Tabla de contenidos para April 2025 en SFX

DUNE: AWAKENING STARTS WITH a question: what if Paul Atreides was never born? There would be no Lisan al Gaib to lead the Fremen people; no one to stop House Harkonnen. Would the planet Arrakis fall? Would the messianic Kwisatz Haderach still come? This is the alternative timeline in which Dune: Awakening, the upcoming massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, takes place. You play as an agent tasked by the Bene Gesserit to find the desert-dwelling Fremen, who have mysteriously disappeared. You must survive on Arrakis while House Atreides and House Harkonnen battle for control. It’s a bold choice to tell a new, divergent story in the Dune universe when Frank Herbert’s tale is so beloved. “We are huge fans of the original works, but as games are a very different…

WHILE WACKY RACES dates back to 1968, Ivan Cohen is emulating some more recent futuristic Road Warriors as he and artist Mariano Benitez Chapo update Hanna-Barbera’s cartoon car competition in Giant-Size Wacky Races – a new one-shot for Dynamite Entertainment’s Warner Animation line. “Part of what made this a challenge worth facing was thinking about how to make it a 21st century story and bringing something new to the mix,” Cohen tells Red Alert. “So there are new racers, new vehicles and a new context for what the races mean to the non-racers. “Penelope Pitstop is the main character, and our take on her is part classic Wacky Races and a little bit Furiosa. She’s not a lone driver in a hellish apocalypse but she’s incredibly charismatic and puts everything…

AS WAKE-UP CALLS GO, SEEING A ballsack wasn’t necessarily on the list of things we were expecting. At least this time the ballsack is in space. It’s early morning on Thursday 2 May 2024 and SFX is at Shepperton Studios in London to step back onto the bridge of the USS Callister once more (see SFX 294) for the first ever Black Mirror sequel. In the original 2017 episode from series four, “USS Callister”, Robert Daly, the creator of multiplayer game Infinity creates digital clones of his co-workers and places them inside a version of it based on his favourite sci-fi series, Space Fleet. But the cloned crew manage to kill him and escape into the game. Now the crew – led by Captain Nanette Cole – find their problems…

When you see the ballsack coming, are you like: “I can’t wait for this”, or do you dread it? No, I was excited because it made sense. It finished off a concept of Walton being stripped of everything. And he’s a buffoon, he’s there to be laughed at. Throw in some bollocks and lock that giggle in. I let them know, I’m here for whatever sight gag you want. If you want to raise up the butt part for a cheeky shot, let’s just do it. Toby is such a fun director, fucking precise, but also a child who’s been given a sandbox full of his favourite things. It’s delightful. It’s such a supportive environment. Whoever’s being funny, laugh at them. Then you can move forward with confidence. How was…

WANT TO FEEL OLD? This issue of SFX goes on sale 20 years to the day that Doctor Who returned to our screens with “Rose”. Yes, Who fans, the revival now spans the same time period that stretched between two teachers from Coal Hill School finding a humming Police Box in a junkyard, and Peter Davison’s celery enthusiast meeting his predecessors in the Death Zone. It’s a remarkable achievement in a televisual landscape where you’re lucky if your favourite Netflix show gets greenlit for a second season, and one we’ve perhaps rather come to take for granted – something recent negative buzz around the series (generated by right-wing newspapers with an axe to grind) has brought into sharp focus. The official word on the show’s future remains the same as…

How would you describe season two? Craig Mazin: Thematically, the second season is about evolution and change. Ellie is growing up and she is changing. The town of Jackson is also growing up. It’s expanding. It’s taking in refugees. It’s changing. The outside is changing, too. How does the second season compare to the first? Neil Druckmann: In the first season, we followed Joel and Ellie as they went up against these other communities – whether it was David’s group or Kansas City. Now, they’ve settled in Jackson. It’s become their home and there’s a love there for a community. We start getting into tribalism in season two and we start to see some other factions. What happens when you’re going against another group and you don’t see the humanity…

WHEN SFX JOINS THE Wheel Of Time’s showrunner Rafe Judkins on a Zoom call, we’re both wistful for the South African sun. Almost a year ago, we visited the series’ Cape Town set to explore the pirate-invested harbour of Tanchico and cavernous caves of the Aiel Waste (read our set report in the last issue). In almost every aspect – costume, make-up, set design – the attention to detail was exquisite, every department working at the top of their game. “Everyone was contributing their piece and making it better,” says Judkins, who, as we speak, is deep into completing season three. The result, he continues, is “better than what we put on the page”. Those involved with the show’s third season attest to it being the most ambitious set of…

How did blowing the Horn of Heroes at the end of last season affect him? Within The Wheel Of Time, there’s this greater sense that there’s a pattern set out for you and that things are predetermined for the characters. I don’t think Mat had envisaged a lot for his future and was silently dealing with that. But when he’s pushed into that discovery, that he’s a leader, it turns his sense of perspective of himself on his head. He has to reevaluate his own sense of worth and what he might actually contribute to the pattern. The character was played by Barney Harris in season one. Do you feel more ownership of the character now? The fans have been incredibly supportive and accommodating to a new face in the…

