such as the straight to video opus Death Race 2 . 2016’s The Boy is her first starring film role, and it was actually released in theaters! Whoa, looks like this girl is definitely going places. In The Boy , Cohan stars as Greta, a young woman who has been hired to baby-sit a kid for a wealthy old couple who live in a spacious mansion in England. Weird stuff happens right at the start when Greta, showing up at the mansion for the first time, removes her boots and leaves them at the front door--only to have them vanish when she goes to retrieve them later. But it really gets weird when Greta realizes that the “boy” that she has been hired to take care ...

When it was released in October of 2012, Sinister was a smash hit that had proven itself to be the rarest of horror films: it was genuinely scary. Ethan Hawke starred as Ellison Oswalt, a bestselling true crime writer who had fallen on hard times financially. Seeking a story for another bestselling true crime book, he moves into the home of a family that had all been killed by hanging. The entire family--the parents and kids--were all hung by the necks side by side in a grotesque display from a branch of a tree in their own back yard. The mystery was not only who killed them and why, but what happened to one of the young daughters, who disappeared after the murders. Sinister was helmed by Scott Derrickson, who also directed the equally scary The Possession of Emily Rose , and who would go on to direct Doctor Strange for Marvel. With Sinister he provides a fascinating mystery, showing how Oswalt uncovers the truth about the family slaying, and how there were more victims--other fa...

The BFG was never on my radar because it was a children’s film, and I usually avoid seeing them whenever I can. While there are some great children’s movies out there for all ages-- The Wizard of Oz immediately comes to mind, as well as the Harry Potter films--I thought that for the most part children’s films can be pretty lackluster and tedious for adults. The fact that Steven Spielberg directed The BFG wasn’t even a selling point for me. Spielberg may be one of the greatest film directors of his--or any--generation, but he does have a tendency to get very sappy and schmaltzy when helming movies aimed at the wee ones. So how did I finally wind up watching The BFG ? It was on Netflix. There I was, looking for something to watch on a Saturday night, and there was The BFG , one of the latest arrivals to Netflix’s schedule. I put it on, and unexpectedly found myself enchanted by a seemingly simple story (but filled with greater resonance) about a girl and her giant. Ruby Barnhill is...

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...

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 ...

The Scooby Gang never had to deal with this crap! Satanic is one of those “see, I can act” movies. It’s a movie that features an actor or actress from a long-running TV show who wants to demonstrate that they can do something other than the same part they’ve been playing for years. In this case, it’s Sarah Hyland, the star of this flick who has played Haley Dunphy on the sitcom Modern Family (a series which I have not seen and, to be blunt, don’t really feel the need to see). I’m not bashing Miss Hyland for wanting to try something different--far from it, she’s to be commended for stretching her acting wings. And while I can’t compare her performance here with her work on Modern Family , I liked her performance in Satanic , where she does a superb job at playing the sympathetic “good girl” role in this horror film, sort of like Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween . If only Satanic was as good as Halloween . Hyland stars as Chloe, who’s on a tour of Los Angles murder sites with her ...