“Rim of the World” is a sci-fi adventure film on Netflix where four kids who meet at summer camp are unexpectedly tasked with getting some important key to some scientist in order to stop some alien invasion.  It is directed by the oddly named McG from a script conceived by Zach Stentz.  Annabeth Gish was the only cast member I recognized.  The intrepid campers are played by Jack Gore, Miya Cech, Benjamin Flores Jr., and Alessio Scalzotto.  They are charming enough, but they can fall into somewhat cliché caricatures, especially Flores.

So these youngsters are at summer camp when aliens rudely interrupt their frolicking with invasion.  A astronaut makes an escape and crashes to Earth and entrusts some key to these kids so they can get it to the scientist who can initiate a satellite or something that could put a stop to the aliens.

The visual effects were pretty good, and I thought the creature design had some originality.  The main cast had some moments of charm, but those were a little too brief and intermittent.  There was a pretty touching moment when one of them had to get a crash course on riding a bike.  It was a bit improbable but somehow managed to work quite well.

It’s not a terrible movie and could be rather fun, but it is unlikely to stick in the memory all that long.

“Godzilla: King of the Monsters” brings back the big green lizard that has stomped around the cinematic world for decades now.  Michael Dougherty and Zach Shields co-wrote this script which was realized by Dougherty as director.  Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Ken Watanabe, and David Straithairn are part of the cast. Also, the great Charles Dance is there to cause trouble in his usual villainous manner.  The monster gang is here with Mothra, Rodan, and of course the three-headed King Ghidorah along with several other giant Titans thundering about the place.

There is some family drama at the center of this just to make it a bit more incoherent. Farmiga’s character has created a device that can calm the Titans down a bit.  Secrets are revealed about the past of these beasts throughout the movie.  There is a group that think that Titans can clear the Earth of some the more destructive tendencies of the human race and every can live in a much cleaner planet with these giant beasts roaming around.

It’s destruction galore! I thought the visual effects were quite stunning. Some of the action sequences were a little hard to follow due to the abundance of close shots and cutaways.

I sort of liked the daughter played by Millie Bobby Brown in this.  The precocious kid who looked a little older than twelve years-old was pretty well played.  Of course, her ingenuity and spunk required an enormous suspension of disbelief.  Brown is a pretty convincing performer in spite of some of the absurd requirements of the script.

It was a good cast.  Bradley Whitford was on hand as well, and he usually is an interesting addition to the many supporting roles he been handed over the years.  There were lots of gorgeous Asian folks around which is appropriate for this franchise, and they all worked well unsurprisingly.

The movie is rather ridiculous at times, but I ended up enjoying it more than it deserved. I read that the reviews were very mixed, and I can understand why it was not universally loved, however I sure had fun with it, especially when all of the monsters started emerging from their various habitats.  The first half does take a little bit of patience, but it gets much more engaging when the craziness kicks off.

The movie works just fine for this genre.  It’s loud and fun to watch.  I would just advise to not examine the plot or dialogue too closely and just kick back and enjoy the mayhem.

“The Fourth Doctor Adventures: The Syndicate Master Plan- Series 8 Volume 2” is a Doctor Who audio boxset from Big Finish Productions.  It is the second half of the eighth series or seasons of audio dramas starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor.  Jane Slavin joins the Doctor as WPC Ann Kelso for this set.  John Leeson reprises his role as the voice of K9.  This is actually a sequel to a First Doctor television serial known as “The Daleks’ Master Plan”.  It explores what happened to various alien races introduced in that story who were apparently allied and then betrayed by the Daleks.  Most of the television story is still missing, and I have yet to hear the soundtrack.  It has also been several years since I read the novelization.

“Time’s Assassin” is the story continued by Guy Adams where the Doctor, Ann, and K9 are caught up in the machinations of the Syndicate on the planet of Kembel.  Jon Culshaw, John Shrapnel, and Anna Acton are included in the guest cast.  It’s not something that impressed me beyond measure, but it works well enough to get the second half of this saga going.  Once again, Baker’s performance makes up quite a bit of slow moments and lackluster dialogue.  It is also another story a little hard to imagine through audio performance.