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▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 103 minutes ▸ Director Mark Anthony Green ▸ Cast Ayo Edebiri, John Malkovich, Murray Bartlett, Juliette Lewis Obsessive fandom, celebrity culture and the slavish sycophancy it generates are the broad targets of a muddled satire that takes its time building up to a gorily murderous finale. Cut from the same cloth as Blink Twice and The Menu, Mark Anthony Green’s feature debut boasts some queasily unsettling moments and a twisted set-piece involving bizarre puppet theatre. By the time Opus reaches its curiously muted conclusion, however, one wonders if its writer/director truly has a handle on what he’s trying to say. That’s not a problem for its ambitious heroine Ariel (Ayo Edebiri), a young journalist fed up with being passed over at her Rolling Stone-esque…

▸ RELEASED 28 MARCH 12A | 149 minutes ▸ Director Joshua Oppenheimer ▸ Cast Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Moses Ingram, Bronagh Gallagher When the musical heads to the arthouse, the results can be infuriating – yes, we’re looking at you, Sparks, with your banal lyrics for Annette – and while The End has some admirable qualities, it’s definitely a minority taste. This post-apocalyptic tale centres on the family of a rich energy magnate and their servants, who’ve spent 20 years hunkered down in a luxurious bunker deep in a salt mine. When an outsider infiltrates this safe space, George MacKay’s Son (who’s never met a stranger) is captivated; Tilda Swinton’s Mother suspicious. Exposing this repressed middle-class existence as an elaborate exercise in denial, Girl (Moses Ingram) becomes a catalyst for…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1980 | 15 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Simon Wincer ▸ Cast Robert Powell, David Hemmings, Carmen Duncan, Gus Mercurio BLU-RAY DEBUT Written by Everett De Roche, who brought us Long Weekend, Roadgames and Patrick, this curate’s egg Aussie thriller puts a fantastical spin on the Rasputin story. Robert Powell plays Gregory Wolfe, a mysterious faith healer who inveigles his way into the home of David Hemmings’s politician Nick Rast (read that surname backwards) by curing his terminally ill son. Wolfe’s motivation is muddy, and it seems rather a lot of fuss over a small fry politician (Rast may be a US Senator – the non-specific setting means it’s unclear). There are bathetic moments too: in one, Wolfe leaves a Turin shroud-like self-portrait on the kitchen floor.…

EXTRA ▸ RELEASED 7 APRIL 2024 | 15 | Blu-ray A grief funk is rendered monstrous in Mary Dauterman’s indie debut. After the death of Anna’s roommate, the cat they adopted (Booger) escapes. Unravelling, she grows increasingly feline: staring at birds, retching up great balls of hair, biting the head off a rat. There’s the odd striking shot (like a dreamscape image of Anna curled up amidst black fur), and Zoe Polanski’s score is effectively oppressive. But as Anna proceeds to acceptance, it all feels a tad pointless. + Extras Video essays; galleries; booklet.…

EXTRA ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1976 | 18 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Yasuharu Hasebe ▸ Cast Tamaki Katsura, Yutaka Hayashi, Yuri Yamashina BLU-RAY DEBUT Part of the Nikkatsu studio’s Roman Porno series, Assault! is a challenge to score. Judged purely on its capacity to leave your jaw hanging, it’s a five, but that’d leave you looking like a sicko. Teaming director Yasuharu Hasebe (who brought us Bond spoof Black Tight Killers) and writer Chiho Katsura (of the demented haunted house flick Hausu), this isn’t a trip to Whitechapel. Echoing movies like The Honeymoon Killers, it follows two cafe workers who, after accidentally offing an escaped mental patient, find that only killing puts them in the mood for top-notch nookie. Packing seven sex scenes and 11 murders into 72 minutes, it’s so…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED 31 MARCH 1991 | 18 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Shozin Fukui ▸ Cast Haji Suzuki, Onn-chan, Kôji Ôtsubo, Rakumaro San’yûtei BLU-RAY DEBUT “When the spirit has overcome the limitations of the flesh, superior abilities will develop”, says director Shozin Fukui about his arthouse cyberpunk splatter flick in one of the interviews on this disc. It’s about as close an explanation as you’re likely to get for this defiantly singular film, so just sit back and enjoy/endure a perplexing ride. In a cyberpunk future (that looks like ’90s Tokyo), an amnesiac sex slave cyborg (Haji Suzuki) is rescued by young Himiko (Onn-chan), who helps him regain his memories. It’s not long, however, before the cyborg’s owners come looking for him. Cue blood, nudity, extensive vomiting, and more screaming than…

▸ RELEASED 27 MARCH 384 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Nicholas Binge ▸ Publisher HarperVoyager We are all products of our memories – and yet our memories are at best unreliable. Worse, for those of us unlucky enough to succumb to degenerative brain conditions, our memories can fade away entirely. As he details in an afterword to Dissolution, this is the fate that befell two of Nicholas Binge’s grandparents. But what if your memories weren’t to be lost but instead removed? How would someone do this? More importantly, why would they do this? These are the “What if?” questions that underpin Binge’s latest book, a strange and compelling slipstream sci-fi thriller. As to who is having their memories taken, meet Stanley, a brilliant researcher who, from the perspective of his…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 304 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author MR Carey ▸ Publisher Orbit Books MR Carey, comics writer and author of The Girl With All The Gifts, puts a fantasy spin on Seven Samurai with Once Was Willem, transposing the concept to the English village of Cosham in the twelfth century. The tale is told by Once Was Willem himself, a boy brought back from the grave by dark magic – unfortunately restored not as his former youthful self, but as a shambling revenant whose grotesque appearance spurs his parents to cast him out. The villain of the story is Cain Caradoc, a malevolent wizard plotting to sacrifice Cosham’s children in a bid to gain immortality. To oppose this vile scheme, Once Was Willem recruits six supernatural allies,…

