The View From The Mountain

I recently completed this 1/24 scale model kit of the Ford Interceptor from the Mad Max films. From the Japanese model kit company Aoshima, I've had this kit sitting unbuilt in a box for way too long, and I thought it was time to finally build it. After painting it black, I gave it a weathering of light tan dust over the hood and roof, and along the sides. It comes complete with all of the details from the movie, including the gas tanks, a spare tire, and a can of dog food that serves as Max's dinner. This was an enjoyable build that was out of my wheelhouse. I don't build many car models, but this was the hero car from my favorite post apocalyptic movies, the Mad Max saga. So I couldn't resist building this one. And I'm glad I did it.

Released 32 years after the original Jurassic Park , and ten years after the first reboot, Jurassic World , the latest film, Jurassic World: Rebirth , is the seventh entry in the long-running cinematic series and, judging from its strong box office take, it won’t be the last. Scarlett Johansson, who was nine years old when the first JP film was released, is now the lead of Rebirth , starring as Zora Bennett, a mercenary who gets hired for a special mission in the jungles on the equator. And she convincingly plays the part with casual ease. The dinosaurs that had been returned to the modern day through science have not been doing too well in the intervening years, with their numbers dwindling to the point to where they now only thrive in areas along the equator, which is designated off limits to humans. Zora is hired to take a team of her fellow mercenaries to one of these forbidden locations that plays host to the dinosaurs because a pharmaceutical company wants them to e...

I first saw actress Florence Pugh as part of an unplanned double feature with the movies Fighting With My Family and Malevolent . Fighting was a biography based on the life of British-born wrestler Saraya Bevis, better known as Paige in the ring. Malevolent was a horror movie about a brother and sister team of con artists who pretend to be ghost hunters so they can bilk their clients--until they run into some real life terrors. Both movies were very good, and I was really impressed with how completely different Pugh was from one film to the next. And so I followed her career, which wasn’t hard to do, seeing how Pugh kept popping up in just about everything since then, including Dune: Part Two , and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Pugh debuted in the MCU as Yelena Belova, the little sister of Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) in the enjoyable Black Widow . Pugh also reprised Yelena later that year in the shitty Disney+ series Hawkeye (Pugh imbued her scenes with some mu...

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...