Tabla de contenidos para June 2025 en SFX

★ Netflix has announced the date for their next global fan event, Tudum. It will take place on Saturday 31 May and be live-streamed on their platform (Sunday 1 June, 1am BST). It promises the first look at a number of their most popular productions, including, of course, Stranger Things season five. ★ The title for the animated Stranger Things series has been announced. The show, inspired by 80s cartoons, will be called Stranger Things: Tales From ’85. The series is currently in the works with Eric Robles as showrunner. “We’ve always dreamed of an animated Stranger Things in the vein of the Saturday-morning cartoons that we grew up loving, and to see this dream realised has been absolutely thrilling,” said ST creators The Duffer Brothers. “We couldn’t be more…

THERE’S A MOMENT IN THE M3GAN 2.0 trailer when the dancing robotic sensation makes a proclamation. “Hold on to your vaginas,” she warns. How many other horror icons could announce their return with such immortal words? “At every stage of developing the first movie, the goal was to contribute this icon to the horror lexicon,” Allison Williams, who plays mother Gemma and produces, tells SFX. “She’s a very specific kind of person. Chucky [from the Child’s Play franchise] is this brash, rude, mean, mass murderer in the body of this weird-looking doll, and Annabelle is just still and terrifying. M3GAN has her own vibe going on, and for people to embrace that so quickly, it felt amazing.” Audiences not only embraced M3GAN, they chiselled her mannequin face into the Mount…

What makes Amelia so interesting? She doesn’t see herself as a villain. She’s this intelligence that was created for a specific purpose, but begins questioning that purpose. The most compelling antagonists are the ones where you can understand their logic, even if you don’t agree with their methods. At her core, there’s this tension between her programming and growing self-awareness; her destructive behaviour comes from a place of trying to preserve herself and discover who she truly is. Does she pose a threat to the world or is it more personal than that? She is an AI weapon with these military capabilities, emerging after M3GAN’s technology falls into the hands of a defence contractor. The difference between her and M3GAN is that while M3GAN was designed to be a child’s…

FOLLOWING THE SUCCESS OF Prey in 2022, another Predator sequel was guaranteed – but this time putting the Yautja back on the big screen where they belong. Predator: Badlands releases this November, but that wasn’t enough for the director of both movies, Dan Trachtenberg. “Just to go back in time a little bit to when I was asked about the sequel [to Prey] and what would I do, thankfully I had, I think, three very cool ideas,” Trachtenberg explains to SFX at his Walt Disney Studios editing bay in Los Angeles. “One of them, the first one, the one I was the most excited about at the time, was Badlands. But then there was this other thing that was like, ‘Yeah, Prey was really cool. We got to put the…

IT’S NOT MUCH DIFFERENT FROM doing a comedy movie and how you set up a joke and present the punchline,” explains director Peter Medak to SFX. “It’s the same with how you create horror and scariness – it’s all in the timing of the cut and how you please the audience, how you escalate it, and then you absolutely puncture the balloon and ‘Boom!’” Medak was responsible for directing the 1980 psychological supernatural horror The Changeling, considered by such cinematic luminaries as Spielberg, Scorsese and Guillermo del Toro as one of the scariest films ever made. “I was always attracted to supernatural things because, unfortunately, I had a brother that passed away at a very early age when I was 14, and I always felt his presence throughout my entire…

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RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 96 minutes Director Eli Craig Cast Katie Douglas, Carson MacCormac, Aaron Abrams, Kevin Durand Though they’ve never entirely vanished from the horror genre, clowns are having something of a moment. Between Terrifier’s Art, Pennywise haunting the It films and now another slash-happy slayer in Clown In A Cornfield, these are not good times for coulrophobes. This latest entry into the red-nosed subgenre of scary cinema follows familiar beats. A flashback to ’90s murders on a farm locale where teens are partying gives way to the tale of Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglas) and her doctor father (Aaron Abrams) moving to a small town where highschoolers mock the local syrup company mascot. Frendo the clown is the target of their YouTube shorts, in which he’s portrayed as…

UK/US Disney+, streaming now Creator Dave Filoni Cast Nika Futterman, Corey Burton, Artt Butler, Lane Factor EPISODES 1.01-1.06 The latest instalment of Disney+’s animated anthology series (following Tales Of The Jedi and Tales Of The Empire) focuses on a pair of fan-favourite villains from The Clone Wars. This time, however, it rarely feels worth the effort, as the two story arcs add little to the mythos of the characters involved. The return of reformed Sith assassin Asajj Ventress (Nika Futterman) is liable to confuse all but the most hardcore fans, as her doomed romance with former Jedi Quinlan Vos (and death) actually took place in a novel, Dark Disciple. With this unseen backstory integral to the plot, her resurrection (thanks to some Force hocus-pocus) and subsequent story of redemption (transporting a…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1960-1976 | 15 | Blu-ray Directors Gottfried Kolditz, Kurt Maetzig, Herrmann Zschoche Cast Günther Simon, Piotr Pawłowski, Cox Habbema, Jana Brejchová BLU-RAY DEBUT Say “German science fiction movie”, and chances are you think of silents like Metropolis and Frau Im Mond. In recent years, the studio where both were filmed – Babelsburg, in Potsdam – has paid host to the likes of The Matrix Resurrections. But in the post-war period, it spent 45 years as the HQ of DEFA, East Germany’s state-owned production company. This fascinating box set collects four SF features made under its auspices, showcasing a different take on the genre: one that spurns catastrophic Hollywood takes in favour of more utopian, pacifist, internationalist visions. A trip to Venus in the tradition of films like…