▸ RELEASED 8 APRIL 576 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author MH Ayinde ▸ Publisher Orbit It can be hard to see the forest for the trees in A Song Of Legends Lost. MH Ayinde crafts a sprawling tale of lost civilisations, mysterious technologies, warring nations and more besides. In the Nine Lands, those born into noble bloodlines possess the power to bond with the spirits of their ancestors and summon them to fight in battle. That’s the official line, but Temi, who belongs to a dirt-poor family of bakers in a slum, discovers that she can summon a spirit from beyond. The spirit, however, has a mind and desires that are all its own. Ayinde’s tale is told from multiple perspectives, with an extensive cast. In the post-Game Of Thrones…

▸ RELEASED 27 MARCH 384 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Maithree Wijesekara ▸ Publisher Harper Voyager Sure, dragons are cool, but have you considered winged snakes? Similar slinky, scaly aesthetics, but with way less gold-hoarding and maidenbothering. Plus poisoned fangs are just so much more stylish than great big gouts of flame. Not only does emperor’s son Ashoka have his very own flying serpent, but when he gets bored of soaring through the air on its back (as if), his other option is a giant leopard. He’s a peaceloving kind of guy – much to his violently expansionist family’s disdain – and we’d entirely understand if he spent his days chilling with his menagerie. But this is the first volume of a fantasy trilogy, and so obviously trouble is on…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 128 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Arkady Martine ▸ Publisher Tor Few writers convey nuance as well as Arkady Martine. This much was clear from her Hugo-winning Teixcalaan duology, books that dealt in great part with the intricacies of diplomacy. What we didn’t know, at least until the first publication of Rose/House as a pricey limited edition in 2023, was that she could also write fiction that conveys a creeping sense of horror. The story here is straightforward. An AI – or “haunt” – infused into a house designed by the acclaimed architect Basit Deniau phones the cops to let them know there’s a dead person in Rose House. Which is a problem from the authorities’ point of view because, following Deniau’s death, the terms of…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher DC Comics ▸ Writer Dan Watters ▸ Artist Hayden Sherman ISSUES 1-4 Like Batman: Year One meets The Silence Of The Lambs, this enthralling maxiseries takes an unflinching, back to basics approach to the Dark Knight’s early years, emphasising detection over gadgets and fisticuffs. Composed of four three-part arcs, its opening trio of issues introduces the Wound Man, a particularly grisly serial killer. Inspired by the classic medieval diagram, he’s covered from head to toe in needles and, ominously – like several other characters we encounter – cannot feel pain. With no supervillains in sight, writer Dan Watters pits the Bat against some very ordinary adversaries, and shockingly he’s even brutally beaten by some extremely hostile everyday citizens. But while the Joker himself is conspicuous by his…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Reviewed on PS5 ▸ Also on PC, Xbox Series X|S ▸ Publisher ​Capcom VIDEOGAME A new land to explore, home to new monsters, mysteries, and an ecosystem in chaos – so far so Monster Hunter, but Wilds is a new high bar for the series in which you… well, hunt monsters and capture them. Maps are more interconnected than ever, and include a base camp so that you never have to leave the action. Likewise, new raptor-like mounts (the Seikret) are able to scoop you up and auto-run towards any set target, breezily whisking you away from danger. The motto of Monster Hunter Wilds: don’t sweat the small stuff. What you do have time to sweat is the clashes with the massive monsters themselves. Extremely…

“The Rock Demon goes totally berserk and hurls the magic keg. You are hit in the head, and your brains turn to beer. This character is totally useless from this point on – close the book.” Ouch. If Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was the serious, grown-up RPG with its exhaustive rule system chronicled in weighty, expensive hardcover volumes, Tunnels & Trolls – which marks its 50th anniversary this year – was its goofy kid brother. Superficially, the two systems had plenty in common, with players rolling dice to determine the outcome of events and character traits like Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence, but that’s where the similarities mostly ended. Playing T&T was equal parts escapist fantasy heroics and gleeful absurdity. Wizard spells included the whimsical “Take That, You Fiend!” and…

WHETHER YOU LIKED THE Jurassic World film trilogy or not, there’s no question that one of the best things to come out of its extension of the canon are the characters and storylines of DreamWorks Animation’s series Camp Cretaceous – and its sequel Jurassic World: Chaos Theory. The former introduced a group of teen campers – Darius (Paul-Mikél Williams), Kenji (Darren Barnet), Ben (Sean Giambrone), Yaz (Kausar Mohammed), Sammy (Raini Rodriguez) and Brooklynn (Kiersten Kelly) – who came to be known as “The Nublar Six” when they survived the dinosaur mayhem and volcanic destruction of Isla Nublar. In the latter, the six are now young twentysomethings traversing the globe to uncover the origins of a black market dinosaur smuggling operation with direct ties to the events in Jurassic World Dominion.…

The Byers house in Lenora, California from season four was recently put up for sale. The four-bed property in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was listed for $675,000. Sadie Sink’s postapocalyptic rock opera O’Dessa is now available on Disney+. Tales From Hawkins 2, a four-issue comic book series, is due to be released by Dark Horse Comics on 25 June. Each issue will feature spooky tales featuring characters from the series. Stage show The First Shadow is due to open on Broadway as this issue of SFX goes on sale and the team have shared images of the cast online, as well as continuing their countdown showing the Mind Flayer looming over New York. Speaking at the recent SCAD TVfest, Matt Duffer said about working on season five: “Ross and I do love…

