The View From The Mountain

While the X-Men films, produced by Fox, have been a great deal of enjoyment for me, the Wolverine trilogy, featuring everybody’s favorite snarling mutant with claws, has definitely been a mixed bag. The first film, X-Men Origins: Wolverine , was just a flaming mess of a flick (with the less said about it the better), while the second, The Wolverine , had a vastly superior story that took Wolverine to Japan. Logan , the third film in the series--and supposedly the final appearance of Hugh Jackman as the title character--dares to be much different, showing the always-grumpy mutant now as an old man who’s caring for an even older Charles Xavier (Patrick Steward, who’s great here) at a hideaway along the US/Mexican boarder. Xavier is suffering from a mind degenerating disease, which causes him to lose control of himself--normally that would be a sad enough scenario, watching a once-proud man devolve into a mindless rambler, but Xavier has always been armed with super psychic powers, an...

I wrote a recent review for The Disappointments Room , a horror thriller starring Kate Beckinsale as a woman who may or may not be experiencing a haunting in her own home. Naomi Watts also did her own version of this story, called Shut In , where she plays a child psychologist who loses her husband in a nasty car accident. Her teenage son, Stephen (played by Charlie Heaton, better known as the older brother from Stranger Things ) was also in the car wreck, but he survived--just barely. While Stephen is alive, the accident left him brain dead, needing constant care from Watts’ character all day long. But the spooky stuff doesn’t happen until one of Watts’ patients, a young boy named Tom (played by Jacob Tremblay, from Room ) breaks into her house because he didn’t want to be sent away--yet no sooner does young Tom show up then he abruptly disappears, seemingly into the deep wintry Maine woods, where the boy’s chances of survival are nil. It’s only after Tom is gone after several days a...

I.T. tries to be a Hitchcock-like thriller that stars former James Bond Peirce Brosnan as Mike Regan, an airline tycoon who befriends Patrick (Jason Barry), his I.T. advisor, after Patrick’s wizardry with computers saves Mike’s life during an important business presentation. Mike then invites Patrick to his upscale smart mansion to fix the wifi--but doing this winds up being a big mistake, since Patrick turns out to be a sick puppy who begins stalking Mike’s daughter Kaitlyn (Stefanie Scott) through their smart house, which helpfully comes equipped with cameras that allow Patrick to spy on them in the supposed privacy of their home any time he wants. I mainly saw I.T. because of the sturdy cast--which, aside from Brosnan (who I thought did a fine job as Bond), also includes Anna Friel ( Marcella , Timeline ) as his wife and Stefanie Scott ( Insidious: Chapter 3 ) as his daughter. And even Michael Nyqvist ( The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo ) shows up. But I.T. winds up being pretty ...

Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 was inevitable, seeing how much money the first film made. And the first movie was a pleasure to watch, being an enjoyable, comedic ride through the cosmos that was an imaginative adventure. Now, in the sequel, Starlord and the gang are back, protecting a race of gold-plated beings from a big ugly monster during a funny title sequence that’s stolen by Baby Groot. No longer a dancing potted plant, little Groot is now free to wander about, getting into and out of trouble as he sees fit, and he’s one of the best things about the sequel. A pleasant surprise for me was seeing Kurt Russell show up as Starlord’s long lost father. Being a fan of the holy trinity of the John Carpenter-directed action/horror/fantasy films that Russell starred in-- Escape From New York , The Thing , and Big Trouble in Little China --I’m convinced that any movie that has Kurt Russell in it is automatically good. But while I was glad to see Russell here, his character, along with...

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...