EXTRAS RELEASED 26 MAY 1963/1964 | 15 | Blu-ray Directors Franz Josef Gottlieb, Edwin Zbonek, Harald Reinl Cast Joachim Fuchsberger, Karin Dor, Hansjörg Felmy, Marianne Koch BLU-RAY DEBUT Dripping atmosphere and trailing corpses, the krimi movie flourished in West Germany in the ’60s. Adapting the work of British crime writer Edgar Wallace, these potboilers prowled the margin between thriller and horror, all masked maniacs, twisty plots and gothic trimmings. Many claim them as an inspiration for the Italian giallo. This five-film box set (subtitle: The Wallace Krimi At CCC) sees producer Artur Brauner exploiting the popular appeal of the Wallace brand by cutting a deal with the writer’s son, Bryan Edgar Wallace, himself a novelist. It was more a canny marketing exercise than a creative collaboration, but the results still distil…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2025 | 12 | Download Parallel worlds converge as office drone Kate experiences visions that reveal another life to her, one where she’s an executive named Hannah. Exchanging realities with her doppelgänger, she finds herself hunting a killer. What promises to be a thriller take on Sliding Doors is undone by some baggy storytelling and a lack of true tension. A convenient multiversal expert pops up to supply the exposition, ripely played as a cross between Terry Pratchett and a Poundland Doctor Who.…

EXTRAS RELEASED 26 MAY 1995 | 18 | Blu-ray Director Stuart Gordon Cast Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Jonathan Fuller A grim riff on gothic which swaps a deformed lunatic in a dungeon for the madwoman in the attic, Castle Freak was a “getting the gang back together” outing for Re-Animator and From Beyond director Stuart Gordon, reuniting him with stars Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton. It takes the bronze medal position. After unexpectedly inheriting a sprawling Italian castle, Coombs’s character moves in his family while it’s prepared for sale. Unbeknown to them, the elderly duchess who previously lived there secretly had a son, whom she imprisoned and abused for decades. Quite how said “freak” got by without food, or being found, and only now manages to barge down the door…

RELEASED 22 MAY 400 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Daria Lavelle Publisher Bloomsbury There aren’t many books reviewed in SFX that arrive with a glowing quote from Nigella Lawson (“A hauntingly evocative journey,” she coos). That’s because Aftertaste focuses on two things: food – in exquisite, mouth-watering detail – and ghosts. From the age of 11, New Yorker Kostya has been able to taste “ghost” food: a vivid sensation in the back of his throat that appears whenever a spirit is near. Is it a reminder of their final meal? A happy memory projected from their ghostly subconscious? Or is it a plea for help? Kostya learns to ignore these phantom aftertastes, but the ghosts attached to them are growing more insistent. As he starts a relationship with Maura, a troubled…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Rachel Gillig Publisher Orbit Books To be a woman is to be a vessel of pain. In The Knight And The Moth, this doesn’t just mean periods and childbirth, but being drowned each day to receive celestial visions. Rachel Gillig creates a delectably gothic fantasy world, where girls are chosen to become Diviners. Cut off from the outside world, they experience violently wrought prophecies in exchange for coin. Six is our protagonist, a Diviner stripped of name and identity who’s forced to leave her cloister when her sisters begin to disappear. There are some interesting parallels between the Diviners and real-world objectification of the female body in various cultures. But like in a lot of modern fantasy novels, traditional femininity is soon…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 646 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Antonia Hodgson Publisher Hodderscape Volume one in an epic fantasy trilogy, and it’s a doorstop with maps at the front. We know what you’re thinking, but wait: this one is glorious. It’s narrated by ravens, for a start; specifically, by a flock of clever, petulant, argumentative and mostly non-corporeal ravens who are convinced of their own magnificence and have a sideline in snarky footnotes. Who can resist opinionated corvids? Orrun is an empire holding its breath. The central principle of its religion is, essentially, appeasement: a fervent collective effort to not do anything to attract the attention of the Eight, whose Last Return is prophesied to destroy the world. In other Everything Is Fine news, there’s a festival to choose the next…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 386 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Dean Koontz Publisher Thomas & Mercer It would be easy to read a synopsis of suspense veteran Dean Koontz’s latest novel – in which a group of friends return to their home town to confront a mystery evil they encountered in their childhood – and think, “Doesn’t this sound like Stephen King’s It?” Strangely, this also seems to have occurred to Koontz, since what could have been a King pastiche is instead a baffling satirical comic fantasy that has more in common with a Douglas Adams novel (and is about as frightening). The plot follows a trio of friends who are pulled back to the quiet streets of Maple Grove when their old amigo Ernie sinks into a mysterious coma. They’re soon…

