Tabla de contenidos para February 2025 en SFX

IF YOU THOUGHT BURGEONING superhero Mark Grayson (voiced by Steven Yeun) might have earned even a tiny bit of a break after laying waste to the villainous Angstrom Levy (Sterling K Brown) in the season two finale of Invincible, you should think again. When Invincible returns to Prime Video with eight new episodes in February, creator Robert Kirkman and showrunner Simon Racioppa confirm to Red Alert that Mark’s got a lot going on this season, and a lot of it is not going to be great. The season picks up with Mark, now 19 years old, still burdened with trying to earn the mantle of protector of Earth in the wake of his father Omni-Man’s (JK Simmons) betrayal. He’s being relentlessly trained by GDA director Cecil Stedman (Walton Goggins) to…

AS “A GUY WHO HAS A handful of cats”, Cullen Bunn is ideally suited to write the latest one-shot to star Sabrina Spellman’s magical moggy, teaming up with artists Dan Schoening and Ben Galvan on The Nine Lives Of Salem. “I thought it would be funny to incorporate some of my cats’ mannerisms and – dare I say – attitudes into him,” says Bunn, who depicts Salem as the John Constantine of the Archie Universe. “He has this awesome sinister vibe that really helps to sell the whole ‘cat as an occult investigator’ angle, and we definitely play with some of the feline tropes.” “Visually, it’s important for me to convey Salem’s posture and movement,” adds Schoening, who provides designs and layouts before passing the finished art chores onto Galvan.…

SEVEN YEARS ago, Charlie Cox’s world was rocked. Preparations had begun for the fourth season of Daredevil when Netflix, seemingly out of nowhere, decided to pull the plug. The series that had been part of Cox’s life for almost five years was over and Matt Murdock’s story would remain unfinished. But then, two years later, Kevin Feige called. The Marvel boss wanted to know whether Cox would return as the blind vigilante lawyer in Spider-Man: No Way Home and She-Hulk. Those two projects were filmed in 2021, but it wasn’t until January 2022, following the release of the rapturously received No Way Home, that Marvel decided Daredevil deserved a second chance going solo. What followed could have easily been dubbed The Year of The Devil: the original Netflix series moved…

Marvel’s TV shows started more directly tied to the movies than Daredevil. It was really cool at the beginning, how tied in they were. It felt like the movies were in your home, and it was a great way to launch Marvel on Disney+. As time went on, the shared universe started to feel like an obligation to people and that cost us a sense of discovery, especially on the television side. That’s part of why we have now rebranded and separated Marvel Television from Marvel Studios. We wanted to create that sense of discovery you have when you walk into the comic book store and there are many different types of comics to read. Daredevil already seems different to those limited series simply because it’s getting a second season.…

AGATHA’S COAT You sit down and think, “She needs some kind of vehicle – hero garb that will carry her through and is both contemporary and fantasy and pushes the boundaries of which period it is” – and it was the coat. I always knew that it was going to be this long travelling coat, I came to my pitch with that idea. I look at costume design as an external expression of the character’s internal experience. So in this case, Agatha’s coat is this protective layer. It’s a bit mysterious, it covers her up, it feminises her, it makes her more masculine. It’s all of the things that she’s experiencing on the inside: duplicitousness. There is a mercurial quality to her and you get these glimpses of this wild…

EVERYBODY DIES. No, that’s not a nuclear-level spoiler – unless you have a seriously underdeveloped sense of mortality, that is. For Oz Perkins it’s both a reality check and the creative engine of The Monkey, his take on one of Stephen King’s most primally unsettling tales. “Everybody will die,” the writer and director gently reminds SFX. “It’s said in the movie: you’ll die, I’ll die, all your friends will die, all your parents, all their parents, your pets… Everybody dies, and the basic madness of that concept became the root of the movie.” For Perkins a King adaptation is a kind of homecoming. “In my childhood Stephen King was definitely something that haunted the spaces,” he recalls, summoning the “imprinted memory” of the Pet Sematary cover – “The snarling cat…

IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A SPOT of romance this Valentine’s Day, how’s this for an unconventional meet cute? In new Apple TV+ movie The Gorge, a pair of elite snipers (played by Top Gun: Maverick’s Miles Teller and Furiosa’s Anya Taylor-Joy) are given year-long assignments at some unknown canyon in the middle of nowhere. While their respective observation posts are situated a mere 600 metres apart, the spooky, mist-filled gorge of the film’s title lies between them. Their respective paymasters have also forbidden them from talking to each other, as they carry out their lonely mission to prevent the highly classified – not to mention extremely unpleasant – contents of said valley from getting out. Let’s face it, even the vast distances and/or computer screens writer/director Nora Ephron put between…

