The View From The Mountain

I first read Stephen King’s The Mist in the horror anthology book Dark Forces (and still have a copy of it) way back when I was a teenager. It was a terrifying tale of a group of people who find themselves trapped in a supermarket when a strange mist descends upon their town. It’s not so much the mist itself that’s was horrifying, but the impossibly frightening things that resided within it; blood-thirsty monsters that hunt and kill humans without a second thought--from large, terrier-sized flying insects to enormous behemoths that would have warmed the cockles of Lovecraft’s cold dead heart. But equally scary was the reaction of some of the trapped people in the store, who devolved into a pack of frightened savages that proved to be just as much of a danger as the monsters in the mist. The Spike TV series isn’t the first time that King’s novella had been adapted. Back in 2007, Frank Darabont directed an underrated and marvelous film version of The Mist , and watching the limp, b...

Another good name for 47 Meters Down would be Mandy Moore Meets Jaws , because that’s pretty much the gist of this film: two adult sisters (played by Moore and Claire Holt) on vacation decide to go scuba diving in shark infested waters when something goes horribly awry and the sharks are served up a nice meal of two chicks in a cage on the bottom of the ocean. But another name for this film was In The Deep , and that’s no joke; In The Deep was actually what 47 Meters Down was originally called when it was very briefly released on video back in 2016. The movie was being dumped back then straight to video without a theatrical release, until something interesting happened. That was when The Shallows , starring Blake Lively as a lone surfer fending off an attacking shark, was released and became a hit. Reportedly, it was the success of The Shallows that made the producers of 47 Meters Down realize that there was money in dem there sharks, and they pulled their film from video releas...

I was first introduced to Jack Reacher through the Tom Cruise movie of the same name that was released back in 2012. I liked the movie well enough, despite a few nitpicks here and there--but I really enjoyed reading the novels by Lee Child. Jack Reacher was a former US Army officer who retires and becomes a drifter, roaming from state to state in the country that he fought so hard to protect. And Reacher is still protecting us, taking on a variety of villains, from backwoods mobsters to big-city terrorists from book to book. The stories in the books are well-told, with great attention paid to the smallest of details. I think of them as 1980s action films, only without being insulting to your intelligence. What a perfect series to adapt to movies, right? Well, Tom Cruise looks nothing like how Jack Reacher is described in the books. And while I thought the first Jack Reacher film was good, the second, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back , is very badly flawed. Based on the JR novel of the sa...

I’ve been waiting for a Wonder Woman movie all my life. Now that may sound strange for me, a fifty-something year old man, to say about a female superhero. But Wonder Woman has been one of my favorite superheroes since when I was a kid back in the 1970s, when I first saw the Lynda Carter TV series. For me, and many in my generation, Lynda Carter *was* Wonder Woman, a force for light and all things good. I knew that when the inevitable Wonder Woman remake came, whoever took over for Carter would have some pretty big red boots to fill. I never had any idea that it would take so long before a new live action Wonder Woman arrived. But return she did, in the more than capable form of Gal Godot, who both looked beautiful and tough at the same time. She first made her debut as the Amazonian Princess in Batman Vs. Superman , and very quickly became one of the best things about that movie, practically stealing it from her co-stars. But that wasn’t enough. This new Wonder Woman needed to soa...

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...

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 ...