Are you excited to be back on the bridge? PGR: Not excited, just terrified of making the bad sequel. OI: Really? PGR: Oh yeah. Excited to see everyone, but pressure! OI: I’m just more excited to see everyone again. I sit firmly in the camp of doing the job is the fun part. After that, it’s none of my business. That alleviates the pressure. It’s all about seeing their beautiful faces again. And ballsack. Did you hope for a sequel? PGR: There had been whisperings about this for a while, but I was convinced it would never happen because of various availability issues. What happens with your characters? PGR: It’s weird. It’s a combination of being in this awkward situation, but they have become this family unit. The first half,…

Star Wars has traditionally been reluctant to play around with genre as much as its Disney stablemate Marvel, but Andor creator Tony Gilroy believes there’s room to try new things in a galaxy far, far away. “I think we’ve made our lane with Andor, and Skeleton Crew was trying to do their own, too. The hope is that you can do anything, and we’re going to open up some canonical things and concepts in Andor that maybe will get people excited to do other things. “I always fantasised that the show would break new ground, that someone would be able to make a three-camera sitcom in Star Wars or a horror movie. I think the first thing I said to Kathy [Kennedy, Lucasfilm president] when she said they wanted to open…

What can you tell us about Belinda’s background and personality? She’s a nurse from modern-day times, and is, I think, very, very independent – very much has her own purpose, has her own life, has her own narrative. I get the feeling that she’s the main character in her own story, and it just so happens to be gatecrashed by the Doctor. Now she wants to return to her own plot, but is caught up in this mad world that he sort of drags her into. It looks like their relationship is fairly… maybe “spiky” isn’t the right word, but she’s quite assertive with him. Yeah, I would say so. And I really appreciate that as well, because I get the feeling that it’s not often the companion is sort…

Juno Dawson’s episode set at the Interstellar Song Contest seems guaranteed blockbuster ratings, as it’ll be sandwiched between two of the TV events of the year: the FA Cup Final (2024 peak: 8.6 million) and the Eurovision Grand Final (2024 peak: 8.5 million). But wait a mo… if the teams are drawing at 90 minutes, the football will go to extra time. And the start of Eurovision is immovable. Then what? “Well spotted!” says Russell T Davies. “It’s going to be very, very interesting what happens. Honestly, that day it’ll be like, ‘Are we transmitting or not?’” Not that he’s overly concerned. “They did run this past me and say, ‘Do you want to take that risk?’, and I said, ‘That’s the sexiest fucking risk I’ve ever heard in my…

SOMETIMES THE BEST ideas come from the most unlikely sources. The lightbulb moment for the very up-to-the-minute premise of Blumhouse and Platinum Dunes’ Drop was a series of anonymous messages received by producer Cameron Fuller and his family on their phones during dinner at a restaurant. “They were totally innocent, nothing creepy,” director Christopher Landon assures SFX. “But Cameron spent the whole night trying to figure out who was doing it, and he never solved the mystery. He felt there was a movie idea in there.” Fuller set the wheels in motion, tasking Truth Or Dare and Fantasy Island writers Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach to develop a story geared around AirDrops – media sent wirelessly from one mobile device to another within close range. While Landon found himself…

AH, WHAT A STRANGE JOURNEY Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction classic The Handmaid’s Tale has taken since it was first published in 1985. A satire of the religious right policies fomented during President Ronald Reagan’s administration in the United States, Atwood’s narrative was the ultimate “What if?” thought experiment about what the country might look like if those policies incited a hostile takeover of democracy and the US became a totalitarian patriarchy called Gilead. Sobering, but surely impossible… (Insert nervous laugh). Fast-forward to 2016 when Bruce Miller (The 4400) and executive producer Warren Littlefield (Fargo) were given a straight-toseries order for The Handmaid’s Tale, starring Elisabeth Moss as June Osborne/Offred, for Hulu. That was just seven months before Donald Trump and his ultra-right wing Republican party won the election…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 |137 minutes ▸ Director Bong Joon Ho ▸ Cast Robert Pattinson, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie A broad, blunt satire that’s brimming with absurdity and rallies against social inequality, cruelty to animals and environmental destruction, Mickey 17 sees Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho returning to his favoured themes. It’s Bong’s first film since his Oscar-winning Parasite six years ago, and though it shares that movie’s righteous anger while surveying haves and have-nots, it’s far less precise and sophisticated. Wilfully so: here, Bong is choosing to operate closer to the register of his earlier English-language adventures, Snowpiercer and Okja. Based on Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7, its action is set 30 years hence, as Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) and his pal/business partner Timo…

