Inhoudsopgave van April 2023 - SFX

YOU’RE SPINNING AROUND Stuart Bannerman, email With all the changes to the Star Trek and Doctor Who universes, you asked us what we’d like to see as a spin-off. I’d like to see more from the timeline of TNG and DS9. Yes, I know we had Picard and whilst season one was pretty good, turning Picard into an android was insane, and lost me! I love Star Trek because of the morals of that universe. Not for the VFX and space battles, but for the glimpses of the possibility that humanity might actually sort itself out in the future. SFX: Hey, does anybody here speak whale? Caffeine Cold, email My idea is for a DS9-style spin-off featuring Seven of Nine and Raffi Musker. Seven and Raffi use their skills, experience and…

EVER SINCE SHE WAS A CHILD, Francisca Alegría has been fascinated by the spiritual world. Growing up, she would visit her grandparents’ farm, and they would tell her stories about her great-grandparents coming back from the dead and having tea with her cousins. “Every single story that I heard, they all had comedy,” the Chilean director tells Red Alert. “None of the ghosts would come and make the family suffer. They always had an element of the absurd.” MERRY MAGDALENA Describing Alegría’s Sundance sensation The Cow Who Sang A Song Into The Future as a comedy or absurd would do it a disservice, but ghosts are central to its story. In fact, the first character we encounter is a phantom. The film starts with the camera focused on a river…

First-look images from filming of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon have been released. Cast for the new six-part French-set series have also been announced: Romain Levi (The Tunnel), Laïka Blanc-Francard (My Night), Anne Charrier (Maison Close), Eriq Ebanouey (Transporter 3) and newcomer Louis Puech Scigliuzzi. Previously announced cast include Isabelle (Clémence Poésy), a Parisian member of a religious group with a colourful history, and Quinn (Adam Nagaitis), a Brit who trades on the black market and owns an underground nightclub. Norman Reedus shared a clip on social media of himself with Greg Nicotero from the Paris set, with some fans in the background showing their appreciation. Eagle-eyed fans spotted the potential new title for the show on make-up boxes from an Instagram post by Reedus – could it soon be renamed…

♦ Production is well underway on a Christmas special, with Ncuti Gatwa being photographed by lots of spoiler-friendly newspapers in February. We don’t do such things in SFX… That said, it’s nice they still have such an interest in the show. ♦ Julie Anne Robinson has been announced as director of Block Three, while Ben Chessell will direct Block Four. ♦ Speaking at an awards ceremony, Anita Dobson revealed the name of her character and the relationship to new companion Ruby Sunday. Spoilers! ♦ Siân Reynish, the VFX co-ordinator for the new series, has revealed that drones are used for the first time while filming on the TARDIS set for the Christmas special. ♦ Guest stars for the Big Finish anniversary series Once And Future have been announced. Stephen Noonan will…

Was it exhausting, acting a state of fear for so long? Yeah, it was. It was all breath work, and because the body doesn’t know any different, I’d get to a point where the body would hit a wall and have the shakes. There’d be times where I’d be like, “I need to take 10, because the bathtub’s full”, and an uncontrollable cry would come out. It wasn’t emotional, it was just the chemistry of the body. After most takes I’d hysterically laugh – it wasn’t that I was laughing at anything, it was just to release the energy. And working with a nine-year-old [Nell Fisher as Kassie], we had to find new ways to keep that stamina up – a nine-year-old couldn’t put their body through that sort of…

PRODUCER JEREMY Latcham is just back from Comic-Con with a spring in his step when SFX catches up with him and writer/directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley to talk Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves. “To be back at Hall H for the first time since the pandemic and to be opening the whole thing was really, really cool,” he says, sounding ever so slightly relieved. “I feel like people dug it. It was great to be back there with something new.” He pauses. “I do feel there’s a lot of franchises that are mature at this point.” “Like a cheese?” asks Goldstein. Latchman is amused but isn’t taking the bait. “It’s nice to have a new franchise… a new movie that has potential to grow into something great,…

IT’S NO SECRET THAT there’s an avalanche of new, scripted television coming at us every year, which makes it extra special when the weirder ones become hits. For example, when Showtime Original series Yellowjackets landed in November 2021, no one expected a horror series about a team of New Jersey high school girl soccer players who survive a gruesome plane crash in the frigid northwest to become a critical and global phenomenon. But its multiple timeline storytelling, set immediately post-crash in 1996 and also in 2021; large, mostly female ensemble cast; and frank exploration of dark issues, including hints at cannibalism, proved to be manna. Returning for its second season this month, Yellowjackets picks right up in addressing its myriad of dangling cliffhangers, including the adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) covering…

WHEN TOM HOLT’S THE PORTABLE DOOR first landed on bookshelves in 2003, it seemed obvious this was a feature film just waiting to happen. Reviewing the novel in The Guardian, Red Dwarf’s Rob Grant even wrote: “If you’re listening, Hollywood, here’s the pitch: The Devil’s Advocate meets Harry Potter.” Twenty years on, here we are, finally. This adaptation of the first of Holt’s JW Wells & Co series (since that first book, he’s penned six more, the last being 2011’s Life, Liberty And The Pursuit Of Sausages) has been a long time coming. First optioned by the Jim Henson Company just under a decade ago, things really started moving in 2016 when Aussie director Jeffrey Walker came on board. “Blanca Lista [Henson’s VP of feature film production] is a complete cinephile…