Jonathan Barnes continues this collection with “Fever Island”.  The TARDIS crew land encounter what seems to be an English spy on a remote island where a dubious experiment is taking place.  Gethin Anthony plays a rather familiar type of caricature. Bettrys Jones, Carolyn Seymour, and Barnaby Edwards are included in this episode.  Of course, the Doctor discovers that that little is as it seems.  It was pretty interesting idea for a story, and the Doctor has an opportunity to display a more villainous performance at times.

“The Perfect Prisoners” by John Dorney completes this collection.  All is revealed, and Ann Kelso has been keeping secrets of her own.  I didn’t get too engaged with this until pretty late into the story.  It was an interesting decision to have the Fourth Doctor travel with an original Big Finish companion and it works for the most part.

I think disappointment is a stronger impression than I want to convey when describing my reaction to this set.  It just seems a little less epic than I was hoping for.  Slavin is a fine actress and her enjoyment with working with Tom Baker is evident.  Tom Baker still seems to have fun doing these things, so that delights me to no end.  May he have several more years left in him where he is well enough to continue his performance! I may appreciate this whole series more once I listen to it again, but I was hoping to be better hooked on the first go.

“The Defiant Ones” is a classic film released in 1958 and stars the great Tony Curtis and the always compelling Sidney Poitier.  Stanley Kramer is the director of this highly acclaimed film written by Harold Jacob Smith, who got the story somehow from Nedrick Young.

Two convicts escape after a prison transfer bus crashes.  Of course, it’s one white guy and one black guy chained together who decide to make a break for it.  That’s about the only thing they can agree on at first.  This was an important film at the time considering that segregation was still a popular practice.

It’s the talent of the two leads that really carries this one and makes this enjoyable.  There is a relationship that develops seemingly out of left field between Curtis’ “Joker” Jackson and a single mother he and Poitier’s Cullen come across along the way.  Cara Williams is part of the cast and plays a woman desperate to leave her current circumstances although the level of trust she displays is somewhat hard to swallow. This movie has some twists and turns to it that are not as easy to buy into as I would like, however it’s still a great experience.  Curtis and Poitier have great chemistry even at the height of their hostility toward each other.  It is heartening to read that Curtis insisted that Poitier share the top billing with him during the opening credits.  It is also too bad that Curtis had to insist on that credit for the more than worthy Sidney Poitier, but  that was how it was at that time.

There are a few moments that had me scratching my head in disbelief, but my incredulity was pretty mild given the overall enjoyment of watching two major Hollywood talents spark off each other during a time when it was considerably more rare to have two men of different ethnicities share such significant screen time together. A part of me would like to have seen it at the time it first premiered just to get a sense of what audiences really thought of it.  It’s a great movie with a great cast, and any  mild criticism I may have is not a good enough reason to pass it up.

“Brightburn” is a horror film that seems to have started off with the idea of distorting the backstory of Superman or something.  Mark and Brian Gunn are the writers who may have been on acid when they conceived this idea.  David Yarovesky is the director who can at least make this somewhat watchable.

A couple trying to have a baby find that something has dropped onto their farm from the sky.  Lo and behold, it’s a baby in a space pod or something.  They end up raising the child until his twelfth year and then the little kid starts to exhibit some strange behaviors and abilities.

Elizabeth Banks and David Denman play the devoted parents who have a pretty unrealistic ability to overlook the obvious.  Of course, they hide the pod from their son and keep it buried under the barn.  Jackson A. Dunn is the actor portraying the unearthly child whose entering into puberty is considerably more destructive than most.  He does the best he can with the script.

This just really seems to be a “what if Superman went bad” idea.  The kid has exactly the same abilities from being able to fly to heat vision.  Bullets apparently bounce of him.  Probably the only new thing in the kid’s bag of tricks is psychokinesis.

The parents display some really senseless reactions to some of their child’s antics.  He crushes the hand of a female classmate and is only suspended for two days.  The parents just take way too long to get extremely alarmed here.

The visual effects were good but not good enough to make me more forgiving of the weaknesses in the plot and dialogue.  The similarities to Superman’s origin were just too distracting.

Brightburn ended up being the name of the Kansas town where all of this chaos takes place.  The distortion of the Superman background is likely intentional and probably sounded like a good idea at the beginning, however I think casual movie viewers who  are merely going to find it obnoxious.