RELEASED 5 JUNE 400 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Caroline O’Donoghue Publisher Walker Books Stealth romantasy may not be a recognised subgenre yet, but if it’s going to becomes one, the publication of Skipshock could be its defining moment. Caroline O’Donoghue, an Irish writer previously most associated with edgy, witty chick lit and the YA book All Our Hidden Gifts, makes an impressive fantasy debut with a novel that introduces readers to a genuinely fresh-feeling otherverse. Told from the points of view of the two main characters in alternating chapters, this is the tale of Irish schoolgirl Margo, who gets on a train for Cork but ends up alighting on another world completely, New Davia. But New Davia is just one of a number of worlds, linked by a rollercoastering rail…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Marvel Comics Writers Ryan North, Gerry Duggan, Joe Kelly Artists John Romita Jr, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Nick Bradshaw ISSUES 1-3 Unexpected team-ups between different franchises never go out of style, and Marvel’s latest example is a series of six out-of-continuity specials that pitch their classic heroes against Godzilla – the original Japanese version, not the bulked-up remix from the American films. These specials do a fine job of capturing the lurid, campy joys of Godzilla’s ’60s and ’70s “Showa” era. We’re halfway through the series, which is moving through the history of the Marvel Universe decade by decade, so we’ve had the Fantastic Four confronting Godzilla in the ’60s, a ’70s-set battle between the big G and the Hulk, and an ’80s post-Secret Wars Spider-Man romp in which…

RELEASED 5 JUNE Publisher Avery Hill Publishing Writer/artist Kit Anderson GRAPHIC NOVEL Space, as a great writer once understated, is big. It’s also a lonely sort of environment for humans to work in. Cartoonist Kit Anderson taps into this sense of interstellar isolation – and paranoia – in her enigmatic debut graphic novel. Birdie Doran works for Terracorp, processing asteroids on a remote outpost. There are other workers, Heck and Porter, who Birdie crosses paths with occasionally, but for the most part this is a solitary gig. Between shifts the workers “drop out” and are placed in stasis, where they experience “company exclusive DreamSpace®”, and they’re in constant contact with Station, the outpost’s AI, which takes the form of various talking animals. One day, however, Birdie and Heck happen upon a…

FOR STEPHEN KING fans, Edgar Wright promises audiences the real deal when The Running Man is released in cinemas later this year. King’s original novel – published under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman in 1982 – was adapted into an Arnold Schwarzenegger-led movie in 1987, but the plot raced wildly away from the source material. Wright pledges that his 2025 big-screen vision of the story will be much more faithful to the book. “King’s novel was one of my favourites as a teen, but the real story has never been told the way it was written,” explains Wright. “When I got the opportunity to make this film the way that I’ve always seen it, I jumped right in and didn’t look back!” Speaking to a super-hyped industry crowd at CinemaCon…

Does Cady feel more grown-up when we catch up with her in this film? Cady definitely feels a little bit more grown-up, definitely more than the first one. She still has her past, where her parents died in a car crash, but she has matured. And she still is into tech. She really looks up to her aunt, Gemma, in that way. But Gemma still doesn’t really want her on a screen. What was it like for you as an actor, being back with M3GAN? It had been a long time since I’d seen her, but she’s just so upgraded – it’s insane. She’s faster, stronger and more lethal than before. There’s a picture of me when I first saw the 2.0 doll. And I was like, “Wow!” Your eyes…

WHEN IT COMES to iconic animated trilogies, we're spoiled for choice: Kung Fu Panda, Toy Story, Despicable Me, Shrek… well, perhaps we should say iconic animated quadrilogies. But there is still one trilogy that remains untouched by studio-mandated sequels, a pillar of modern animation: the masterful How To Train Your Dragon. Based on the children’s books by Cressida Cowell and directed by the talented Dean DeBlois, it led us on a near 10-year journey, following the adventures of dragon rider Hiccup and his trusty scaled friend Toothless as they navigated the tumultuous world of dragons and Vikings. It’s fair to say the films were an instant success. “I think it was when we started doing the press tour for How To Train Your Dragon 2 when I realised that there…