▶ RELEASED 31 JANUARY 15 | 97 minutes ▶ Director Drew Hancock ▶ Cast Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Harvey Guillén, Rupert Friend The trailer for Companion teases a twisted romance from the producers of Barbarian and The Notebook; a sleight of hand description that teases only elements of Drew Hancock’s directorial debut. Indeed, Companion encompasses almost a half dozen genres and naming them all would give away the film’s surprises. We can, at least, set up the premise. Three couples, including Jack Quaid and Sophie Thatcher’s seemingly devoted duo, head to a holiday home in the woods. This is not your average Evil Dead-style cabin, but a luxury mansion owned by Rupert Friend’s creepy drug dealer. A murder mystery (of sorts) ensues. To say any more would spoil the fun. The…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! PG | 110 minutes ▶ Director Jeff Fowler ▶ Cast Jim Carrey, Ben Schwartz, Idris Elba, Keanu Reeves “Double your villain, double your fun!” chortles Jim Carrey in Sonic 3, a third outing for Sega’s beloved blue blur that finds the Ace Ventura star playing not just mad scientist Ivo Robotnik but also his 110-year-old grandfather Gerald. The fun quotient, though, remains pretty consistent with Sonic’s earlier vehicles, for all the latexassisted lunacy Carrey lends to his latest incarnation, or Idris Elba’s hilariously stern turn as “fist for brains” Knuckles. Once our hero’s nemesis, the pugnacious echidna has now joined “Team Sonic”, alongside flying fox Tails. The power of three, though, is still no match for Shadow (Keanu Reeves), a prickly teleporter out for payback after…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2000 | 15 | 4K/Blu-ray ▶ Director Sam Raimi ▶ Cast Cate Blanchett, Keanu Reeves, Katie Holmes, Giovanni Ribisi BLU-RAY DEBUT This paranormal suspenser plays like a Southernfried take on Eyes Of Laura Mars, as Cate Blanchett’s widowed psychic experiences visions linked to a small-town murder. For the most part director Sam Raimi restrains his hyperkinetic tendencies to service a story that’s as much concerned with local infidelity and courtroom drama as the otherworldly. You can sense the relish he brings to the psychic sequences, with their memorable jolts of uncanny imagery. Raimi also draws strong performances from a top-flight cast, not only the reliably brilliant Blanchett but Keanu Reeves, persuasively monstrous as an abusive husband. For all its misty bayou atmosphere, though, this extrasensory whodunnit…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2024 | 15 | DVD/download A new entry in the niche genre of kangaroo horror, this Australian indie finds a young sheriff investigating a savage killing spree by a malevolent marsupial. Undone by some goofy CG, it’s an outback critter flick that clings to the well-worn story beats of the Jaws playbook. The punning title promises a cheekier ride than the film delivers, the tone leaping like a crazed roo between self-aware splatterfest and a more earnestly played exploration of combat trauma. + Extras None.…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1988 | 15 | Blu-ray ▶Director Stanley Kwan ▶ Cast Anita Mui, Leslie Cheung, Alex Man, Yuen Irene Wan BLU-RAY DEBUT This Hong Kong ghost story may have stemmed from Jackie Chan’s stable Golden Way Films, but is free of dramatic stunts. It could have been different if his suggestions had been incorporated. Thankfully they were not. It centres on the doomed love between a 1930s courtesan (Anita Mui’s Fleur) and the heir to a trading company (Leslie Cheung’s Chan). Chan’s parents block a marriage, leading to a suicide pact. Fifty years later, Fleur’s ghost returns to seek out the lover she’s been waiting for in Hell, enlisting the help of two news reporters, and placing an ad in the paper. Why everyone’s convinced this gambit…

Recent theatrical releases landing on shiny disc include SMILE 2 (out now, 4K/Blu-ray/DVD), in which pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) inherits the curse which causes people to commit suicide while grinning grotesquely. We said: “The pop milieu adds some glossy theatrics… But for all its bells and whistles, it’s essentially a beat-for-beat reprise.” Special features: director’s commentary, deleted scenes and 48 minutes of featurettes. Sony’s Spidey spin-off trilogy wraps up with VENOM: THE LAST DANCE (3 February, 4K/Blu-ray/DVD). This time Eddie Brock finds himself the prime suspect for the apparent murder of Detective Mulligan. Cue a cross-country road trip in order to clear his name. We said: “Every bit as resoundingly stupid and intermittently entertaining as the first two.” Circa 40 minutes of Blu-ray bonuses include 13 minutes of…