I suppose it’s an interesting idea to pitch to the studio, but there were too many plot holes and moments when the parents just looked too dense for me to buy into it when it is all said and done.

“Old Black Magic” is the latest novel from Ace Atkins who has been continuing the popular Spenser series created by the late Robert B. Parker.

A friend of Spenser’s is dying and his major regret is his failure to recover some paintings that were taken in a heist twenty years before.  Spenser is hired to look into the matter when the museum that was robbed starts receiving letters from someone claiming to know the whereabouts of the purloined art pieces.  Spenser always knows which members of the criminal elite in Boston to start with.  Of course, murder is right around the corner.

Although Hawk is away in this one, former enforcer Vinnie Morris is on hand to help with the negotiation and with the muscle.

I found this one to be a little more interesting because high dollar art is not usually a realm in which Spenser operates.  He is on familiar territory when facing old mob bosses who could point him in the right direction.  Also, he has to contend with police officials who resent his participation in the investigation.  Some things have changed for Spenser in recent years, but he still has long-time girlfriend, Susan Silverman, at his side as well as the love of their pooch, Pearl.

I was a little surprised that this novel seemed a little short on fisticuffs here.  Also, no one burst into Spenser’s office to threaten him.  I was even more astounded when some drunken floozie didn’t make some clumsy pass at him so he could take the noble road of monogamy to Susan.

Spenser still has the dry wit, although Atkins seems to have tried to come up with new ways to present it.  There is a certain repetition of encounters in most of the novels, however Atkins seems to have taken a little different path in this one without really compromising the integrity of Parker’s creation.

I am not sure that I have the expertise to claim that Atkins’ efforts to emulate Parker’s style of prose is flawless, but I feel confident to proclaim this to be one of the better installments in the series.  I did miss Hawk though, but I expect he will be back at Spenser’s side in the next novel.

I guess this is the season for me to read continuations of series created by now deceased authors.  Stieg Larsson’s Swedish hacker and crusader, Lisbeth Salander, is back in “The Girl Who Takes an Eye For an Eye” by David Lagercrantz.

“The Kamelion Empire” is a Doctor Who audio play from Big Finish Productions and was written by Jonathan Morris.  Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson, and Jon Culshaw reunite for this final story in the recent trilogy in the Monthly Range featuring the shape-changing android,  Kamelion.  They are joined by merely one other guest actor, Christopher Naylor.

The Doctor and his companions are drawn by a summons to the planet Mekalion which is where Kamelion would call home.  It is seemingly abandoned until a powerful device called the Locus is discovered.  Naylor plays the Alternate Kamelion and something called Chaos.  Kamelion is susceptible to the influence emitted by strong personalities or psychic manipulation.

For quite a while, it is just the main cast exploring their surroundings and getting in trouble.  Their chemistry is spot on as expected.

I thought this was a pretty good episode.  Kamelion was not really a character that I found all that fascinating, but this was a pretty compelling adventure.  Morris is one of the prolific Big Finish writers and is usually quite good.  This episode is a fine example as to why he keeps getting work with them.

Tegan at times can be written a little too brash, however she was toned down a bit here without compromising her nature.  She actually manages to display some compassion to Kamelion’s plight.

Strickson is also great as Turlough.  He doesn’t do much acting these days outside of this, but he still has the chops when he returns to contribute to Big Finish audios.

I think this episode wrapped up this part of the Davison era quite effectively.  Culshaw is a very talented voice impressionist and performer in the United Kingdom and was an excellent choice to take on the role of Kamelion, who was original played by the late Gerald Flood, in the two television adventures, “The King’s Demons” and “Planet of Fire”.

Not only was this the best out of the three Monthly Range releases with Kamelion, it is one of the stronger episodes to come out this year.

“Winter Ridge” is a British thriller directed by Dom Lenoir.  The screenplay was written by Ross Owen Williams.  A young detective’s life is rocked when his wife is struck by a drink driver and placed into a coma.  After several months of emotional turmoil at her bedside, he is drawn into the investigation of some suspicious deaths of several elderly residents of the small community.  The film stars Matt Hookings, Michael McKell, and Alan Ford.