There aren’t many actors who return to a role over 25 years… [Laughs] It’s very surreal. But it has been, truly, just absolutely delightful to revisit this character. It’s something I certainly never ever expected to do. I was positive that I had said goodbye to her many, many years ago. [Laughs] She’s come as a delightful surprise. Was there anything you wanted to bring or change for Seven in this final season? No. There was nothing that I wanted to change, or do. I trust Terry implicitly, I’ve known him since I started on Voyager – he was a PA, delivering the scripts to the make-up trailer the year that I started. So we were both the new kids together and we became good friends. He is truly such…

▸ UK/US Apple TV+, Fridays ▸ Showrunner Scott Z Burns ▸ Cast Kit Harington, Sienna Miller, Edward Norton, Daveed Diggs EPISODES 1.01-1.08 It’s the end of the world as we know it, and it seems Scott Z Burns (writer of The Bourne Ultimatum) does not feel fine. Venturing into the sort of speculative fiction territory the writer explored in 2011 pandemic drama Contagion, his new eight-part anthology series imagines what the next 50 years could look like if global warming goes unchecked. It’s no spoiler to say that humanity’s future isn’t looking too bright. Unfolding across four eventful decades, Extrapolations explores multiple aspects of impending climate catastrophe, from the widespread destruction of ecosystems to the plight of people dealing with rapidly rising sea levels. While a smattering of recurring characters…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1969 | 15 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Narciso Ibáñez Serrador ▸ Cast Lilli Palmer, Cristina Galbó, Mary Maude, John Moulder-Brown BLU-RAY DEBUT The man ultimately responsible for Dusty Bin is behind this Spanish horror. Narciso Ibáñez Serrador also helmed killer-kids classic Who Can Kill A Child?, but his great success came devising the gameshow translated as 3-2-1. It’s set in a French boarding school, whose headmistress believes in taking a firm hand with impudent girls (whip crack). Don’t expect anything too kinky, mind: ’60s Spain’s censorship regime results in a shower scene where the girls all wear nightgowns. Serrador has a flair for witty editing, intercutting between a girl taking a tumble in the hay and classmates threading needles… A 19th century splice of Alfred Hitchcock…

▸ RELEASED 27 MARCH 2023 | 12 | Blu-ray/DVD/download ▸ Directors Christopher Berkeley, Sam Liu ▸ Cast David Giuntoli, Tati Gabrielle, David Dastmalchian, Patrick Fabian DC’s animated superhero movies continue their recent trend of bold, unexpected swings with this pulpy outing that melds Batman’s world with the Cthulhu Mythos of HP Lovecraft. Adapted from a 2000/2001 miniseries co-written by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, it’s an alternate universe tale set in ’20s Gotham, pitching Bruce Wayne against a lethal cult that’s trying to release an ancient Elder God to wreak havoc on the world. We’re soon getting lots of madness and tentacles, alongside direct homages to Lovecraft and thematically weird takes on Batman villains like Poison Ivy and Two-Face. The enjoyable plot delivers satisfying twists and turns, making this better paced…

▸ RELEASED 27 MARCH 1963 | 15 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Mario Bava ▸ Cast Christopher Lee, Daliah Lavi, Tony Kendall, Ida Galli Exacting revenge from his habitual haunt of beyond the grave, Christopher Lee cuts a darkly romantic figure in this sumptuous, S&M flavoured Euro-gothic from Mario Bava. It’s an entertainingly torrid piece that makes a full-blooded virtue of every cliché of the genre: secret passages, silhouetted turrets, bloodied daggers, spectres at windows. Bava brings his trademark delight in colour to the dark deeds, and drenches it all in howling wind and Rachmaninoff-style piano flourishes. The potboiler story is very much secondary to the visuals, but the whip-cracking kinkiness ensures there’s a bite. Extras Subtitled interviews with Bava’s son Lamberto (25 minutes), second assistant director Sergio Martino (24 minutes)…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | 15 | SVOD ICON Rosalie is a creepy little girl, prone to pushing kids out of treehouses and saying weird stuff about Hell. Turns out she’s the least of anyone’s worries in this silly supernatural horror. It has the production values of a noughties soap, and the dialogue might have been generated by ChatGPT, but the way it piles on plot twists and horror tropes – possesion, ghosts, curses – is perversely compelling. If nothing else, you won’t have seen another film like it.…

STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS SEASON ONE (4K/Blu-ray/DVD) is the big TV release this month. We said: “the best first season of live-action Star Trek since the original run in 1965.” Bonuses include pieces on Anson Mount’s portrayal of Pike (featuring “intimate footage” – steady on, dear) and the production design tech, and what sounds like a season overview. We’d love to tell you if they’re much cop, but apparently it’s beyond the wit of one of the world’s largest studios to supply any advance materials. There’s also been a peculiarly unseasonal release for Christmas fantasy comedy VIOLENT NIGHT (out now, Blu-ray/DVD), in which David Harbour’s Santa Claus gets caught up in the crossfire as a dysfunctional family come under siege from a team of mercenaries. We said: “Each kill…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 512 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author AG Riddle ▸ Publisher Head Of Zeus While it sounds like it should be a local radio station, this ambitious tale is actually a satisfying mix of quantum physics, alternative history and good old-fashioned espionage. When CERN physicist Dr Tyson Klein identifies a mysterious code hidden in his data, he becomes the target of sinister forces who’ll do anything to keep the earthshattering discovery quiet. Despite its hard SF foundations, however – not to mention some clever riffs on real-life physics – Quantum Radio’s carefully researched ruminations on grand unification theories turn out to be a Trojan horse for unashamed thriller action. Ty and his companions – though assembled from familiar building blocks – are likeable enough to make you…

▸ RELEASED 27 MARCH 124-163 pages | Hardback box set ▸ Authors Steve Cole, Paul Cornell, James Goss, Una McCormack, Marc Platt, Jacqueline Rayner, Gary Russell ▸ Publisher Big Finish Terry Nation’s ’70s space opera about a bunch of freedom fighters fighting the tyrannical Federation gets novelised. Wait, hasn’t that been done before? Well, yes: in 1977 and 1979 Trevor Hoyle wrote two books which adapted nine series one episodes, squeezing some of them down and skipping others entirely. A third book later adapted three from series four. In this box set, a host of writers tackle the first 14 episodes, all scripted by Nation. Each slim volume tackles two, usually giving them around 65 pages each. Back in the pre-VHS heyday of TV novelisations, their ability to faithfully reproduce…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 256 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Grace Curtis ▸ Publisher Hodder & Stoughton Think of Westerns and SF and you may well think of Firefly – and that is just how Frontier is being marketed. But it’s actually a very different kind of story, an episodic tale of one woman’s journey through a foreign landscape. After the devastation of climate change, most people left Earth in pursuit of a better life elsewhere. But some chose to stay – religious devotees who worship Gaia and believe those who left were evil sinners. Onto this world crashes an unnamed woman, searching for her lover who is also lost somewhere on the planet. The law here considers her a criminal, and as she moves from town to town, she…

▸ RELEASED 30 MARCH 272 pages | Hardback/ebook ▸ Author Kelly Link ▸ Publisher Head Of Zeus There’s no version of Little Red Riding Hood in this volume of Kelly Link’s reinvented fairy tales, but a wolf disguised in grandmother’s clothing seems like a good metaphor for the stories themselves. They’re sort of the same shape as fairy tales, but underneath something else entirely. Something sharper. Here, instead of an insecure king sending his sons on impossible missions, we get a youth-obsessed billionaire. Instead of an unfortunate traveller getting lost in the woods, a grad student takes an ill-advised house-sitting gig. Link uses the language of fairy tales to tell contemporary and futuristic stories in her deadpan style; it’s deliberately jarring and wilfully challenging. All the stories can be loosely categorised…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Publisher DC Comics ▸ Writer Mark Russell ▸ Artist Mike Allred ISSUES 1-3 How would Superman deal with the end of the world? Pitching the character’s innate optimism against an unchangeable fate isn’t a new concept, but DC’s latest three-issue miniseries at least finds some new twists in the idea. Superman: Space Age pitches Kal-El into the political realities of ’60s America, and then follows him across the years until the Earth faces inevitable destruction from the events of 1985 crossover Crisis On Infinite Earths. It’s a similar conceit to writer Mark Russell’s previous Marvel series Fantastic Four: Life Story, with each 90-page issue tackling a different decade. There are also unavoidable similarities to previous DC classics like The New Frontier and All-Star Superman –…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Publisher Image Comics ▸ Writer Mark Millar ▸ Artist Juanan Ramirez ISSUES 1-3 “With great power comes no responsibility” is the theme of Mark Millar’s boisterously irreverent take on vampires. Turned to the dark side after being critically injured in a reckless parkour accident, Philadelphia teen Danny Garcia embraces his newfound powers with bloody relish. Like Spider-Man bitten by Morbius, he restyles himself as a superhero, swinging from rooftop to rooftop. After converting his best friends Amy and Sam, they form the titular bloodsucking super-team, decked out in colourful wrestling costumes. Millar also puts his own wry touch on the rules of the genre, from transforming into mist to summoning rats and not being able to cross water. Juanan Ramirez’s fluid linework compliments Millar’s typically…

BRANDON CRONENBERG DOESN’T just want Infinity Pool to freak you out – he wants it to make you laugh, too. “We were always chuckling to ourselves when we were developing it, we thought it was going to be funny,” he tells Red Alert. That’s quite a strange admission for a director whose latest film has been widely described as “shocking” thanks to scenes of Alexander Skarsgård naked and breastfeeding, and Mia Goth wildly screaming while pointing a loaded gun at a bus full of people. It’s no wonder early audiences found it a bit much. “During our early test screenings with friends and colleagues, there was very little laughter,” the director says. “I thought, ‘We’re fucked. We really fucked up this film, it’s a disaster because nobody’s laughing.’ They seemed…