▶ RELEASED 11 FEBRUARY 406 pages | Paperback/ebook ▶ Author Michael Nayak ▶ Publisher Angry Robot Author Michael Nayak once spent a “summer” at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, one of the most remote and inhospitable places on Earth. His debut novel was conceived during that Antarctic adventure, and that first-hand experience gives Symbiote an evocative – and chilly – sense of place. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live in a community of 40 people, surrounded by permanent darkness in a landscape so hostile it can kill you in seconds, this does an excellent job of taking you there. In a near-future where the US is at war with China, the “Polies” have to deal with a contagion that thrives in extreme cold, turning anyone infected into…

▶ RELEASED 13 FEBRUARY 176 pages | Paperback ▶ Authors Robin Smith, Karl Stock  ▶ Publisher Rebellion There’s a specific art to making a striking comic book cover, and 2000 AD has been doing it weekly for the past 47 years. This new volume takes an in-depth look at the cover art process via the work of Robin Smith, who was art editor of 2000 AD during one of its most creatively fertile periods. Between 1980 and 1985, Smith was responsible for getting the right cover illustrations from legendary artists like Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons and Carlos Ezquerra. Smith would generate the eye-catching rough layouts for each piece, and that’s what we see here, alongside finished covers featuring the likes of Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper and Strontium Dog, providing a…

▶ RELEASED 30 JANUARY 384 pages | Paperback/ebook ▶ Author Camilla Bruce ▶ Publisher Magpie Unfortunately for recently orphaned sisters Lily and Violet, there aren’t any cute little fairies at the bottom of their aunt’s garden. Nope, in this YA-but-trying-to-pretendit-isn’t witchy tale, there’s something much nastier down there: the furious ghost of a murder victim who needs the girls’ help to get his revenge. In chapters alternating between the perspectives of the girls and their aunt Clara, a story of intergenerational trauma unfolds. Resentful and bitter, Clara only agrees to take in the girls because she wants their inheritance – and when she discovers nine-year-old Violet can speak to the dead, quickly turns it into a moneymaking scheme. Thing is, some of those dead people have stories to tell of…

▶ RELEASED 13 FEBRUARY 368 pages | Paperback/ebook ▶ Authors David Barnett ▶ Publisher Canelo Horror It feels vaguely wrong to read this creepy little folk horror in the winter. Yes, it might send a shiver down your spine – but it’s set in sunny Cornwall, at the height of summer. Still, it probably won’t make you want to book a holiday there any time soon, so maybe that’s for the best. Thirty-something artist Merrin was born in the idyllic tourist trap of Scuttler’s Cove, but she hasn’t gone back since moving away to university. When her mother dies, she heads south – but gets a nasty shock when she discovers her inheritance is long spent. Instead of moving into her childhood home, she ends up in the “affordable” side…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Publisher Mad Cave Studios ▶ Writer Jeremy Adams ▶ Artists Will Conrad, Cliff Richards ISSUES 1-5  Given Flash Gordon’s 1930s newspaper strip origins, this latest take on the square-jawed space hero strikes a neatly nuanced balance between pulpy storytelling and radical plot twists. Jeremy Adams bravely frontloaded the big developments in last year’s Free Comic Book Day issue zero, with Flash cleverly fooling Ming by faking his own death, only to inadvertently cause the destruction of planet Mongo – a devastating event that is, frankly, subsequently not explored enough. So it feels like an unnecessary diversion when issue one opens with Flash imprisoned on the cornily named Planet Death, where he battles Star Warsesque aliens in an arena before forming an inevitably shortlived alliance with…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Publisher Marvel Comics ▶ Writer/artist Declan Shalvey ISSUES 1-3 As Mystique and Destiny finally tied the knot at the end of the X-Men’s Krakoan Age, it’s frustratingly inevitable that the new From The Ashes era finds them separated, if not estranged. Declan Shalvey imbues this excellent five-parter with an intriguing spy-fi sheen. Raven plays an enthralling cat and mouse game with Nick Fury Jr and SHIELD as she attempts to track down her missing spouse, who it turns out is in the custody of the now muchreduced espionage agency. With the shapeshifting Mystique able to take on a diverse range of guises, from Maverick to Magneto and Colossus, it can sometimes be difficult to pin down her actual character. Elsewhere, while tensions run high between…

