The View From The Mountain

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...

The House With A Clock In Its Walls is the latest attempt to jump-start a movie franchise that’s based on a series of children’s books. The only difference here is that the original book that this film is based on was written back in 1973 by the late author John Bellairs, and was illustrated by the late Edward Gorey, the writer/artist probably best known for his delightfully quaint ghoulish artwork as seen on the opening titles of the PBS Mystery! series. Another notable difference here is that THWACIIW (even the acronym for this is long) has been directed by Eli Roth, who’s better known for the first two Hostel movies, as well as The Green Inferno , all three movies being hard core horror flicks with stomach-churning gore. So does this House work? Yes, and quite nicely, too. As been noted in the DVD commentary for THWAC (I even have to cut down the acronym!), sometimes when you’re restricted, the restrictions can make you be even more creative. The PG rating doesn’t hamper Roth,...

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.

I had stopped reading comics by the time Venom made his debut. So my first exposure to the character of Venom came in the third Spider-Man film, released in 2008 and directed by Sam Riami. After a powerhouse second outing with Spider-Man 2 , the third and final Riami-directed Spider-Man movie was a huge let down, thanks to the multitude of villains that the Wall-Crawler had to contend with--Venom, being one of a trio of baddies gunning for Spidey, really should have been the sole villain of that film (reportedly studio interference was responsible for the multi-villain story line). Now, ten years after Spider-Man 3 , Venom returns, but in his own movie without Spider-Man. Tom Hardy is the star, appearing as Eddie Brock, a reporter in San Francisco who’s trying to seek the truth about an Elon Musk-type of tech tycoon named Charlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), who’s rumored to be doing illegal experiments. The rumors turn out to be true. One of Drake’s spaceships crash lands on earth, bringing ...

I built the 1/48 model kit of the AT-ST Walker from Ban Dai. This is actually the second of these that I built. The first AT-ST I built, I painted it a forest camouflage pattern. With this second walker, I decided to paint it in a desert scheme. I used "sand" colored Americana acrylic hobby paint. This Ban Dai model is so good because it has such great little details that make the model seem more realistic. I dirtied up the walker with "dark brown" acrylic paint. The decals are from another kit in my decal collection.

You could have gone one of two ways with The Meg , play it straight, just like Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece Jaws , or go the comedic route, a la the Sharknado series. The main problem with The Meg is that it tries to have it both ways: it tries to be a deadly serious drama about a super-sized shark that terrorizes coastal China while also having goofy humor, and the result is that The Meg is just…meh. Based on the popular novel by Steve Alten, the concept of The Meg is based on a real life monster shark, the Megalodon, that lived back in the dinosaur age but went extinct millions of years ago. But The Meg posits that there’s more Megs than you can shake a shark cage at living under a layer of gas at the bottom of one of the deepest trenches in the ocean. And when a three person submarine pierces this layer of gas, it helps the Meg to reach the surface (Note: there’s virtually no mention of anybody going through decompression in this movie, much like how there’s virtually no men...

Not having seen the original Sabrina TV series (and not really having any great desire to) I went into the brand new Chilling Adventures of Sabrina completely cold and unknowing of whatever the previous incarnation was about. But I wound up enjoying the new version immensely. Thankfully, the new Sabrina has ditched the cheesy sitcom trappings of its predecessor in favor of an hour-long drama format--and thanks to it being on Netflix, we really get full-hour episodes. Also thanks to Netflix, the new Sabrina series is allowed to fully embrace its horror-movie inspirations. This was the first great thing that the new series has done: diving head-first into the horror genre with full-on gore and some genuinely frightening scare moments that managed to catch this old horror movie fan off guard. Like the original sitcom, Sabrina is a teenage witch who lives with her two witch aunts and whose familiar is a cat named Salem. Unlike the sitcom, the cat never speaks but transforms into a rea...