▸ RELEASED 28 MARCH 15 | 99 minutes ▸ Director Chris Reading ▸ Cast Ruth Syratt, Megan Stevenson, Johnny Vegas, Sophie Thompson Two bungling junk shop owners replenish their stock with genuine historic artefacts after someone leaves a time-travelling bumper car next to their bins. But their clueless temporal plundering doesn’t come without consequences. Sadly, for a sci-fi comedy, it doesn’t come with enough laughs, either. This often surreal, low-key British mockumentary (which brazenly abandons any pretence of being a mockumentary whenever the plot won’t allow it) features a reliable cast of UK comedy stalwarts (Mark Heap, Jane Horrocks, Stephen Fry), some wonderfully bizarre moments, and plenty of Carry On-style fnarr-fnarr acronyms. But it relies too heavily on deadpan delivery, sly glances and awkward, blank-faced dead air, which make what’s…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 101 minutes ▸ Director Paul WS Anderson ▸ Cast Milla Jovovich, Dave Bautista, Arly Jover, Amara Okereke “This is no fairy tale,” growls Dave Bautista’s Boyce in the opening narration to this latest Paul WS Anderson smackdownathon, but it’ll certainly seem awfully familiar to anyone who has ever watched the director’s output in the past. There’s his better half, Milla Jovovich, as a kickass warrior: here a warrior witch named Gray Alys, who grants wishes and is assigned by a queen to find a werewolf in a wasteland. Sure enough, she often uses two weapons at once. There’s a ruined world as a setting (we’re back in postapocalyptic territory), which Alys needs Boyce’s help to traverse. And other characters who are more plot device…

▸ UK streaming now on NOW/Sky Atlantic, Thursdays ▸ Creator Chris O’Dowd ▸ Cast Christina Hendricks, Paddy Considine, David Rawle, Eileen Walsh EPISODES 1.01-1.06 Running the full gamut of “quirky” from “rural folk and their charming esoteric ways”, through “This is all getting a bit Twin Peaks” to “WHAT THE F**K JUST HAPPENED?”, this slice of Oirish whimsy from The IT Crowd star Chris O’Dowd starts and ends like two entirely different shows. Both of them a lot of fun, thankfully. The first episode has a Detectorists tone, with the residents of an Irish village trying to convince a US TV company that its new Game Of Thrones-style TV show should be filmed there. SF elements only start being hinted at in episode two. After that, the show accelerates both the sci-fi…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2025 | PG | SVOD/download VIAPLAY Don’t expect deep dives on Blade Runner or The Hitcher from this portrait of Rutger Hauer – the former only comes into focus at the end; the latter’s barely mentioned. No matter: the personal story of ’80s cinema’s favourite villain is more interesting. The work of Hauer’s goddaughter, it boasts affecting contributions from his widow and friends like Whoopi Goldberg, plus a plethora of personal footage (Hauer was constantly filming), painting a picture of a liberated, joyful life. You’ll come away resolved to carpe diem.…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2025 | 15 | Download A rickety charter plane crashes in the swamps, downgrading its passengers to gator-bait class. The gators themselves have enjoyed an upgrade, transformed by a toxic spill from a secret drugs lab into even deadlier predators. This critter flick falls back on standard tropes – the selfish a-hole hoarding a working cellphone inevitably gets his just and gory deserts – but for all its overfamiliarity it’s an efficient, slickly executed survival thriller, dripping with bayou atmosphere.…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1968 | 15 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Alain Resnais ▸ Cast Claude Rich, Olga Georges-Picot, Anouk Ferjac BLU-RAY DEBUT An influence on Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, this is a highly unusual time travel movie – one which, in Gondry’s words, “uses editing as a special effect”. Claude Rich plays a writer recovering from a suicide attempt, enlisted in an experiment to send him back in time – not physically, but psychologically – then return him after a minute. It goes wrong, and he uncontrollably flits back and forth, experiencing moments from his past – from workaday drudgery to a tragic death. The writing process was highly unorthodox, with novelist Jacques Sternberg penning scores of fragments for Resnais to place in order. The…

▸ RELEASED 27 MARCH 336 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author John Scalzi ▸ Publisher Tor What if the Moon really was made of cheese? Daft idea, sure… but what if it did suddenly metamorphose into a giant Mini Babybel overnight? Well, one thing John Scalzi would point out is that it couldn’t be a giant Mini Babybel – that’d be silly. Completely wrong density and albedo. Because what this book does is takes a completely Lunar Tunes concept, then treats the fallout in all seriousness. How would the Moon turning into cheese affect the Earth and its inhabitants – scientifically? Politically? Theologically? Existentially? Artistically? The book’s set over a lunar month, with each chapter spotlighting different sets of characters (though some do make reappearances) on successive days in that cycle, as…

▸ RELEASED 7 APRIL 336 pages | Paperback ▸ Author Charlotte Tierney ▸ Publisher Salt Publishing Despite the title, there’s no wedding in this psychological (but maybe supernatural) horror novel. The “Cat Bride” is a character in a fairy tale beloved by 16-year-old Loveday, in which a man falls in love with a cat who’s been magically transformed into a woman. Loveday herself is on the brink of a transformation, though what she’s becoming is open to interpretation. Her ailing grandmother insists she has a special link to the mysterious big cat that supposedly stalks the moors; her mother says she’s just ill. What’s the truth? Well, something’s killing the livestock, and Loveday can’t explain why she keeps waking up naked and covered in blood. You might think the obvious…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW 432 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author RM Gray ▸ Publisher Penguin When is a story about pirates not a story about pirates? When you make your lead characters pirates and then sink their ship in the first few pages, yank them off the high seas and drop them in a country manor for the rest of the book. It’s a weird decision and possibly an unwise one, but RM Gray just about manages to make the dissonance work. Her lead pirate-out-of-water is Violet Oberon, who’s still mourning the death of her brother in a sea battle when she’s forced into servitude at the home of a wealthy Nightweaver family. Humans have heard terrible stories about the magical Nightweavers: they’re evil and they eat our flesh! Which…