SUPPORTED BY A PAT BRODERICK COVER AND interior illustrations by many of the original artists, several classic ’80s comics characters, including Concrete, Cerebus and Flaming Carrot, are eschewing the pictures as they make a comeback in new short story collection Legends Of Indie Comics: Words Only. “Prose fits comfortably on Concrete,” says the stone giant’s creator Paul Chadwick. “My artwork has some cinematic moments but I’ve always leaned towards comics as a literary experience. Concrete’s interior life has always been a focus: his ambivalence, his humiliations, his musings on the future.” “This is the first Doc Stearn prose story,” continues Mr Monster’s Michael T Gilbert. “I found it a fun challenge, working entirely in words, as it exercised a different part of my brain.” “Prose or comics, it makes no…

Does Born Again feel like getting the band back together? It does. That was all very special. When we were cancelled in 2018, they had just pitched me the new season – what the story was going to be – and I just assumed we would be shooting on the same schedule. We never really had our moment to say goodbye and close the chapter. It was very emotional, after so many years, to be back and talking about the past and all of those things. Would you say it feels like a season four? It does. But there was a U-turn after the strike, where we were headed in one direction which was interesting and valid. The argument was, if we’re coming back after all these years, we don’t…

I MAGINE IF IN HANS CHRISTIAN Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, when its heroine is asked to trade in her voice for legs so she can woo her mortal infatuation on shore, she simply barked back: “Well, why can’t the prince grow a tail instead?” Novelist Andrzej Sapkowski, in his tales of the Witcher, has delighted in turning fairy tale presumptions on their head, wielding a searing-hot poker against the kinds of cultural norms they enforce – chivalrous knights, feral creatures, wilting maidens. In his short story “A Little Sacrifice”, taken from the 1992 collection Sword Of Destiny, monster slayer Geralt is hired to translate Duke Agloval’s marriage proposition to Sh’eenaz, a ferociously beautiful mermaid, into her own deep-sea dialect. She refuses to drink the potion that will turn her tail…

PRACTICAL MAGIC “In our approach to Skeleton Crew, we used the philosophy of using practical effects whenever possible,” explains ILM Animation Supervisor Shawn Kelly. “That relates to things like the set, the ships, the props and even Neel’s head. That also carries through into the camera work on the show. We try to stay true to the type of camera moves that we would see in the original Star Wars trilogy.” OUT OF THIS WORLD “A big part of the show is the environments,” says ILM VFX Supervisor Eddie Pasquarello. “We haven’t been to any of these places before, so it was a very big challenge for us to start thinking about building these new worlds. For Port Borgo, we had some good concept art from Doug Chiang’s art department.…

FORBIDDEN VALLEY THE VALLEY OF GWANGI Named after an Allosaurus (a Jurassic forerunner of the more famous T. rex), this bizarre depression in the Mexican desert is home to a prehistoric ecosystem ruled by dinosaurs – each one lovingly animated by stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen. GORGE OF ETERNAL PERIL MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL Medieval tourist boards must have had a nightmare trying to sell the Gorge of Eternal Peril – and the Bridge of Death that traverses it – to potential visitors. With incorrect answers to the bridge keeper’s questions punishable by death, it’s best to proceed with caution. CANYON OF THE CRESCENT MOON INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE No prizes for guessing how the valley (situated in Hatay, now part of Turkey) providing a hiding place…

IN JUST TWO SEASONS OF SHOWTIME’S HIT HORROR series Yellowjackets, there’s been a catastrophic plane crash, a wild wolf attack, several affairs, a lot of murders and two cannibalistic feasts. Not bad for a show about a team of all-star, female, New Jersey high school soccer players. But it’s clear by now that the subtext driving the narrative is really about what happens when, post-plane crash, these teen survivors let their IDs go wild, then get saved and have to function once again in proper society. The show services dual storylines, one set circa 1996 with the teens in the remote wilderness of Canada where they’re stuck, and the other is 25 years later, back in suburban New Jersey, where the adult survivors are not doing that great… Season two…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 127 minutes ▶ Director JC Chandor ▶ Cast Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Russell Crowe, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger Sounding the death knell – at least for now; you know the studio won’t want to stop trying, despite all the reasons not to – of Sony’s universe of Spider-Man spin-off characters comes Kraven The Hunter. It lands with not so much the satisfying thwack of an arrow hitting a target, but more the wet splat of a bag of dog poo thrown at a door. Let’s start with the positives, shall we? There are a couple of well-realised set-pieces. And as Kraven, the villainous big game hunter/Spidey arch-enemy (here spun as a crime bossstalking anti-hero), given powers by a magic potion, Aaron Taylor-Johnson gives it his all,…