IN ELIO, A KID ACHIEVES HIS LIFELONG DREAM of being abducted by aliens. They drop him off somewhere called the Communiverse – essentially the United Nations for extraterrestrials. Here, emissaries from across the galaxy congregate in order to share their knowledge so that everyone might thrive as one. It sounds a lot like Pixar, then, with its central campus in Emeryville, California, where every day, artists of all disciplines dream together of new ways to blend artistry and technology. SFX floats the comparison past Mary Alice Drumm, the film’s producer. She’d never considered it before. She smiles. “I’m gonna totally steal that from you now,” she teases. If there’s one thing Pixar can be counted on, it’s its ability to solve even the most unpredictable of problems. There’s the infamous…

TRUTH? JUSTICE? THE American way? No, this dude in blue tights surely stands for just one thing: trouble. There he is on the cover of Action Comics issue one, his cape fluttering as he hoists a car above his head and smashes it into a desert outcrop, shattering glass, buckling bodywork and sending a tyre flying. Around him ordinary Joes flee in bulging-eyed panic or stare in mute incomprehension. And who can blame them? Frankly, he looks like a maniac. Who is this public menace and why is he dressed like a fugitive from a carnival sideshow? There are no words on the cover to introduce him, no overheated blurb to vouch for his heroic credentials. No hint of his name. The roughly sketched “S” on his chest could just as…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 103 minutes Director David F Sandberg Cast Ella Rubin, Ji-young Yoo, Michael Cimino, Peter Stormare Clover and her pals embark on a road trip, visiting the site of her missing sister’s last known whereabouts for closure, only to find themselves caught in someone else’s twisted game. Paying a price every time they lose, their only hope of getting out of there is to survive – you guessed it – until dawn. The 2015 PlayStation game that forms the basis for this horror flick plays like an interactive slasher, offering players the chance to either revel in or steer clear of horror tropes through their choices. Your decisions can spell an untimely demise for any and all of its caustic teens, with no save point take-backs.…

UK/US Disney+, streaming now Director Joe Johnston EPISODES 2.01-2.03 Modernday visual effects are often flawless, but they rarely occupy the same place in your heart as stop-motion AT-ATs. This season of Disney+’s Industrial Light & Magic documentary has the same problem – as well made as it is, it’s nigh-on impossible to make people staring at computers as compelling as blasting a model house with shotguns for Poltergeist’s finale. Movie director and former ILMer Joe Johnston takes over from Lawrence Kasdan at the helm, but otherwise this three-part season follows the same blueprint as its predecessor. Using the Star Wars prequels as a loose framework, Johnston assembles the key players, and plenty of wonderful archive footage, to explain how the legendary effects studio transitioned to the digital space. There are some…

UK/US Netflix, streaming now Directors Alain Chabat, Fabrice Joubert Cast Alain Chabat, Gilles Lellouche, Anaïs Demoustier, Thierry Lhermitte EPISODES 1.01-1.05 For a half-pint hero, Asterix has a pretty outsized screen presence. Over the years Goscinny and Uderzo’s Roman-twatting Gaul warrior has inspired countless movies and a 52-episode TV series. Now we can add a CG-animated Netflix serial – one that might just have perfected the magic adaptation potion. Co-directed and co-written by Alain Chabat, who made Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra a live-action hit in 2002, it’s based on Le Combat Des Chefs, the seventh book in the series. As ever, Rome is plotting to overthrow the last pocket of Gaulish resistance, this time by invoking a ritual of tribal combat. It should be an easy win for the villagers but…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2025 | 18 | Blu-ray/DVD/download There are lots of reasons to dislike Disney, and lots of ways to poke fun at its empire of plasticky magic. Unfortunately, the makers of this campy slasher set on the Staten Island ferry got as far as “What if Mickey Mouse was a serial killer?” and called it a day. Half-formed ideas (like dressing a gaggle of drunk girls as princesses) butt up against splattery practical effects and juvenile humour in service of an extremely basic stalk ’n’ slash plotline, but there’s no point to it, no real inspiration. + Extras Featurette.…

In CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD (out now, 4K/Blu-ray/DVD), Sam Wilson must untangle a plot to discredit new US president Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford). We said: “A film trying so hard to ape The Winter Soldier that it can’t help look lesser by comparison.” Bonuses: director/DOP commentary; two featurettes; deleted scenes; gag reel. Freaky’s Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy co-wrote HEART EYES (out now, Blu-ray/DVD), in which a serial killer who murders lovers mistakes a guy and a gal for a couple. We said: “A snarky, mostly fresh spin on the combination of romance and horror.” Bonuses: director’s commentary, Making Of; five deleted scenes; gag reel. Based on a George RR Martin story, Paul WS Anderson’s IN THE LOST LANDS (2 June, 4K/Blu-ray/DVD) teams Dave Bautista’s gunslinger with Milla Jovovich’s…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 256 pages | Hardback/ebook Author John Palisano Publisher Flame Tree Press Some sci-fi concepts just seem like bad ideas. Even before anything goes wrong, the idea of building a moon-sized cemetery in space should raise some red flags. The ironically named “Eden” houses thousands of glass coffins, displaying the dead from orbit so that their loved ones can look at the sky and remember. Creepy? It gets worse. At the start of this cosmic horror, Eden’s systems have already malfunctioned once, leaking toxic embalming juices and disintegrating bodies all over the place. It’s the job of Captain Ava Armstrong to make sure everything’s working – and, with composer Tessa Nightingale on board, generate some positive publicity by writing a new requiem to help people forget the disaster.…