It’s a pretty interesting premise with a few unexpected twists, but the film does feel a bit longer than the nearly ninety minute running time.  I really didn’t recognize any of the actors, however the performances were pretty convincing.  The lead character faces a certain moral dilemma when the driver who injured his wife gets a pretty light sentence is lurking around.  Obviously that doesn’t make for a harmonious situation.

It’s a pretty good mystery, but it has a typically slower pace common in British entertainment.

“John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum” is the latest action film in the… well….John Wick series of films.  Seriously, I have to work on my eloquence.  Anyway, Keanu Reeves returns to the role of the master assassin who just wanted to retire until his wife dies, and his dog gets killed by Russian hitmen.  Laurence Fishburne and Ian McShane return as Halle Berry and Anjelica Huston join the mayhem.

Parabellum is apparently Latin for “prepare for war” or something along those lines. John Wick certainly is capable of doing that.

The choreography of the fight sequences is quite creative, at least in my amateur opinion. The fights and stunts are ridiculously implausible, but they are creatively ridiculous.  Kudos to director Chad Stahelski for finding the right pros to do that. Unfortunately, some of the dialogue written by the four writers can sometimes fall on shaky ground.  Yeah, it took four writers to do this.  Derek Kolstad, Shay Hatten, Chris Collins, and Marc Abrams all had to put their heads together.

This is one of those films with a secret society of assassins with complex rules and honor codes.  Something called the High Table lurks in the shadows and has loads of expert killers at their beck and call.  I kind of like the name of this group even if I don’t understand the origin of it.

This is also just a bloodbath with plenty of mutilations, dismemberments, and droll humor for anyone without any sense of queasiness or delicacy.

Berry plays some assassin who is accompanied by gorgeous dogs who are quite agile and vicious in a firefight.  She becomes a reluctant ally of Wick, who has been excommunicated by the High Table due to killing some guy in a consecrated hotel in the last film.  Berry looks great and does fine with the material she was given.  This film is mostly about stunts and visual effects and not so much on character development.  She also got to show off her own physical prowess with staged fighting.  Actually, she seems to have trained quite well for her participation in this project.

One of the problems with this is that Wick just isn’t all that compelling as a character.  Reeves’ portrayal comes off as a bit flat, which may be more of a result of the writing than limited acting ability, although I never considered Reeves to be any master thespian.  He’s not terrible for the most part, but I think Wick could have been given some more engaging characteristics.

Anyway, the film is what it is.  It’s mindless entertainment with a lot of plot holes and absurd coincidences and impossibilities.  It’s just good enough to keep me interested in seeing what could happen in the next chapter.  It does end in a way where another installment is possible, if not improbable.

“Available Light” by Dayton Ward is the latest novel in the Star Trek: The Next Generation range.  Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the Starship Enterprise find a seemingly abandoned spacecraft that has also drawn the attention of marauders. In case the word “seemingly” wasn’t enough of a clue, it turns out this hulking vessel isn’t all that abandoned.  Big surprise, isn’t it?

The more fascinating element in this novel is the fallout from the exposure of Section 31, the most covert and ruthless branch of the Federation.  Captain Picard was part of a forced removal of a previous Federation president who ended up getting murdered.  Section 31 is no longer a secret, and the revealing of its misdeeds has shocked and unsettled the denizens of the United Federation of Planets.

Ward is a competent writer, but unfortunately the main plot just didn’t intrigue me all that much.  I think it felt too familiar although the Enterprise was apparently exploring new territory which has been dubbed the Odyssean Pass.  The Enterprise has encountered countless seemingly derelict vessels and greedy space pirates.  Picard as usual tries his best to have everyone get along and play nice.  It just doesn’t offer all that much that felt new.

Anyway, it looks like Picard is going to deal with the consequences of his alliance with Section 31 in the next novel, so hopefully that offers a more engaging literary diversion.

Next up is a quick return to Boston, figuratively, to check up on venerable private eye, Spenser.  Ace Atkins has continued the series started by the late, great Robert B. Parker as Spenser gets another chance of resolve an old art heist using some “Old Black Magic”. Spenser doesn’t become a wizard or anything, but the book is called “Old Black Magic”. Anyway, I will discover the reason for such an appellation and report back.