UK Sky Atlantic/NOW, streaming now US HBO Max, streaming now ▶ Showrunner Alison Schapker ▶ Cast Emily Watson, Olivia Williams, Travis Fimmel, Sarah-Sofie Boussnina, Chris Mason, Mark Strong EPISODES 1.01-1.06 So there are prophecies, various Houses, something big and awful coming, giant monsters, scheming factions and random nude sex scenes. It must be a new Game Of Thrones spin-off, yeah? Oh, hang on – there are spaceships too… Welcome to Dune: Prophecy, a prequel series set some 10,000 years before the events of Dune. Not that you’d realise – it looks more like it’s set 10 weeks before Dune in terms of tech, social structure and design ethos, but that’s surely a deliberate nod to the books. To be fair, Dune existed long before A Song Of Ice And Fire,…

▶ RELEASED 3 FEBRUARY/  OUT NOW! 2024 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD/download Documentarian Asif Kapadia crosses the streams with speculative fiction in this powerful polemic on the state of planet Earth. Samantha Morton anchors the film as a woman struggling to survive in a dystopian 2073, but it’s the contemporary talking heads (explaining how her future could come to pass) which provide the more compelling drama. Ultimately, though, 2073 bites off rather more than it can chew. + Extras None.…

▶ RELEASED 24 FEBRUARY 2024 | TBC | Blu-ray/download ▶ Director Yang Li ▶ Cast Ruoyun Zhang, Elane Zhong, Yang Song, Leon Lee For this Chinese timetravel caper, writer Yang Li seems to have rummaged through off-cuts from Western works. It channels everything from Scott Pilgrim (animation mixing with live action, particularly during fight sequences) to Everything Everywhere All At Once (different realities colliding) by way of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (pop-ups explaining random concepts to the viewer). The result is amusing, yes, but it’s like blending an entire four-course meal into one smoothie. On a faraway planet that resembles Earth, we meet three schoolkids in 1999, who fall into a lake of industrial waste and develop the ability to travel to the present day with a sneeze.…

▶ RELEASED 20 FEBRUARY  448 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Nnedi Okorafor ▶ Publisher Gollancz It’s one of the clichés of literary fiction that a first novel should be rich in autobiographical elements. Only later, when the writer has learnt more about the craft, will they step away from their own lives in earnest. This is, of course, an exaggeration, but there’s a grain of truth in it. Science fiction, by contrast, is less awash with overtly autobiographical fiction: SF writers don’t live in the future or travel off-planet. SF writers, again to generalise madly, are more likely to weave autobiography into their fiction later in life, perhaps when they’re taking stock. All of which we mention because, ever unconventional, Nnedi Okorafor’s latest novel – a book written by someone…

▶ RELEASED 30 JANUARY 288 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Nick Newman ▶ Publisher Doubleday Very often, SF is a genre of giant vistas: of starships that take generations to reach their destination, of wars that convulse entire galaxies, and of posthuman evolution millions of years into the future. But it’s equally good at taking a tiny and apparently mundane setting, and turning it into something jarringly, alienatingly strange. With the exception of a brief epilogue, The Garden is completely set in a single garden. True, it’s the garden of a stately home, and so considerably less tiny than any lawn most of us have ever had to mow. But for its gardeners, sisters Evelyn and Lily, its fruit trees and vegetable patches and beehives are the whole world. They…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 304 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Susan Barker ▶ Publisher Fig Tree As serial killer calling cards go, even the Zodiac letters have nothing on this. Victims of Susan Barker’s titular “old soul” are turned into their own mirror image. Facial features, random skin blemishes, entire limbs, even their internal organs: every single one is reversed. Two people meet by chance in an airport when they both miss the same flight. Over consolatory drinks, Jake and Mariko learn that they have something horrible in common: each of them has lost a loved one in an uncannily similar way. Soon, Jake is joining the dots, turning up deaths over three continents and seven decades. In each case, witnesses remember a mysterious, dark-haired woman who was fixated on…