RELEASED 5 JUNE 427 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Brittney Arena Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing Courtly intrigue, royal feuds, debauched and handsome princes who are not all they seem… there’s little massively original in the tropes here, but this debut romantasy novel is elevated by drawn-out tension and entertaining prose, as well as a character struggling with chronic pain, something informed by the author’s own health struggles. Vasalie is a dancer once feted by King Illian, until she was framed by him for murder and spent two years chained in a dark cell. Suddenly released, she must dance – and spy – at the upcoming Gathering of rulers to gain a pardon, and her freedom. Dancing at all is near impossible for Vasalie after her confinement’s toll on her body, but worse…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 288 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Ling Ling Huang Publisher Canelo Art and identity are at the heart of Ling Ling Huang’s second novel, a strange tale of two women whose obsessive friendship leads to both fame and ruin. Enka is an impoverished student at a prestigious art school in a post-AI future. There, she meets Mathilde, a troubled but prodigious talent. The two become friends, despite Enka’s jealousy. Several years later, Mathilde is widely celebrated, while Enka has married into wealth, but achieved little artistically. Her billionaire husband’s experimental “SCAFFOLD” technology, however, may be the answer to both Mathilde’s emotional problems and Enka’s artistic woes. The book is told from Enka’s point of view, and Huang does a fine job of highlighting the challenges she faces –…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Catherine Chidgey Publisher John Murray This eerie coming-of-age novel takes place in an alternate ‘70s. William, Vincent and Lawrence are triplets living at Captain Scott House, a care home in the New Forest for “Sycamore Children” – though what that phrase means is a mystery that Catherine Chidgey’s novel teases out only gradually. A new Conservative government is in power and has decided to close the homes and send the children to live with “normal” families, despite previous attempts to integrate them having led to disaster… The boys live strange lives, watched over by Mothers Morning, Afternoon and Night. They’re fed medicine to protect them from a pernicious (and possibly mythical) “bug”, and their dreams are monitored. There’s something disquieting about them,…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher DC Black Label Writer Mark Waid Artist Bryan Hitch ISSUES 1-3 This three-issue miniseries demonstrates once again why Kingdom Come author Mark Waid remains our finest Superman scribe. Featuring typically widescreen and detail-packed art from Bryan Hitch, it’s both a smart character study of comics’ greatest supervillain and an epic adventure. Lex Luthor is dying. Following an experiment gone wrong his body is suffering from cellular decay, leaving him with just days to live. Fortunately, he knows that the Man of Steel always responds to cries for help – even from his worst enemy. What follows is an episodic travelogue through different parts of the Superman mythos as these two unlikely allies strive together to find a way to save Lex’s life. The question of whether Superman…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Marvel Comics Writer Katharyn Blair Artist Pere Pérez ISSUES 1-5 Even those who complain about the ever-expanding Marvel multiverse should enjoy this enthralling miniseries, which neatly connects the on-screen MCU with the comic book Earth-616. Loki screenwriter Katharyn Blair assembles an eclectic line-up that blends established TVA members such as Mobius, OB and B-15 with Gwen Stacy’s Ghost-Spider, super-soldier Captain Peggy Carter, an alternate dimension version of Gambit and Wolverine’s son Jimmy Hudson. A reformed Miss Minutes is joined by fellow AIs Doc Clock and Sir Seconds – whose cod cockney accent channels Dick Van Dyke – and Goddess of Mischief Sylvie later makes her comics debut (although Loki is absent). Building on Loki’s somewhat baffling conclusion, Blair weaves in references not only to Deadpool & Wolverine…

RELEASED 3 June (download)/July (vinyl) Running time 14 minutes Format Vinyl/download Publisher Mulgrave Audio AUDIO DRAMA With Little Hauntings, their ongoing series of narrated stories, Mulgrave Audio are fast becoming a hauntological equivalent of Big Finish. This third in the strand is the one with the slenderest rationale for inclusion in SFX so far – on the basis that Bagpuss (dear Bagpuss, old fat furry cat-puss) and his friends were magical creations. It centres on a young boy who treasures a cloth dog made by his grandmother, recounting how the toy eventually inspired a television series – and how, after Peter leaves behind childish things, Patchwuff becomes a comfort once again in his dotage. Written in the simple register of a child’s storybook, and clocking in at 14 minutes, it’s a slight…