It’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s coming, the Force is coming home. No, not Star Wars’ Force, but the demonic entity from The Evil Dead – the one that zooms through the woods, toppling trees, on its way to possessing people and turning them into cackling, deformed killers known as Deadites. And it’s not coming home to its old stomping ground of Tennessee, but to Los Angeles. Because uniquely, the fifth entry in the now 42-year-old series – perhaps horror’s most gleefully excessive franchise – unfolds not in the traditional setting of a cabin in the woods, but (for the most part) in an ordinary family apartment. Just because this is domestic horror, however, don’t make the mistake of thinking that the Deadites have been domesticated… DEAD KEEN Evil…

What’s Ellie like at the start of the film? She’s really under the gun. Her husband’s up and left, so she’s taking care of three kids on her own. The building they live in is about to be demolished, so she has to find a new place to live. Then Beth shows up on her doorstep. She hasn’t answered my last few calls, and I’ve got a chip on my shoulder about it. So there’s some conflict between the sisters in the beginning. One thing I loved about Lee [Cronin]’s script is that it’s so character-driven. We’ve done a good job of establishing the relationships really quickly, and I think you care about us because of it. That’s new for Evil Dead, for The Force to be terrorising a family…

CHRIS MCKAY adopted a simple mantra when it came to directing the upcoming action-horror-comedy Renfield: “Make a fucked-up Dracula movie.” At first, that colourful mission statement might sound like a departure for McKay. He had previously helmed episodes of Robot Chicken and the animated The Lego Batman Movie before transitioning to the time-travelling alien invasion blockbuster The Tomorrow War. But actually the king of the vampires and his minion were right up McKay’s street. “I grew up watching John Carpenter movies,” McKay tells SFX. “I’m a huge David Cronenberg fan. Tobe Hooper… Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Poltergeist. Jaws was a big movie for me. To this day, I gravitate towards horror. The perennial Christmas present was a Stephen King book – I grew up reading a lot of King. “There…

Need something strange in your neighbourhood? Who ya gonna call? Well, production designer Marcus Rowland and visual effects supervisor Sean Mathiesen, as it happens. They talk us through bringing the dead back to life and building the world of Lockwood & Co. EARLY CONCEPT ART MR: Romek [Delimata, concept artist] did that. With discussions with Joe [Cornish, showrunner] super early on, we did this visual with Romek before the series was commissioned, I think it was two weeks into the first lockdown [2020]. We did a few images of key frames to get the ball rolling and get an indication of the direction it should go into. Then Framestore did some 3D modelling of how those component pieces would fit together, but the visual and the process changed along the…

▸ RELEASED 14 APRIL TBC | 122 minutes ▸ Director Makoto Shinkai ▸ Cast Nanoka Hara, Hokuto Matsumura, Eri Fukatsu, Shota Sometani The anime films of Makoto Shinkai – best known for 2016’s Your Name, a mega hit in Japan – are as big-hearted and romantic as they are playful and offbeat. His latest is perhaps his quirkiest yet. It follows the titular Suzume (Nanoka Hara), an orphaned high school girl who falls into the orbit of Sōta (Hokuto Matsumura), a young man with a secret mission: to guard a series of magical doors that, when opened, unleash a giant worm-like creature that causes devastating earthquakes. The twist? Thanks to a curse from a cat, Sōta has been turned into a chair. A walking, talking, three-legged chair. It is a…

▸ UK/US Netflix, streaming now ▸ Creators Everett Downing Jr, Patrick Harpin ▸ Cast Laz Alonso, Priah Ferguson, JeCobi Swain, Yvette Nicole Brown EPISODES 1.01-1.10 Nope, this isn’t a Mandalorian spin-off centred on Baby Yoda. But don’t feel too disappointed. My Dad The Bounty Hunter is a frothy CG comedy space opera aimed at kids, but – as with Pixar movies – has enough sophistication and wit to keep parents entertained too. And not just because it quotes Blade Runner, although that helps. Two Earth kids, Lisa and Sean, discover that their dad Terry is an intergalactic bounty hunter when they stowaway in his car – which is actually a shuttlecraft – and are accidentally whisked into space. He wants to get them home before his wife finds out, but…