RELEASED 6 FEBRUARY 384 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook Author Scott Reintgen Publisher Rock The Boat Mars is already a cool place, but if you want to make it even cooler, why not add a dragon? His name is Dread, and he’s lurking in a secret military bunker with a group of teenagers training to be his space-faring crew. Orphan Lunar Jones stumbles across Dread while scavenging the Martian desert. He’s on the run not only from the local wildlife – desperate to kill every human on the planet – but also his fellow scavengers. The moment boy and dragon meet, they realise their destiny is to be together. There’s great universebuilding from Scott Reintgen here: every planet and moon in his solar system has an accompanying dragon, and the beasts’ relationships…

▶ RELEASED 4 FEBRUARY 528 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Richard Swan ▶ Publisher Orbit Books An undercurrent of eldritch horror flows through this first volume of Richard Swan’s Great Silence trilogy. It’s set against an imposingly complex backdrop of competing nations, species and doctrines, where the afterlife is real but communication between the mortal and aethereal dimensions is strictly controlled. When the spirit realm inexplicably falls silent, Sovan ambassador Renata Rainer is dispatched to contact the Stygion, a race of magically adept mer-people, hoping they can provide answers. Alongside his quest, the story is told from two additional perspectives: Peter Kleist, a lieutenant in the Sovan army, posted to a remote, untamed frontier; and Lamprecht von Oldenburg, an avaricious noble conducting illicit magical experiments. Swan builds an oppressive sense…

JUST IN TIME FOR VALENTINE’S Day comes a cinematic mash-up that aims to please both romcom and horror fans. Impossible, you say? Director Josh Ruben most ardently disagrees and presents Heart Eyes, his latest film, as proof of concept. In just five years, Ruben has carved out a unique horror space for himself making funny, thought-provoking and scary films like Scare Me (2020) and Werewolves Within (2021). His latest is based on an original premise by Phillip Murphy and co-written by successful modern horror screenwriters Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy (Happy Death Day). Ruben was approached by Kennedy to give his spin on their tale of a masked serial killer (featuring literal heart eyes carved into his mask) targeting happy couples. Ruben tells Red Alert that as soon as he…

AS MANY DOCTOR WHO ACTORS HAVE found over the years, even when you’re done with the TV series, it doesn’t mean your character’s over for you. So it is with Sacha Dhawan, the latest television Master, whose last appearance was in the Thirteenth Doctor’s farewell extravaganza “The Power Of The Doctor”. But for Dhawan – who popped up in five episodes of Jodie Whittaker’s run – there was a nagging sense of unfinished business, that there was more to mine from this most manic incarnation of the Doctor’s arch-nemesis. “The great thing about the Master is there’s still so much to cover,” the actor tells Red Alert about his return to the role for audio producers Big Finish. “Even as I left the TV version, I was like, there’s still…

♦ It’s been announced that Rose Ayling-Ellis MBE will be appearing in a second season episode to air later this year. Showrunner Russell T Davies said: “We always want guest actors on Doctor Who to have fun, but Rose takes it to a whole new level. She storms in with an astonishing performance of terror, anger and bravery in one of the most frightening episodes we’ve ever made.” Ayling-Ellis said: “I loved Doctor Who when I was growing up, so being cast in the show was a dream come true. My inner child is ecstatic with excitement! Working with Russell and filming alongside the talented cast and crew has been an incredible experience. Ncuti is a wonderful Doctor, and I can’t wait for audiences to see what we have created…

How have the events of Hawkeye and Echo affected Kingpin? They were kind of different iterations of the Fisk from the original show. My job is to service the story. Hawkeye was one style of show, very far away from the Netflix series, and the way Fisk was written itself – which was really good – was a completely different world. When I did Echo, they leaned into the grittiness, but when it came to Fisk, it still was not quite the original thing. We’ve had the chance now to do it the way we wanted to do it. Do you think the vision for this show became clearer following the creative overhaul? I felt the character lives best in a down-to-earth, gritty world, darker story. There are things in…

With Blade and Armour Wars having previously been taken off the release schedule (potentially to fill one of the studio’s untitled dates), Marvel has been a little more coy about announcing projects prematurely. However, we do know that work has been ongoing on a Vision Disney+ series from Star Trek: Picard’s Terry Matalas, a spin-off show about Black Panther’s Okoyo, and a Nova series (though this may end up being a movie) from Moon Knight scribe Sabir Pirzada. Meanwhile, Denzel Washington has let slip that he’s in negotiations to appear in Black Panther 3, Shang-Chi 2 has been on the docket since the first one’s release, and an X-Men movie – reportedly from The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes writer Michael Lesslie – seems imminent after Secret…