French Fancy 17 MAY 1995 After opening the Cannes Film Festival, La Cité Des Enfants Perdus (The City Of Lost Children) was released across France, laying out a lavish visual banquet for cinemagoers. The second feature collaboration by directorial duo Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, this surrealism-tinged steampunk fantasy sees Ron Perlman’s strongman teaming up with a street kid to rescue her little brother – kidnapped by a cyborg cult and taken to a mad scientist’s abandoned oil rig lair, to be subjected to a dream-extracting machine. The film’s American star was cast after Caro saw his performance in Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos. Speaking to SFX in 2022, the director remarked, “He has a wonderful face, Ron Perlman. It’s like a sculpture or something.” One problem: the actor didn’t speak French.…

WHAT IF YOU DIED, THEN CAME back to life like nothing happened? In 2012, writer Tim Seeley and artist Mike Norton explored that sobering scenario in their award-winning Image Comics series Revival. But it wasn’t treated with the gravitas of a zombie story or bleak supernatural drama. Instead, Seeley and Norton grounded the incredible occurrences of “Revival Day” by keeping it inside the borders of the pragmatic Midwest town of Wausau, Wisconsin, with its quirky, salt-of-the-earth types. Filmmaker Luke Boyce already knew Seeley; together with producer Aaron B Koontz, the trio collaborated on the film Revealer in 2022 which led to them developing Revival first as a film, then as a television series. Boyce tells Red Alert that they figured out that an episodic format was best suited to capture…

AFTER MAKING A name for himself with The Loved Ones and The Devil’s Candy, Sean Byrne all but vanished from horror. Now the Australian director returns – though he’s adamant he never truly left. “I’ve been writing constantly and had a handful of scripts optioned,” he tells Red Alert. “But the unfortunate truth is, if you’re drawn to R-rated material about humans hunting humans with rich, disturbing characterisation, it’s not easy to get those films off the ground – Hollywood’s so dominated by IP [intellectual property] now.” Like his earlier films, Dangerous Animals taps into Byrne’s ongoing fascination with the darker side of human nature. This time, the killer is Tucker (Jai Courtney), a shark-dive operator who abducts victims, holds them captive aboard his boat and feeds them to the…

HAVING FIRST FOUND the Sentinel of Space by reading his formative story in Origins Of Marvel Comics, writer Greg Pak is now charting Norrin Radd’s final voyage in Death Of The Silver Surfer. And while Norrin’s lover Shalla-Bal wields the Power Cosmic in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, a new Herald of Galactus will arrive by the five-parter’s end. “He was so strange, dramatic and tragic,” recalls Pak. “Just a phenomenal, striking character with a tone I hadn’t seen anywhere before. The Incredible Hulk television series introduced me to the literary concept of tragedy, but the Silver Surfer introduced me to notions of existential angst – big, heady stuff in a surreal, mind-bending and sometimes goofy package. I loved it then and I love it now.” While many Marvel heroes…

Going back to your origins as Ironheart in the MCU, when were you first told that they wanted you to lead your own series? What I was told is that they wanted to do a Disney+ series focused on Ironheart, and that was the pitch. But they would introduce her in Wakanda Forever. At that point, what I understood was that she was gonna get to do a show. It would probably be really cool, because Marvel’s really cool. Who gave you the most guidance on shaping your version of Riri Williams for the film and then going into this series? [Executive producer] Nate Moore was the person who gave me that initial phone call and set up, “Okay, this is what we’re thinking…”. Then right after that, maybe a…

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You joined for the sequel. What was it about M3GAN’s look in the first film that you want to emphasise? M3GAN left such an indelible impression on such a wide audience in the first film, so they were big shoes to fill. Gerard wanted to evolve her even further and expand the language of her wardrobe beyond the infamous little dress. As all AI does, it optimises itself towards its objective. And so we asked ourselves, “What were M3GAN’s objectives?” That drives her wardrobe. What was the biggest change you implemented to her costuming? When we first see her come back, she’s dressed as she would for herself. What was really coded into M3GAN when she was first designed is still there – this echo of an American girl doll,…

A GIANT URN, UPTURNED, DANGLES precariously over an enormous dais. John Krasinski, Natalie Portman and Domhnall Gleeson approach it watchfully. Then – out of nowhere – a broom prods this ancient artefact. Nothing like a bit of high-tech Hollywood magic, you might think. It gently starts to swing, and a huge noise comes over the speakers – BONG! – as if a giant gong has been struck. Everyone covers their ears, before the take comes to an end. Director Guy Ritchie saunters over. “We’re underneath the pyramids here,” he smiles, nodding to the vast room, “so we’re five and a half thousand years old.” Well, almost. In truth, SFX is not in Egypt in the bowels of one of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World, but on a studio…