▸ RELEASED 27 MARCH 384 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Josh Malerman ▸ Publisher Tor Nightfire Josh Malerman is the author of Bird Box, which was adapted into a so-so Netflix mega-hit featuring Sandra Bullock in a blindfold. After getting a few chapters into his latest, you’ll be the one asking for the blindfold. Not because it’s rubbish, but because it’s absolutely terrifying. The set-up is deceptively simple. Eight-year-old Bela has a monster living in her closet, a monster that sits with her at night, asking if she’ll let the entity “into her heart”. Bela doesn’t want to say yes, but she also doesn’t want to say no, so she avoids the question. Until the creature starts to leave her closet, and even her room, so it can get the…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher DC Comics ▸ Writer Mark Waid ▸ Artists Dan Mora ISSUES 1-4 DC’s premier superteam has reunited with a literal cast of thousands following the game-changing events of the All In initiative, inviting every hero to join its ranks. It’s exhausting to take in the vast number of characters. Mark Waid wisely focuses on heavy hitters such as Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and The Flash, while a disembodied Red Tornado acts as an omniscient AI and sturdy support is provided by the more obscure likes of Dr Occult, the Metal Men, Mr Terrific, Swamp Thing’s daughter Tefé Holland, and the Green Guardian. There’s also the latest Air Wave, whose apparently lightweight Wi-Fi abilities eventually play a vital role – although given some unspecified connections to main…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Running time 118 minutes ▸ Format CD/download ▸ Publisher Big Finish AUDIO DRAMA Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor finds himself on Mondas before the days of the Cybermen… hang on, haven’t we heard this one before? Yep, that’s the basic synopsis of both this release and 2002’s wonderful Spare Parts. This isn’t a case of Big Finish repeating itself, however. Where that story was a brand new tale, Genesis is part of the Lost Stories strand, inspired by an idea that Cybermen co-creator Gerry Davis pitched to the Doctor Who office in the ’80s. It was rejected and a full script never written, until now. The TARDIS crew find themselves on a suspiciously Earth-like world ruled over by the twin princes Dega and Sylvan. After an accidental…

AS SMALL-SCREEN CONCEPTS GO, there are few juicier than “Kevin Bacon hunts demons”. That was the back-of-a-fag-packet idea put to writer/producer Erik Oleson in 2023, a job offer he simply couldn’t say no to. “It was very exciting to develop the tone of Appalachian noir mixed with horror,” he enthuses to Red Alert, “and to bring my stamp to it.” The idea had been brought to Prime Video by Bacon himself, alongside Blumhouse supremo Jason Blum who’d been sent the treatment by newcomer Grainger David. Realising they had the DNA of something special, Amazon turned to Oleson, a veteran of shows such as Daredevil, Carnival Row and The Man In The High Castle, to shape David’s concept into a potential series. The result, The Bondsman, stars Bacon as Hub Halloran,…

Season two of Doctor Who has been confirmed as returning to BBC One, iPlayer and Disney+ weekly from 12 April. The iPlayer release has been changed from midnight to 8.00am. Additional cast have been announced for season two, including Christopher Chung. He said: “I’m absolutely thrilled to step into the Whoniverse as Cassio for season two! This show is legendary, and getting to be part of this new era feels surreal. Working with Russell and Ncuti has been a dream! This episode is huge – packed with everything Who fans love: heart, adventure, and a touch of madness. I can’t wait for everyone to see what’s in store – it’s going to be iconic. Get ready!” Showrunner Russell T Davies added: “I’m a huge fan of Slow Horses, and I…

On making his first horror film… It was my first time experimenting with the genre, head on. And I love it, man. I got to dig into the films that I loved coming up and got to analyse why I loved them and what drew me to them. I really leaned on those influences and figured out a way of how to tell my story in that space. It’s kind of genre-bending. It’s a genre-fluid film. There are vampires in the film, but it’s really about a lot more than just that. It’s one of many elements. I think we’re gonna surprise people with it. On using his own family history for inspiration… It’s very personal. My maternal grandfather is from Mississippi and my Uncle James, who passed away while…

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When did you first hear about doing a sequel? It has almost come together many times before this. I’ve been in touch with Charlie about it for six years. It went through so many iterations – him and I touched base about it a couple of times a year. I think the first time he reached out was less than a year after the original, to tell me he had a lot of ideas and that he was working on something, so this has actually been a long time in the making. Where do we find the real Nanette at the beginning of the sequel? The real Nanette has been living with the guilt that she was blackmailed into breaking into Daly’s apartment and then he died afterwards. And she…

YOU ALREADY know where this story ends. In fact, in a break with standard Star Wars protocol, Andor creator/showrunner Tony Gilroy is quite happy to confirm that his show wraps up “with Cassian Andor walking out to the ship to go to the Ring of Kafrene”. There, as Rogue One detailed in 2016, he’ll meet up with (and subsequently bump off) Rebel informant Tivik, setting forth a sequence of events that will result in the recovery of schematics for a certain armoured space station – plans that will help Luke Skywalker become the poster boy of the Rebellion. Saying all this doesn’t really count as a spoiler, however, because Andor’s second and final season is as much about the journey as the destination, completing Cassian’s evolution from petty criminal to…

