John Muir

Charlotte, North Carolina

Critic and Contributor at Freelance

Award-winning creator of the audio drama Enter The House Between (2023), and the new web series, Abnormal Fixation, coming soon. Author of The X-Files FAQ.

Articles

John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV

4 days ago | reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com | John Muir

"These are the symbols of democracy. A democracy we take as for granted as the water we drink. But democracy is a living thing; its skeleton an ideal; its bloodstream dissent; its tissue comprised of all the people who inhabit it. All the people. But what happens if the life of democracy is paralyzed by fear, or greed, or simple laziness, and the country is yielded up, or co-erced, or persuaded into accepting a dictatorship, a leader whose word alone is all of law?
John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV

1 week ago | reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com | John Muir

For those of you who have never seen it, Survivors is an absolutely grim and thoroughly fascinating British program about an insidious pandemic which wipes out modern civilization and leaves the shattered survivors to re-learn all the old trades in order to build a new -- and hopefully better - world. In other words, Survivors is sort of The Walking Dead, only without the periodic threat of rampaging zombies.
John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV

4 weeks ago | reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com | John Muir

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), directed by Leonard Nimoy, proved such a sensation at the box office in the mid-1980s that its success led directly to the development of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987 – 1994) in syndication. At the time, the fourth Star Trek film won rave reviews from general audiences and mainstream critics, both of whom praised the film’s fish-out-of-water humor and the inventive time-travel narrative.
John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV

4 weeks ago | reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com | John Muir

Early this week, I celebrated William Shatner's birthday, and today I want to draw attention to some of his co-star, Leonard Nimoy's great work too. Of course, Shatner is still with us. We lost the amazing Mr. Nimoy a decade ago, and still feel that loss a decade later. Like Sweet, Sweet Rachel before it, Baffled! concerns a person from our Modern Age of Reason and Technology (The 20th and 21st century) who becomes unexpectedly engulfed in a psychic “mystery” and must solve a crime related to it.
John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV

1 month ago | reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com | John Muir

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is widely-regarded as the worst Star Trek film ever made. Of course, that's wrong. These days we have Section 31 (2025) to take that title, but more importantly...Nemesis (2002)? Insurrection? (1998), Generations? (1994)I'd submit they are all worse than The Final Frontier. Okay, okay, I am a Star Trek fan, and can see the silver-lining in every Star Trek movie. So I am happy to enumerate the aspects I appreciate and admire about Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV

1 month ago | reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com | John Muir

This TV movie, The Horror at 37,000 Feet -- from 1973 -- has not, historically, received a lot of love from critics or audiences. It stars William Shatner as an alcoholic ex-priest, and even Shatner’s die-hard fans, believe that the movie is the worst production the icon has ever been associated with. Well, I’m going to buck conventional wisdom a bit and give the telefilm a little much-needed love today. And, of course, Shatner is great, as always, in this film.
John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV

1 month ago | reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com | John Muir

"Encore" is one of the most audacious installments of the entire seven season run of Mission:Impossible (1966-1973). At times, the premise of this sixth season episode beggars beliefs, but at other times, the execution is so convincing that the audience buys the whole thing. In "Encore," William Shatner guest stars as a gangster named Kroll who, nearly forty years earlier, committed the murder of a rival mobster, Danny Ryan. Kroll hid the body, and weapon used to kill him, but nobody knows where.
John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV

1 month ago | reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com | John Muir

With all the bad and scary going on in the world right now, this week, at least, is an opportunity to celebrate something wonderful, the great William Shatner's 94th birthday! We'll start here, with a Twilight Zone episode starring the Shat: "Nick of Time.""Nick of Time" is a Richard Matheson story, and one of my all-time favorite installments of the 1959-1964 Rod Serling series, The Twilight Zone. There are flashier shows, there are scarier shows, but I really enjoy how ambiguous this story is.
John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV

1 month ago | reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com | John Muir

In 1975, the late Harlan Ellison's award-winning short story, "A Boy and His Dog" (featured in the 1969 collection calledThe Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World) was adapted to film by actor L.Q. Jones, a relatively novice director. You may recognize Jones' name because he's a talented actor who has appeared in films as diverse asCasino(1995) andA Prairie Home Companion(2006) and he wrote the truly amazing (and deeply underrated) 1971 horror film,Brotherhood of Satan.
Abnormal Fixation Kickstarter: Get Your Art Seen in An Episode!

1 month ago | reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com | John Muir

"...some of the best writing about the genre has been done by John Kenneth Muir. I am particularly grateful to him for the time and attention he's paid to things others have overlooked, under-appreciated and often written off. His is a fan's perspective first, but with a critic's eye to theme and underscore, to influence and pastiche..." - Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files, in the foreword to Horror Films FAQ (October 2013).