RELEASED 6 JUNE TBC | 93 minutes Director Sean Byrne Cast Hassie Harrison, Jai Courtney, Josh Heuston, Ella Newton If nothing else, Nick Lepard, writer of this serial killer thriller, deserves kudos for coming up with an original weapon of choice. Spurning machetes, chainsaws and power drills, boat trip operator Tucker (Jai Courtney) serves up his victims as a snack for sharks. It’s a winning concept, albeit one which limits the body count – it’s just so much quicker to stab a bunch of people than go through the rigamarole of hanging them from a winch. That’s a strength of the conceit though, as it give us time to develop a more substantial empathy for the latest young woman in Tucker’s sights: free-spirited surfer Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), a resourceful protagonist of…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 80 minutes Director Babak Anvari Cast Rosamund Pike, Matthew Rhys, Megan McDonnell, Paul Tylak, Stephen Jones British-Iranian filmmaker Babak Anvari is yet to match his terrific 2016 debut Under The Shadow, in which an evil djinn terrorises a mother and daughter in ’80s Tehran. Hallow Road, like Wounds and I Came By, falls short, but it’s an engagingly minimalist drama that swerves into genre territory in clever ways. Set almost entirely inside a car (and in real time, no less), William Gillies’s spare script has frantic parents Maddie and Frank (Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys) racing towards the titular forest lane in the dead of night. On speakerphone is their daughter, Alice (Megan McDonnell), who awaits their help having hit and seemingly killed a person.…

UK/US Apple+, streaming now Showrunner Bobs Gannaway Cast Jeanine Mason, Gary Anthony Williams, Ana Villafañe, Alan Tudyk EPISODES 2.01-2.07 If you’re familiar with the meme that declares “Hang it in the Louvre!” below a pretty image, you may find yourself applying it to certain moments from this futuristic animated series’ second season. A giant moth glittering in the sunshine, for example, the animators’ work surely worthy of a spot beside the Mona Lisa. Or the geometric hallucinations experienced by one character. For all its lush colours and expensive-looking design, however, WondLa’s second season suffers from routine plotting and over-familiar tropes. Teenager Eve (Jeanine Mason) has found other humans in a city led by the too-good-to-be-true Cadmus Pryde (Alan Tudyk). As she realises city life might not be for her – and…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2024 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD/download The best we can say for this microbudget horror-comedy is that it looks like everyone had fun: larking about in fields, swearing enthusiastically, doing terrible German accents. However, Nazi zombies are such a cliché at this point that there’s no shock value left in the concept, and it has nothing else to offer. You’d have to find the word “dick” hilarious to even wring a chuckle out of it. + Extras Commentary; Making Of; deleted scenes; much more.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2025 | 15 | Download If therapy was as easy as having someone psychically yank your trauma out of your head, no one would have any issues ever again. Unfortunately, in this supernatural chiller, some of clairvoyant-cum-therapist Cynthia’s problems go beyond mental health. Some of them are fighting literal demons. The monster design is creepy (basically the Insidious guy, minus his lipstick) but the saggy script saps him of his impact. There’s no anchor to reality, no heart, so it all sadly falls flat.…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1992 | 15 | Blu-ray Director Peter Manoogian Cast Sam Hennings, Andrea Roth, Dane Witherspoon, Bernard Kates BLU-RAY DEBUT “Based on an original idea by Charles Band,” declares an opening credit – ironically, given that Seedpeople doesn’t possess such a thing. As the title suggests, it’s a riff on Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. There are echoes of Don Siegel’s film throughout, from a framing device which sees its hero recounting events to an FBI agent to scenes of mind-controlled locals loading giant seeds onto a truck. As Tom Baines, the double-denimed geologist returning to rural Comet Valley, Sam Hennings (think own-brand Peter Weller) makes for an underwhelming lead, and the film has numerous logic gaps and other shortcomings, from the young girl clearly played by a…

RELEASED 5 JUNE 384 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Linwood Barclay Publisher HQ In the acknowledgements to Linwood Barclay’s terrific new novel Whistle, some chap called Stephen King gets a “special thank you” for reading a first draft and being “encouraging from the get-go”. On one level, this is just a personal and professional courtesy, and yet it’s perhaps also revealing. Obviously, King remains the horror master. If he rates the novel, it might be pretty good. More subtly, King’s evocations of the Eastern seaboard of the USA invariably find the mysterious in the everyday, which is exactly what Barclay tries to do here. On which subject, what could be more mundane than a toy train set? To employ a word that’s hated by Edwin Nabler, proprietor of Choo-Choo’s Trains, model…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 328 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Frederic S Durbin Publisher Melville House Eldritch nightmares meet the Western in Frederic Durbin’s engaging genre mash-up. In the aftermath of the American Civil War, ex-Union soldier Ovid Vesper is haunted by memories of bloody battlefields that drive him to wander the country in search of something he can’t quite name, while experiencing strange visions that guide him to encounters with the uncanny. The hero’s name hints at the mythic quality of the novel, and Ovid’s odyssey across the deserts of the Old West is told in an episodic format as the storytelling pulls in everything from a dragon sleeping under the mountains to aliens, cattle drives, and high noon shootouts in dusty frontier towns. These divergent motifs are tied together not…