1 The Death Star starts out as a Separatist project in the prequel trilogy. Its first canonical appearance comes in Attack Of The Clones, when Geonosian ruler Poggle the Lesser hands prototype plans to Sith Lord Count Dooku. The planet’s population was later wiped out to protect the Emperor’s little secret. 2 The original Death Star is 160km (100 miles) wide at its equator. That would equate to a very small moon in real life, as Ceres – the largest asteroid in our Solar System – has a diameter of just under 1,000km. 3 The Death Star’s superlasers are powered by very large kyber crystals. Smaller versions of the crystals can be found in Jedi lightsabers. 4 During construction its working title was Project Stardust. 5 The thermal exhaust port…

The trailer includes a glimpse of Anita Dobson’s mysterious neighbour Mrs Flood, seated at the Intergalactic Song Contest. Will we finally get closure on her identity by the end of the season? “There are answers, there are spectacular answers,” Davies says, promising us more costumes to rival the fluffy white fur coat Dobson rocked at the end of “Empire Of Death”. “She’s at her finest. And you will see her every single week – she’s in every single episode. You won’t ever quite know where and when to expect her…”…

DURING NCUTI GATWA’S first season, five of the eight episodes were set on Earth – four in the modern day. And when we did visit alien planets, we saw an Earth-like city (“Dot And Bubble”), and a battlefield (“Boom”). You’d imagine this year’s “Get Belinda home” arc might tip the scales in favour of strange new worlds. So when we catch up with production designer Phil Sims, the first thing we ask is whether season two leans into pure sci-fi a little more. “This season, the gloves are off,” he says. “The team have gone sci-fi-tastic with it. I think it feels more like spooky Doctor Who, and more like the sci-fi Doctor Who that I grew up with.” He gives the example of episode three, which involved filming in…

Many of Landon’s horror movies feature LGBTQ+ supporting characters and Drop is no exception. But can he see a horror movie with a gay lead coming to cinemas any time soon? “Oh, fuck no!”, laughs the filmmaker, who is gay himself. “Here’s a great example, and I won’t name names. I wrote a movie based on a very big and popular IP that had a gay lead, and that was the thing that stopped it from getting made. [The studio] just couldn’t deal with it; they were worried that it would alienate half the audience or half our country [the US] in particular. “So it didn’t move forward. It was a shame as it was actually one of the best scripts I’ve ever written. I was insanely proud of it,…

What journey is Perrin on in this season? Perrin was the person who is quite happy to be in the background. He’s had guilt and trauma, so he’s been happy to let Rand take the shine. But he naturally starts to find himself in positions where people are looking to him for direction or leadership. That’s where we find him in season three. He can’t be that person who keeps his head down in the corner any more. He has to make decisions, not only for himself but on behalf of other people. He goes back to the Two Rivers – back to his home. There’s something quite cathartic about going back to that location. We were filming [in Prague] in 2019, and going back was something. A make-up artist…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 18 | 97 minutes ▸ Director Josh Ruben ▸ Cast Olivia Holt, Mason Gooding, Jordana Brewster, Gigi Zumbado The combination of romance and horror (and, indeed, comedy) is not exactly new, but in Heart Eyes it’s given a snarky, mostly fresh spin. Josh Ruben’s film focuses on Ally McCabe (Olivia Holt), a jewellery advertising executive mourning a recent break-up. She has a meet-cute with Mason Gooding’s smooth, romantic Jay Simmonds, only to discover he’s been brought in to oversee her next campaign. To make matters worse, the “Heart Eyes Killer” is on the loose, having murdered lovers elsewhere in previous years. The serial slayer targets Ally and Jay, mistaking them for a couple, and soon they’re fighting for their lives while also discovering that they might…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 18 | 91 minutes ▸ Director Kyle Mooney ▸ Cast Jaeden Martell, Rachel Zegler, Julian Dennison, Kyle Mooney Techno terror is not exactly the newest concept in the world, but with Y2K, Saturday Night Live veteran Kyle Mooney finds a way to make it funny and just a little emotional; think Superbad on a date with The Terminator. Jaeden Martell (one of It’s Losers’ Club) and Deadpool 2’s Julian Dennison are high-schoolers Eli and Danny, who just want to be in with the cool kids. Eli is also dealing with a crush on the nerdy Laura (Rachel Zegler, soon to be seen starring in Snow White). The boys get their shot at a pre-millennium party in 1999, when the world is worried about computers failing. That’s…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! U | 78 minutes ▸ Director Gonzalo Gutierrez ▸ Cast Micke Moreno, Cassie Glow, Matthew Moreno Lamprea, Thomas Harris This Spanish-made adventure introduces us to a descendant of windmill-whacker Don Quixote. Young Alfonso (Micke Moreno) has inherited his great-great-great-great grandfather’s powers: he can see that windmills are actually giants and, randomly, his best friends are a bunch of imaginary rabbits. These magical skills – which nobody else believes are real – are put to the test when his town falls victim to a series of storms, allowing property developer Corrasco (Thomas Harris, whose vocals are a cross between Stephen Fry and Eddie Izzard) to swoop in for his own nefarious purposes. The animation feels cheap but it’s definitely cheerful. All the characters have something useful to…