▸ RELEASED 27 MARCH 1973 | 12 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Jack Smight ▸ Cast James Mason, Leonard Whiting, David McCallum, Jane Seymour BLU-RAY DEBUT The title card of this miniseries features a pink carnation. It should have been green, as viewers with even the most rudimentary gaydar should detect a homoerotic subtext. The creature (Michael Sarrazin) is a dish: Victor (Leonard Whiting) greets it by gasping “You are beautiful!”. And after spurning his creation when it later grows ugly, Frankenstein returns from honeymoon having – as someone notes – “grown a beard”. Ahem. The title misleadingly suggests fidelity to Mary Shelley’s novel – though elements like its Arctic conclusion are drawn upon. Other additions include a competing Promethean overreacher, Dr Polidori (James Mason), and Prima (Jane Seymour), a wickedly…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1973 | 15 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Don Sharp ▸ Cast Robert Hardy, Joan Collins, Christopher Lee, Jane Birkin BLU-RAY DEBUT One of the less celebrated ’70s chillers, Dark Places is barely a blip on Christopher Lee’s CV. And no wonder – he may earn top billing on the poster but he’s wasted in a low-key role, conspiring to bring about the downfall of the true lead, Robert Hardy, who’s just inherited a stately pile with some restless spirits thrown in. Helmer Don Sharp injects as much contemporary, crashzoom energy as he can and there’s tangible atmosphere in the derelict rooms littered with creepy broken dolls. But it’s a creaky, muddled tale that ends up playing like an overextended Hammer House Of Horror. Extras Film historian…

▸ RELEASED 7 APRIL 2023 | TBC | SVOD ▸ Director Jeffrey Walker ▸ Cast Patrick Gibson, Sophie Wilde, Sam Neill, Christoph Waltz SKY CINEMA When hapless Paul Carpenter almost accidentally finds himself employed by venerable London institution JW Wells, his main question on his first day is: what the hell does this company actually do? Especially as some of his co-workers seem to be trolls, and he’s set the task of locating a door which apparently moves around he building. His search soon uncovers a larger conspiracy, though… Adapted from a novel by prolific fantasy humorist Tom Holt, produced by The Jim Henson company and featuring spirited supporting performances from a number of esteemed thesps as company bigwigs who all look like they moonlight as Hogwarts professors, The Portable…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | TBC | SVOD SHUDDER The title nods to Mary Poppins, but she never gave a kid microdoses of LSD – or a knife to stab mummy with. After bonding with Johnny, a lad with multiple allergies who’s never spoken, loopy babysitter Millicent does. Imagine a Hallmark movie where everyone’s homicidal or horny. It’s played relatively straight; going full-on John Waters might have been better. And sadly the trippy aspects consist of little more than the odd blurry sequence.…

▸ RELEASED 30 MARCH 512 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author MR Carey ▸ Publisher Orbit Books If there was a moment when Mike Carey, comics writer, morphed into MR Carey, novelist, it came in 2014. This was the year his mycologically driven (sort-of) zombie apocalypse novel The Girl With All The Gifts, written concurrently with his screenplay to the 2016 movie, gathered the kinds of reviews that suggested Carey had (should there have previously been any doubt) definitely arrived as a creator of long-form fiction. Accordingly, there’s now a real sense of anticipation when Carey’s latest hits bookshops, especially when, as with Infinity Gate, he’s trying something new. This is the opening volume in a duology where Carey takes on a subgenre that’s made its way to the centre of…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 470 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Owen King ▸ Publisher Hodder & Stoughton Anyone who shares a home with a cat – whether adorable fluffball, aloof demigod or cranky little bugger – knows, deep down, that such feline companions spend a non-trivial portion of their time idly plotting our downfall. They could take you at any time; they’re just choosing not to. It’s the bargain we make: we give them food, they express contentment by sitting on our laps. In the Dickensian city of The Curator, cats are revered and placated by the traditionally minded and the vulnerable alike. The educated and forwardthinking, however, shun such superstitions. Theirs is a bold, rational new age of trams and factories. Just as the novel opens, a largely bloodless…

