The View From The Mountain

It’s Friday night during the summer in Beutter county, an idyllic farming community in Indiana, and the good folks are settling in for what should be another humdinger of an evening. Until their plans are shattered by the arrival of an Explorer From Another World! This turns out to be an alien (Gemma Sterling) who starts savagely killing people from the moment it disembarks from its flying saucer. Local kids Eddie (Colin McCorquodale), Marybeth (Sage Marchand) and Culpepper (Nolan Gay) are planning on seeing a movie, but it looks like they’ll be battling for the very survival of the human race instead! Explorer From Another World is a wonderfully done throwback to the B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Ably directed by Woody Edwards (who gives himself a small cameo as Hank in the sheriff’s jail cell), the film is forty five minutes long, but manages to tell its torrid but funny story very effectively in the time allotted. And the short running time tracks when you...

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is returning (finally!) on the 17th of July with an all-new third season. To celebrate the return what has become my favorite of the new Star Trek shows on Paramount+, I decided to create a list of my top five episodes from the first two seasons. Memento Mori After several episodes of hinting at their presence, Memento Mori is the first big confrontation between the Federation and the Gorn. First introduced in the TOS episode Arena , with a memorable fight between Captain Kirk and a slow moving, green-skinned humanoid lizard, the Gorn have popped up in the episode The Time Trap of ST: The Animated Series , and in the In A Mirror, Darkly Part Two episode of ST: Enterprise (using really bad CGI that wasn’t much of an improvement over the Gorn suit used in Arena ). We never actually see the Gorn in Memento Mori , except for their ships, which look like angry claws ripping their way through space. This is a wise move, because not showing the...

Director Tobe Hooper is best known for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre . I admit to never really having been a big fan of TCM, instead I was more partial to Hooper’s TV miniseries of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot , which aired in 1979. And while there was a bit of a controversy over whether he or Steven Spielberg actually directed 1982’s Poltergeist , the success of that film, which brought supernatural horror to the suburbs, enabled Hooper to swing for the fences with Lifeforce , a science fiction horror extravaganza that was released in 1985, forty years ago this year. Based on the book Space Vampires by Colin Wilson, the screenplay for Lifeforce was written by Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakoby--with O'Bannon being a writer on the first Alien film. Taking place in 1986, when the real life Halley’s Comet was due to return to Earth, Lifeforce has Steve Railsback ( The Stunt Man ) in command of a tricked out space shuttle with an American/British crew of astronauts called the Chu...

Presence, the latest film from director Steven Soderbergh ( Sex, Lies and Videotape, Out Of Sight ), is based on his real life experiences with what he believes is a ghost in his own home. Inspired by his spectral roommate, Soderbergh wrote a few pages of a script, which he handed to David Koepp ( Panic Room, Jurassic Park ), who finished it. The film was shot in a house in Crandall, New Jersey, over just eleven days in September 2023 (they received an interim SAG-AFTRA agreement during the strike that year). Soderbergh shot this in the ‘found footage’ style, using only one camera, with himself as the camera operator. The result is that Presence is a haunted house story that is told from the point of view of the ghost. And it’s marvelous. But instead of the typical ’found footage’ movie, which is supposed to be culled together from film or video that is literally found after the fact, we see everything that’s happening in this house through the ‘eye...

While I’m not a big fan of medical shows, I decided to give Pulse , the new medical drama on Netflix, a try for one basic reason: its lead actress, Willa Fitzgerald. She was memorable and charming as officer Roscoe Conklin in the first season of Reacher on Amazon Prime. She made a great sidekick for the lead character, vagabond adventurer Jack Reacher. Thanks to Reacher being a drifter, the series changes its supporting cast every season, leaving Willa free to get cast in Pulse as Danielle “Danny” Simms, a third year resident working the ER at Maguire Hospital in Miami. Pulse starts out very good, with a major hurricane bearing down on the Miami area, and eventually rolling right over the hospital itself. The hospital, newly built, was designed to withstand massive storms like this, but that doesn’t mean everything is just hunky dory. Despite being protected from the hurricane, there are still major problems for the ER staff to deal with. And the episodes with the hurrica...

In Cleaner Daisy Ridley ( Star Wars: The Force Awakens ) stars as Joanna “Joey” Locke, a window cleaner at a swanky London office building that serves as the headquarters for an energy company. Joey becomes late for work when she’s forced to take her autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck) to her job with her. Because of her lateness, her nimrod of a manager makes Joey work an hour late, well into the evening. Joey reluctantly keeps cleaning windows of bird splatter in the darkness, but eventually bird droppings wind up being the least of her problems. A team of terrorists arrive at a party that’s being held at the office for the energy company’s share holders. Disguised as performers, the terrorists seize the energy company’s board members as hostages, while knocking everybody else out with gas. Joey, still working on the windows outside, sees all of this and promptly goes into action. Because, as the film has earlier established, Joey is a former Britis...

Actress Zoë Kravitz, the daughter of musician/actor Lenny Kravitz, is best known for her roles in films like Mad Max Fury Road , Rough Night , and as a very memorable Catwoman in The Batman (she was superb in that film). She made her directorial debut (as well as co-written the script and co-produced) with Blink Twice (Amazon/MGM), a psychological thriller about a cocktail waitress named Frida (Naomi Ackie) who’s busy working an exclusive event with her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) when the guy who’s running it, billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) invites them to party with him on his private island for a few days. Of course, the women take him up on his offer, looking forward to treating themselves to a wonderful vacation on a tropical island. However, Frida quickly notices some strange things happening, like one of the maids, who keeps laughingly referring to her as “red rabbit.” Jess also realizes that she’s suffering from memory lapses. But most of this is pa...