SCREEN PLAY “Neel was a fun and interesting challenge for ILM,” Pasquarello tells SFX. “Neel’s head was built by Legacy Effects as a fully animatronic puppet. There’s a screen at the front, so that the actor wearing it could breathe; you can see it just above his trunk. On set, there was a puppeteer who stood to the side of the scene controlling the puppet head. I believe we had three or four heads in total. One for Robert [Timothy Smith], who plays Neel. There was a stunt Neel and a stand-in Neel.” FACE THE FACTS “There’s been some online confusion about facial capture with Neel,” adds Kelly. “On set, the young actor Robert [Timothy Smith] did have some cameras recording his facial movements. You know, the little dots on…

ONCE UPON A TIME IN 2023, independent British film studio Jagged Edge Productions unleashed Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood And Honey on a public still mighty fond of AA Milne’s good-natured, honey-loving teddy bear, thank you very much. “It was made in seven days on £20,000 and then, honestly, things just went crazy,” laughs Scott Jeffrey, co-founder of Jagged Edge with Rhys Frake-Waterfield. After going viral on social media, the copyright-dodging slasher movie, originally set for a small-scale VOD release, burst quite unexpectedly onto cinema screens around the world. “Whereas with the sequel, Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood And Honey 2, we had £320,000 which is still, like, crap, but it’s a lot more. I’m very good at managing budgets,” Jeffrey adds. “I don’t waste any money; every single penny is on screen. I think that…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW!  15 | 85 minutes ▶ Director Steven Soderbergh ▶ Cast Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday If you’ve ever used the virtual tour function on an online property site, Presence might give you a slight feeling of déjà vu. While Steven Soderbergh is no stranger to genre films, he’s never made an out-and-out horror before. Presence suggests we’ve all been missing out. It’s built on a brilliantly simple conceit: what if a haunted house movie was shot from the perspective of the restless spirit dwelling there? In practice, this means the viewer is locked into a roving camera in long takes, as it glides up and down the stairs, silently observing the interactions of a family who’ve moved into a new home – a…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2025 | 15+ | SVOD ▶ Director Olatunde Osunsanmi ▶ Cast Michelle Yeoh, Omari Hardwick, Kacey Rohl, Sam Richardson, Sven Ruygrok, Robert Kazinsky PARAMOUNT+ You may well bridle at Section 31 if you’re a dyed-inthe-wool Star Trek traditionalist, because this is the anti-Next Generation: a numbskull actionfest that has zero interest in high-minded philosophising over important ethical issues. It’s 27 years now since Deep Space Nine producer Ira Steven Behr devised Starfleet’s clandestine black ops division, who do the dirty work the likes of Jean-Luc Picard could never countenance. This kinetic, explosive streaming movie, set in the 23rd century, takes the morally grey intelligence agency and gives them the Suicide Squad treatment. Cue squabbling, stabbings, torture, endless waspish quips, and a score laced with rock guitar…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2024 | N/A | SVOD SHUDDER One for fans of The Substance, this Kiwi horror melds Eyes Without A Face and Face/Off, grafting winceinducing scenes onto a thematic musculature of the pressures to meet beauty standards and conform to a host culture. As shy Chinese biochemistry student Wei continues her late father’s work on skin grafts, Hweiling Ow’s promising debut paints a darkly comic portrait of snowballing madness – one with some interesting details (such as the disgust Wei’s New Zealand-born cousin feels toward her culture).…