▸ RELEASED 6 APRIL 256 pages | Hardback/ebook ▸ Author Kristin Baver ▸ Publisher Dorling Kindersley The Star Wars galaxy provides rich pickings for this riff on the “100 Objects” format popularised by the likes of Radio 4 and the British Museum. StarWars.com associate editor Kristin Baver curates a broad selection of artefacts stretching from the Old Republic through to the First Order era, in a book that’s sufficiently up-to-date to include entries from last year’s The Book Of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Andor. The photography is the winner here, with every object – ranging from household names (Darth Vader’s helmet) to the impressively obscure (a mummified hand from Solo) – given the chance to shine. Even items that had blink-and you’ll-miss-it cameos on-screen are showcased as the masterpieces…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 384 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Michael Grothaus ▸ Publisher Orenda Books In describing Michael Grothaus’s second book, there’s a distinct risk of making it sound like a by-the-numbers slipstream novel. For a start, there’s the setting: a near-future Japan where teenage maths and tech prodigy John is awaiting a big payday for his quantum computing insights. In Tokyo, suffering jet lag and culture shock, John heads late at night for Mr Happy Café, where he receives a “relaxing ear cleaning” from an initially enigmatic waitress, Neotnia. The two, who share a deepseated sense of being outsiders, are drawn to each other and, oh so gradually, a tentative love begins to blossom. That Beautiful Shining People isn’t just a slipstream novel with pretensions to being literature…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 368 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Rachelle Atalla ▸ Publisher Hodder & Stoughton What if society doesn’t end with an asteroid strike, or a zombie plague, but with slowly rising prices and livestock quotas? Rachelle Atalla’s second novel envisions a grimly plausible future where humanity – or at least England and Scotland – starts to run out of drinkable water. The results are not pretty. Our guide through this slow sort-of-apocalypse is 21-year-old Aida, a student forced to give up her university career and return to her parents’ farm in Scotland. It’s an unhappy reunion. She has a fractious relationship with her mother, one that only gets worse when a van full of strangers arrives seeking aide. There are shades of ’70s telefantasy classic Survivors to…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Publisher DC Black Label ▸ Writer Tom King ▸ Artist Jorge Fornés ISSUES 1-3 Tom King has frequently delved into the weirder edges of DC’s back catalogue with miniseries like Strange Adventures and The Human Target, but his latest effort sees him going further than ever before. Danger Street collects a number of mostly forgotten DC characters for a dark 12-issue thriller. These first three give us the set-up, as an attempt by two down-on-their-luck heroes to boost their reputation goes horribly wrong, accidentally killing one of the pre-teen members of the “Dingbats of Danger Street” gang. We also get subplots involving nearly a dozen other characters, including a female cop, a group of evil child billionaires, and mythic Jack Kirby creations the New Gods.…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ 222 minutes | CD/download ▸ Publisher Big Finish AUDIO DRAMA A long time ago the Third Doctor bade a melancholy farewell to his companion, Jo Grant (Katy Manning). Now, many decades later – for Jo, at least – the two are reunited. In “Supernature” the Doctor and Jo stumble upon a secret military operation on the Isle of Wight and come under attack from the local wildlife. It’s a slight story, but this is very much about exploring Jo’s headspace in the wake of a personal tragedy. “The Conservitors” is set in a sci-fi dystopia ruled over by machines. It’s clichéd stuff, but also in keeping with the set’s MO as a series of Pertwee-era pastiches. Finally “The Iron Shore” is an atmospheric tale of…

OUTSIDE OF THE JURASSIC World franchise, there aren’t a lot of premium dinosaur movies to dazzle cinemagoers. Writers/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (A Quiet Place) tell Red Alert that they’ve lamented that fact for the last 20 years. Obsessed with terrible lizards since they were both kids, they’ve filled that void with their recently released, original sci-fi take on a dino movie, 65. Essentially a two-hander, it features Adam Driver as Commander Mills, a working-class space pilot on a long-haul job to pay for his ill daughter’s treatments. When his ship crashes, only he and a young girl who was in cryogenic sleep, Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), survive. They find themselves on a hostile planet that is revealed to be Earth, 65 million years ago. When that premise came to…

It’s not every day a director has to give notes on demonic possession. So what sort of guidance was Cronin providing Alyssa Sutherland with? “She really grabbed what I was after very early,” he says. “A lot of what we talked about was about physicality, and timing. But also what was the thought process going on with that demonic force is inside her. Because it’d be really easy to just wipe everybody out – but not when there’s a chance to wage psychological warfare on the innocent! “So there’d be times I would have said to her, ‘Don’t forget, you’re fucking with them’. Because something as powerful as a Deadite could walk into the room and wipe everybody out, but it’s playtime for them. And I was saying also, ‘Look…

THEY SAY IT TAKES A SPARK TO IGNITE a revolution. In Naomi Alderman’s 2016 novel The Power it’s a genuine jolt of voltage, unleashed from the fingertips of teenage girls. Soon gifted to all women, this lethally empowering phenomenon is destined to upend society. Fried patriarchy, anyone? “There’s a rebelliousness and a wit to Naomi’s work,” says Raelle Tucker, showrunner of Prime Video’s adaptation of Alderman’s provocative, best-selling tale. “She’s very daring but also imaginative. She’s talking about real world issues that are difficult, but she’s doing it without ever losing her sense of humour or sense of adventure. It connects on an emotional level. All those things combined with really original, distinct character work is unusual in one package. “Naomi has been incredibly involved since the beginning of the…

A REUNION THAT WAS decades in the making, the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation are back and breaking the internet with season three of Star Trek: Picard. “It was very clear, when we talked about Terry [Matalas] taking over the show, that what he really wanted to build to was the Next Gen movie he had never seen,” Star Trek’s big boss Alex Kurtzman tells SFX. “The minute he said that I was like, ‘Amazing. Let’s do that.’ “What’s great about that is we can do that in 10 hours instead of two. That means that we can really marinate in each character and get to know each character before we bring them all together. That’s the way to make it a satisfying reunion.” SFX has to get…

2.1/2.2: “THE LAST SONTARAN” Tied into Who’s “The Sontaran Stratagem”, Sarah Jane’s third tangle with the spudheads (written by Phil Ford) sees one crash-landing near a radio telescope, then plotting to drop satellites on nuclear power stations to avenge the Sontaran fleet’s destruction. At the end they let him fly off because, hey, children’s show. ♦ Neat bit: Commander Kaagh going Predator by cloaking device. 3.7/3.8: “THE ETERNITY TRAP” This Phil Ford spookfest is set in a manor house menaced by 17th century alchemist Erasmus Darkening (Donald Sumpter). There’s a scientific explanation (a malfunctioning transdimensional portal), but this is classic ghost story fare, with poltergeist activity and cobwebbed secret passages. ♦ Neat bit: A voice saying “Sarah Jane, help me!” from a gramophone record. Creepy. 2.9/2.10: “THE TEMPTATION OF SARAH…