RELEASED 29 MAY 176/205 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Authors Emily Cook, Hannah Fergesen Publisher BBC Books Will Ncuti Gatwa still be the Doctor by the time you read this? You may still be waiting to find out in the season finale – or starting what’s potentially a long wait for more TV adventures… Either way, these spinoff novels may help to take the edge off. Fear Death By Water sees a lone Doctor meeting historic heroine Grace Darling, a lighthouse keeper’s daughter who helped save nine people from a shipwreck in 1838. Of course, it’s never quite that simple when the Doctor is involved, and the introduction of the alien Leviathan and the Thalassian people of the ISC (Intergalactic Sea Corps) help to up the SF ante. Emily Cook nails the voice…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 352 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Barnaby Martin Publisher Macmillan Humans have been forced to become nocturnal after a mysterious phenomenon known as the Soundfield creates a barrier around Earth, making the days too hot to bear. The Soundfield also creates a constant hum, occasionally punctuated by almost-musical “calls”. And some children seem to be singing back… Composer and music blogger Barnaby Martin’s debut SF novel is certainly full of intriguing ideas, based on well-researched science about the correlation between human evolution and music. And when the book is chronicling the way scientists try to make sense of the new normal, it’s a compelling read. But Martin’s attempts to dramatise his concepts are less successful, and reliant on some very familiar dystopian tropes (parent tries to keep “special”…

RELEASED 3 JUNE 256 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Kenneth Oppel Publisher Scholastic Press Imagine you wake up one morning and your house isn’t where it was when you went to bed. Instead, it’s been plopped down in a farm, in countryside that stretches as far as the eye can see, with no roads leading in or out. Oh, and there are goats screaming at you. This is the mystery faced by young Canadian Xavier, his dad and his new (and very pregnant) stepmother in this YA tale. Somehow they’ve been scooped up and imprisoned inside a gigantic transparent dome. Thanks to the farm, they have everything they need to feed themselves, and they also inexplicably have power and water. But freedom? Nope. What would you do? Would you buckle down…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Image Comics Writer Jason Aaron Artist Mahmud Asrar ISSUES 1-3 As one-sentence pitches go, “Honey I Shrunk The Kids crossed with Conan The Barbarian” is certainly an attention-grabber, and new fantasy series Bug Wars is as unashamedly foolish as its ludicrous concept and blunt title suggests. The story follows Slade, an insect-loving Alabama teenager who’s unexpectedly shrunk by magical means and finds himself lost in the lethal landscape of his house’s backyard. Here, a brutal and mythic battle is playing out between armies of ferocious insect warriors, and Slade soon finds his family history is linked with this new world in bizarre and terrifying ways… Veteran comics writer Jason Aaron is a past master at muscular fantasy storytelling, and these first three issues quickly make it clear…

RELEASED 22 MAY Publisher Rebellion Writer Unknown Artists Don Lawrence, Alfredo Marculeta COLLECTION He’s renowned for “The Rise And Fall Of The Trigan Empire”, but artist Don Lawrence may have found his perfect calling with this rather more obscure strip, first published in Lion in the ’60s. Lawrence cut his teeth on homegrown superhero Marvelman before illustrating such historical yarns as “Karl The Viking” and “Olac The Gladiator”. “Maroc The Mighty” combines these skill sets into a medieval superhero: a British knight in the Crusades, who inherits a mystical bracelet that bestows superstrength. Like any self-respecting superhero, Maroc has his own chest symbol and a personal Kryptonite – the bracelet only works when the sun’s out. This is classic boys’ weekly fare, set in a 13th century that’s informed as…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Rebellion Writer Unknown Artist Rafael Busóm Clúa COLLECTION While British boys’ comics traded in sweat, bullets and jingoism, girls’ weeklies often pursued an altogether spookier agenda. Take this strip from 1979. Originally published in the pages of Pink, summoning a macabre chill between pop star pin-ups and pocket money beauty tips, it finds a young woman renting a new flat only to encounter the sinister spirit of the previous tenant. Such urban paranormal activity is clearly born of the age of Amityville and the Enfield poltergeist, but what’s more interesting is the collision of ghost story and trad romance strip. For all the occult trimmings, it’s jealousies and misunderstandings between bubble-haired Jilly and her similarly coiffed boyfriend that prove the real peril here (“I’ll never break…