▸ RELEASED 27 MARCH 2025 | TBC | SVOD ▸ Director Todd Austin SKY ARTS Twenty-four years on, the passing of the creator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy at just 49 still stings, in part because this early adopter never got to enjoy (if that’s the right word) a world of iPhones, social media and burgeoning AI. This documentary (circa 66 minutes) sets out to tackle some of the questions of life, the universe and everything raised by his work. Featuring interviews with collaborators like Hitchhiker’s producer John Lloyd, old pals like Stephen Fry, and (more unexpectedly) his siblings, it’s attractively presented, using some charmingly lo-fi animation. Inspired, no doubt, by Kevin Jon Davies’s excellent recent book 42, it also draws on artefacts from the Adams archive at St…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2024 | 15 | Download Set after a pandemic dubbed “Mother Nature’s revenge”, this downbeat post-apocalyptic puzzler follows a young fella searching for his girlfriend after waking up with amnesia. Carrie-Ann Moss’s take-no-shit middleaged woman takes him in. Die Alone doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but its vegetational take on the Infected supplies the odd surreal visual (a zombie with a bush sprouting from its bonce). And while some twists hove into view well in advance, the most effective manages to hide in plain sight.…

Surely the death knell for Sony’s Spidey spin-offs, KRAVEN THE HUNTER (31 March, 4K/Blu-ray/DVD) sees the Russian big game hunter (here spun as an anti-hero) taking on Aleksei Sytsevich (aka Rhino) after his brother’s kidnapped. We said: “Leaden, utterly uninspired storytelling.” Bonuses: four featurettes (23 minutes); deleted scenes; out-takes. NOSFERATU (7 April, 4K/Blu-ray/DVD), Robert Eggers’s remake of FW Murnau’s silent classic, comes to disc in an extended cut (four minutes longer). We said: “Seems to teeter on the brink of a plunge into insanity throughout… A film with its own distinct identity.” Extras include director’s commentary, a 41-minute Making Of, and three deleted scenes. The latest from cult filmmaker Guy Maddin, RUMOURS (out now, Blu-ray/DVD) centres on a G7 summit. Alone in the grounds of a chateau, national leaders encounter…

▸ RELEASED 10 APRIL 464 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author John Higgs ▸ Publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson John Higgs has form when it comes to Great British institutions: 2022’s Love And Let Die mapped the intertwined destinies of James Bond and the Beatles. Now he turns a cultural critic’s eye to Doctor Who, another world-beating example of Blighty’s soft power birthed in the early ’60s. Here’s the entire 60-plus years of on-screen fiction and backroom drama, Time Lord heroics and messy human behaviour by those who actually made the show. From Dalekmania to the second coming of RTD, it’s an astute, solidly researched overview, albeit one with a gossipy side that occasionally verges on tabloid prurience. Hardcore fans may fear it’s an overfamiliar tale – this is the most documented…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Hardback/ebook ▸ Author Silvia Park ▸ Publisher Magpie In a near-future unified Korea, a cyborg cop is trying to locate a missing robot, while his estranged sister is preparing for the launch of a new line of child automatons, and a dying, disabled girl discovers an enigmatic AI in the form of a small boy in a junkyard. From that summary, Silvia Park’s debut may sound like some gnarly cyberpunk noir – and there are certainly elements of that – but it’s actually a far more cerebral slice of sci-fi. Set in a world where most humans appear to regard robots as somewhere between a labradoodle and a dishwasher, it’s a novel about AI self-determination that addresses what it means to be human…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Dark Horse Comics ▸ Writer Kelly Sue DeConnick ▸ Artist David López ISSUES 1-4 Packing in plenty of punky attitude and teen angst (alongside the occasional magical transformation), the latest comic from Captain Marvel and Pretty Deadly writer Kelly Sue DeConnick is a scattershot mix of satirical comedy and fantasy that takes aim at everything from pandemics to crime podcasts. Set in Portland, Oregon, in an uncomfortably believable near future, FML (short for “F*** My Life”) is the story of four teenagers who just want to play heavy metal and get through life in one piece. However, when a magic spell causes unintended consequences, and a local podcast festival dredges up dark secrets, things soon get both weird and dangerous. We’re four issues into this eight-issue…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Publisher Rebellion ▸ Writer Rob Williams ▸ Artist Henry Flint COLLECTION Nobody does space opera quite like 2000 AD, and the long-running anthology’s punk-influenced spirit is on full display in Shakara, one of its weirder sci-fi epics. Set in a hyper-violent universe of chaos and disorder, it follows a mysterious entity on a bloodthirsty revenge spree across the cosmos. The titular warrior is out to avenge its dead race, but across the stories presented here there are a satisfying number of twists and turns, along with a surprisingly effective emotional throughline underneath the absurd ultraviolence. It’s packed with wild imagination and demented world-building, with writer Rob Williams doing a great job of pushing the scale of the story to mind-bending extremes. However, it’s the visuals…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Running time 44 minutes ▸ Format CD/vinyl/download ▸ Label Fab Records ALBUM Older readers may remember the phenomenon of the knock-off sci-fi soundtrack album: generically titled collections of themes performed by jobbing orchestras. SFX even put one out back in 1998 (Sound FX, yours for one 1p on Discogs). Well, this handsome new release from The British Stereo Collective (aka producer Phil Heeks) is something even stranger: a collection of 16 themes to shows that don’t exist, plus two brief idents. The opening “Moonbase Britannica” is a wonderfully cheesy disco cut, reminiscent of Meco’s Star Wars And Other Galactic Funk, while other tracks touch on minimal synth (“The Queller Tapes”) and faux library music (“Ghosts Of Us”). Some of the themes are winkingly titled pastiches…