▸ UK/US Netflix, streaming now ▸ Creator Agata Malesinska ▸ Cast Vanessa Aleksander, Jędrzej Hycnar, Jakub Sasak, Magdalena Cielecka EPISODES 1.01-1.06 This Polish drama has lofty aims for its limited budget: fusing Top Gun aeronautics with Blade Runner futurism while also trying to reinvent The Time Traveler’s Wife as a love triangle. Astronaut Niko (Jędrzej Hycnar) wakes up in his spaceship in 2052 after 30 years orbiting the Earth in accidental suspended animation. While he snored, his 2022 girlfriend Marta (Vanessa Aleksander) married his best friend Bogdan (Jakub Sasak). With both those roles recast for the future scenes – with actors who do a damn fine job of recreating their younger counterparts – and sinister Russians refusing to release the still-sleepy Niko back to his country, the stage is set…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1972 | PG | Blu-ray ▸ Producer Barry Letts ▸ Cast Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning, Nicholas Courtney, Roger Delgado BLU-RAY DEBUT Fittingly, Jon Pertwee’s middle season finds the Third Doctor not just in his dandy pomp but perfectly caught between his past and future. Still exiled to Earth and mixing it with the military, he’s also sneaking away to other worlds a whole year before the Time Lords officially lift his travel restrictions. The classics are frontloaded: “Day Of The Daleks” is powered by the kind of time-bending paradox you suspect may have imprinted on a young Steven Moffat, while “The Curse Of Peladon” proves a deliciously atmospheric piece of studiobound world-building. “The Sea Devils”, meanwhile, delivers one of the show’s touchstone monsters and a briny…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1953-1984 | PG | DVD ▸ Directors Various ▸ Cast Various humans, Dormantus the dragon Of the nine films in this BFI box set, three (all around 50 minutes long) are fantastical. The Selkie (1979) ( ) sees a seal taking human form (a middle-aged bloke in jeans and bobble hat) to protest against a town council’s plans for seafront development. Featuring much seal-out-ofwater humour (he can’t resist a goldfish…), it’s charmingly whimsical, with a worthy ecological message. A dumpy, fire-breathing dragon that looks suspiciously like it moves on hidden wheels is the main draw of 1973’s The Flying Sorcerer ( ), in which a time machine accidentally brings it back from ye olden days. It’s daffy stuff, with some amusing Beano logic – like the…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2023 | 12 | SVOD ▸ Director Christopher Landon ▸ Cast David Harbour, Anthony Mackie, Jahi Di’Allo Winston, Tig Notaro NETFLIX If you’ve caught Christopher Landon’s previous movies, including Happy Death Day and Freaky, you’ll know he’s the master of the horrorcomedy. But in his latest film, there’s not as much comedy and barely a hint of horror. We Have A Ghost is, instead, something of a throwback to the family fantasy flicks of the ’80s, specifically ET: The Extra-Terrestrial and Beetlejuice. Wearing its Amblin influences proudly on its sleeve, it tells the story of a ghost (played by David Harbour, with the cruellest of combovers) who becomes a cause célèbre after teenager Fulton (a winning Jahi Di’Allo Winston) uploads footage of him to YouTube. Certainly…

▸ RELEASED 31 MARCH 2023 | TBC | SVOD SHUDDER Remember The Eye? In that, a blind woman had eye surgery and started seeing ghosts. The Unheard is like that, but for deafness: a young woman undergoes an experimental procedure to restore her hearing, only to find she’s hearing things that aren’t there… or are they? Impeccable sound design makes the first hour play like a drama about a woman adapting to changing senses. It’s a shame about the horror elements, which range from predictable to unlikely, without ever being properly scary.…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1980 | 18 | 4K Blu-ray Released on Blu-ray as Zombie Creeping Flesh, this Italian horror is no less shoddy in 4K. Ripping off Dawn Of The Dead, it recycles Goblin’s score. After a promising actionpacked opening, commandos incapable of remembering to “shoot them in the head” are relocated to the Papuan jungle on a bafflingly aimless mission. Expect butcher’s bin gore and endless wildlife stock footage. Extras Commentary, four interviews, an appreciation, trailer, poster.…

▸ RELEASED 30 MARCH 352 pages | Hardback/ebook ▸ Author Lavanya Lakshminarayan ▸ Publisher Solaris Books Part thought experiment, part cautionary tale, The Ten Percent Thief evokes a chillingly plausible vision of the future. Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s debut novel keeps the spotlight shifting between a huge cast of point-of-view characters, and the result is an impressive tapestry of vignettes in the style of Short Cuts or Magnolia. It’s also a smart satire of contemporary ideas about economics, the class system and our reliance on technology. In Lakshminarayan’s Bangalore of tomorrow (rebranded here as Apex City), your life is defined by your status on a statistical Bell Curve. The lives of the top 20% (Virtuals) are shaped by sophisticated AI to maximise their never-ending pursuit of productivity, while the bottom 10% (Analogs)…