▶ RELEASED 31 JANUARY 2024 | N/A | SVOD SHUDDER Think pro wrestling is “fake”? Well, things get pretty real in this surprisingly straightfaced horror. When a dodgy indie promoter accepts a booking for a series of “dark” matches at a private facility, he unwittingly sets his roster up for something truly shady… You’ll think you’ve got this film sussed, but it’s smarter than it looks. Its puppyish enthusiasm for wrestling and un-elevated horror gives it a kind of weirdo charm, while baddie Chris Jericho shows off some of the charisma that made him a superstar.…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1966 | 15 | Blu-ray ▶ Director Leslie Stevens ▶ Cast William Shatner, Allyson Ames, Ann Atmar, Eloise Hardt BLU-RAY DEBUT  A must-see for William Shatner fans, this curio (filmed a year before he pulled on Kirk’s gold tunic*) gave him quite a challenge, being scripted in international language Esperanto. Writer/director Leslie Stevens was fresh from the cancellation of his anthology show The Outer Limits. Cinematographer Conrad Hall would later tot up 10 Oscar nominations – and three wins. The simple story feels folkloric: a manichean struggle set around a village that’s a hunting ground for demons. Succubus Kia (Allyson Ames) targets a noble soldier. But Marc (Shatner) maintains his piety, and a male counterpart is summoned to take revenge… Shot entirely on location (mostly within…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 448 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Annabel Campbell ▶ Publisher Orbit Books A populist leader, an authoritarian justice system, a persecuted outcast community, riots, natural disasters… it’s a mystery where writers get their ideas from. The privileged city-state of Amoria thrives beneath its vast glass dome, but tensions are rising between the ruling mage class and the non-magical poorer folk. Our heroine is Naila, who has glimmers of a gift but doesn’t know how to use it. Powerful wizard Haelius commits to training her, but political conspiracy, foreign spies and mysterious crop deaths threaten to destabilise everything around them. And we’re teased with glimpses of hunters tracking a destructive beast across the desert beyond the walls. The allegory in Annabel Campbell’s debut novel feels very pertinent…

▶ RELEASED 30 JANUARY 336 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Lucy Rose ▶ Publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson You’ve probably seen enough movies to be wary of going on long cross-country drives in rural Texas, in case your car breaks down in cannibal country. In rural Cumbria, though? Lucy Rose’s debut novel suggests it’s time to start worrying about what might be going on in the more remote parts of the UK… Margot and her Mama keep to themselves. They eat what they can forage, or hunt, or otherwise lure into their storybook cottage in the woods. Like a stray hiker, for example: lost and tired, lulled into a false sense of security. Careful only to eat the ones who won’t be missed, the two of them manage to evade notice.…

▶ RELEASED 16 JANUARY  368 pages | Paperback/ebook ▶ Author Polly Crosby ▶ Publisher Scholastic In this YA tale, life’s great! If you’re perfect, that is. But what of those who aren’t? Those born blind or deaf, or missing a limb, or poorly in any way? They face one of two options: either their families drop them off at an enigmatic Hospital to be “rehabilitated” (spoiler: they won’t be), or they wait around to be kidnapped by monsters called the Vulpine, dragged underground to who-knows-what fate. Basically, being different sucks. Which is why young Ora is having a particularly sucky time when we meet her. After developing a lung condition, she’s absolutely distraught at what lies in her future. She doesn’t want to enter the Hospital, and is terrified of…

▶ RELEASED 6 FEBRUARY  243 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Maggie Su ▶ Publisher Sceptre The horrors of the modern dating scene are much discussed and lamented – so if you had a chance to craft the perfect mate from scratch, would you do it? Even if they literally started out as a watery blob on the ground? That’s the dilemma which faces college dropout Vi. Stuck in a job she despises, she’s still grieving the loss of her ex, Luke, when she stumbles across the eponymous blob behind a nightclub. Taking it home, she soon learns that it responds to her instructions. It slowly develops into a full human, addicted to cereal and daytime TV, who Vi calls Bob. But Vi isn’t necessarily the best person to possess that…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Publisher DC Comics ▶ Writer Kelly Thompson ▶ Artist Hayden Sherman ISSUES 1-4 One of the core conceits of DC’s freshly-minted Absolute Universe imprint is that life is much harder for the heroes in this parallel world. That’s led to radical reinventions of Batman and Superman, but Absolute Wonder Woman takes a subtler – and arguably even more satisfying – approach. This Diana was brought up not on Paradise Island, but in Hell, with Circe the witch (a longtime foe in the regular DC universe) reinvented as her loving protector. Cut to the present, and the adult Wonder Woman reveals her existence to a shocked world. While the US military are hesitant to trust this sword-wielding goddess on a skeletal pegasus, they’re left with little…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Reviewed on PSVR 2 ▶ Also on PCVR, Quest 3 ▶ Publisher Survios VIDEOGAME  A VR experience that aims to sit somewhere between the tension of Alien Isolation and the action of Aliens sounds great, and it is… at first. Rogue Incursion features superb graphics, manual reload mechanics that actually work, and a synth companion that for some reason wears a pair of glasses. You get a pulse rifle and a motion tracker, and the xenomorphs look, sound and move exactly as they should. It initially feels satisfyingly Alien. As you scavenge ammo and interact with terminals to open up ways forward, you’re regularly interrupted by alien attacks. A little too regularly. It soon becomes apparent that the game spits out enemies every few minutes…