▸ RELEASED 23 MARCH 352 pages | Hardback/ebook ▸ Author Jinwoo Chong ▸ Publisher Melville House Publishing Jinwoo Chong’s debut novel is an impressive satirical head-scratcher about loss, identity and the lingering power of old TV shows. Flux centres on three distinct voices. Bo is eight years old and dealing with the sudden death of his mother; Brandon is a young professional, living his best life and working in publishing, until his magazine closes and he’s suddenly let go; Blue is a middle-aged man, mute, but offered access to an expensive technology that will enable him to talk once more – for a limited time only. Brandon’s story dominates in the first half of the novel, as he’s courted by a shadowy tech startup and agrees to take part in…

▸ RELEASED 23 MARCH 320 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Louise Swanson ▸ Publisher Hodder & Stoughton End Of Story is one of those books you engage with like a cryptic crossword rather than merely read. It’s a vast, playful, ingenious piece of literary legerdemain, that invites you to question, and to interpret. But few cryptic crosswords put your emotions through such a wringer too. A near-future dystopian tale set in a Britain where fiction has been banned and would-be narrative authors are treated like potential terrorists, it’s told in a series of “secret” journal entries by former award-winning author Fern Dostoy. Now working as a cleaner in a hospital, she illicitly moonlights as a book reader to help children sleep at night. Then elements of her old novels start…

▸ RELEASED 6 APRIL 416 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Olivie Blake ▸ Publisher Tor One For My Enemy joins the ranks of fantasy novels inspired by Shakespeare and, like Chloe Gong’s These Violent Delights, the starting point here is Romeo And Juliet. Olivie Blake swaps Verona for New York City and two feuding families of Russian witches: the Antonovas, led by matriarch Baba Yaga, and the Fedorovs, headed by patriarch Koschei The Deathless. The prose is overwritten, dragging heavily on the pace, and the plot is cluttered and untidy. Meanwhile Blake can’t seem to decide whose story she is telling – is the book about the forbidden love between Sasha Antonova and Lev Fedorov, or about their elder siblings Marya and Dimitri? At the outset, it seems to be…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Publisher Marvel Comics ▸ Writer/artist Tradd Moore ISSUES 1-4 There are distinctive comic-book artists – and then there are people like Tradd Moore, who feel like they’re operating by their own set of lurid, sensedefying rules. Best known for Image’s hyper-violent series Luther Strode, he’s netted a serious showcase in Doctor Strange: Fall Sunrise, a four-issue miniseries that’s undoubtedly one of the most experimental comics Marvel has ever published. The multilayered, deeply abstract story follows Doctor Strange as an attempt to aid the birth of a god-like being sends him on a bewildering odyssey into another dimension. Here, Strange faces mind-bending magical terrors, while writer/artist Moore bends the limits of the comic page almost to breaking point with hyper-intricate panel layouts and dazzling art nouveau…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Reviewed on PC ▸ Also on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 ▸ Publisher Focus Entertainment VIDEOGAME Never has a game wanted to be a spiritual successor to BioShock (not necessarily a bad thing) more than Atomic Heart. It has the same “what if” approach to history as BioShock’s underwater city, proposing an alternate timeline where Russia becomes a global utopian superpower built on advanced robotics, AI and a magical liquid called polymer that gives you superpowers. It follows a similar template too, as you fight biological and mechanical threats using, basically, magic in one hand and weapons in the other. It almost pulls it off too, presenting a beautiful ’50s-feeling “world of tomorrow”, with bots that alternate between creepy Bakelite doll…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Reviewed on PlayStation 5 ▸ Also on PC, Xbox Series X|S ▸ Publisher Electronic Arts VIDEOGAME Set in a fantasy world inspired by feudal Japan, this hunting game is brimming with fantastical foes the size of houses to topple, with a rapid and satisfying hack-and-slash combat system, and an absorbingly creative building feature. Electronic Arts and Dynasty Warriors developer Koei Tecmo’s new partnership has produced brilliant results in a genre that’s typically been dominated by Capcom’s weighty Monster Hunter series. The Karakuri are wacky contraptions like huge cannons and hammers that can be put together in the blink of an eye, using a simple, intuitive method of building blocks. The game’s stand-out feature, it also provides the most fun, resulting in a system that’s as…

Grotbags My one big regret from a 20-year career in journalism is not failing to topple corrupt governments or right cruel injustice – it’s having just missed out on the chance to reunite Grotbags and Croc for a career-spanning interview. Hey, we all have our roles in life. Grotbags, aka Carol Lee Scott, was a witch who sought to capture Rod Hull’s Emu to use his special powers (attacking people, presumably) to “control all brats” (aka children). Like I said, we all have our roles, and this one seems perfectly aspirational in a pre-TikTok age. The characters were created by Scott and Hull for a live summer show in 1979. They joined forces on television shortly after in a reign that would last over a decade, spanning eight different shows.…