Table of contents for July 2024 in SFX

SET TO BE THE BASIS of 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars, Marvel Super Heroes: Secret Wars made comic book history when it was first published in 1984. Written by Marvel’s then editor-in-chief Jim Shooter and illustrated by Mike Zeck and Bob Layton, the 12-issue maxi-series was the first universe-wide superhero crossover, predating DC Comics’ Crisis On Infinite Earths by almost a year. However, it was actually conceived as a tie-in with Mattel’s new line of action figures and playsets, which didn’t find favour with Marvel’s leading scripters at the time. “Jim and I offered Secret Wars to a few of our top writers, but no one was interested in writing a ‘toy’ book,” recalls Secret Wars editor Tom De Falco, who also recently wrote the retro series Secret Wars: Battleworld. “After…

WHILE SEASON THREE RECENTLY CONCLUDED ON the small screen, Resident Alien is about to return to comics (where it began). However, according to writer Peter Hogan, fans of the TV series should be wary of diving in at the deep end of the Steve Parkhouse-illustrated comic book. “The books are very different to the show,” he tells Red Alert. “They’re basically two very different narratives, which are parallel stories rather than one being ahead of the other. Dark Horse have released the monthly comic in omnibus versions, so new readers can easily follow the whole story from the beginning, which will be a much more enjoyable experience than trying to jump in at Book Eight. “The new readers who’ve been vocal about it all seem to be enjoying the books,…

“I’VE HEARD MYSELF DESCRIBED as Hollywood’s longest-established rebel,” said Roger Corman, reflecting on a prolific career in cult filmmaking, one that saw him become a champion and mentor to the likes of James Cameron, Joe Dante and Francis Ford Coppola. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Corman had a lifelong affinity for fantastic cinema. “I became a critic for the university newspaper,” he told SFX in 2008. “Now I had to really analyse the films that I liked… I started thinking, ‘This is what I want to do.’” Abandoning a career in engineering, Corman sold his first screenplay in 1954. Disappointed by the resulting movie, Highway Dragnet, he raised $12,000 to produce his own shot at a hit, Monster From The Ocean Floor (1954). As a producer and director for exploitation kings…

ERIC KRIPKE HAS HAD TO KEEP his mouth shut for a really fucking long time. In fact, the showrunner behind the world’s bloodiest, sweariest, and downright weirdest “supe” show, The Boys, has yet to speak publicly about the upcoming season – until now, that is. “This marks my official first interview for season four,” he tells SFX one dreary Monday. “The answers will be fresh!” With The Boys last airing almost two years ago, Kripke’s been actively working on a number of other BCU (that’s the Boys Cinematic Universe) projects, primarily the spin-off series Gen V, which launched last September and has been renewed for a second season. Gen V centred on a group of highschool-age superpowered humans training to join the nefarious weapons dealer/multi-platform superhero company Vought International. Over…

If the world really was invaded by blind extraterrestrials with a keen sense of hearing, some people would be naturally better at surviving than others. We wouldn’t, for instance, bet on Brian Blessed or Alan Carr living more than a day before being ripped apart by a Death Angel. So which of the cast members of Day One would be best and worst at navigating a world where any kind of noise is likely to get you killed? “Oh, I would have trouble because I like to talk to myself,” smiles Lupita Nyong’o. “Like when I’m stressed out, I talk to myself and give myself pep talks to get me through. So the very thing I’d need to do to stay alive would be the thing that killed me.” “Alex…

FOR 2022 SLASHER FLICK X and its same-year prequel Pearl, director Ti West did the standard amount of press for a low-budget horror, which is to say not a lot. But with his latest film MaXXXine (a direct sequel to X), things are different. Very different. “With X, no one knew we made that movie,” the man born Timon West tells SFX about 2022’s surprise horror hit (made for $1 million, it ended up grossing $15m). “And then Pearl [budget: $1m; box office: $10.1m], no one knew we made that movie either. So this one is the only one that everyone knows has been happening since the very beginning.” The consequence of the critical and commercial success of those films is that MaXXXine is arriving with considerably more fanfare than…

FORGET SPORTS ALMANACS AND ALMOST KISSING your mum – Marty McFly’s dealings with the Doc in Back To The Future feel tame compared to The Butterfly Effect. It’s perhaps the darkest time-travel movie ever committed to celluloid, with an alternate ending so harrowing that it still keeps people up at night despite 20 years having passed since it first hit cinemas. Released in 2004, this sci-fi drama had then-rising star Ashton Kutcher playing Evan, a young man with a very troubled past that saw him and his pals enduring a torrent of abuse. From parental violence and encounters with a paedophilic neighbour, to accidentally causing the death of a mother and her baby and witnessing the torture of the family dog, it was a grim period that all involved would…

RELEASED 28 JUNE TBC | 165 minutes Directors Yorgos Lanthimos Cast Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley If there’s any kindness in Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest wild and weird work, it’s hard to find. The director behind Poor Things is back with another surreal meditation on human frailties and flaws. Reuniting some of his collaborators on that film, including Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and cinematographer Robbie Ryan, it’s a warped comedy that defiantly wades into surreal terrain, as the cast all play multiple roles across its trio of short films. In the first segment, Jesse Plemons is Robert, a man whose life is dictated by suave Svengalifigure Raymond (Dafoe), who provides him with a daily list of instructions, such as “no sexual intercourse”. Stone briefly pops up…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 12A | 145 minutes Directors Wes Ball Cast Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand, Peter Macon Jumping forward “many generations”, the tenth Apes outing both induces a warm glow of nostalgia via callbacks to the 1968 original (like a frenetic “human hunt”), and refreshes the franchise by creating the space for some impressive world-building. The first act is a triumph in this regard, introducing an ape community unlike any we’ve seen before. Home to Noa, an innocent young chimp, its people have developed bonding rituals with eagles, and constructed structures around old electricity pylons. The decaying remains of human civilisation are much in evidence elsewhere too: skyscrapers overgrown with vegetation, skewered by trees. It’s an impressively detailed, beautifully realised world. As Noa embarks on a quest for…

RELEASED OUT NOW! TBC | 112 minutes Director Xiaopeng Tian Cast Tingwen Wan, Su Xin, Kuixing Teng, Yang Ting This Chinese CG animated film invites comparisons with Spirited Away and the Spider-Verse movies. It’s not as good as those, but still remarkable. Like Spirited Away, it’s about a little girl lost in a scary-funny magic world. Like the Spider-Verse movies, it has mind-bogglingly, exhaustingly dense visuals. Much of the film has the texture of trembling liquid, keeping you marvelling at what you’re seeing, though the story sometimes palls. Shenxiu is estranged from her dad and step-mum. Falling from a cruise ship, she’s swept to a submarine-restaurant, encountering fishy and furry folk, and an alarmingly wide-mouthed youth named Nanaha. The opening is great, making us share in Shenxiu’s melancholia before plunging…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 1970 | 12 | 4K/Blu-ray Director Jess Franco Cast Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, Klaus Kinski, Maria Rohm BLU-RAY DEBUT By the late-’60s, Christopher Lee was habitually moaning about how far Hammer’s Dracula films had strayed from the novel. Jess Franco’s Euro-horror gave him the chance to essay a more faithful take on the Count. A slide promising Bram Stoker’s text “exactly as he wrote it” fibs, though. Dracula certainly looks authentic: as in the book, he has a moustache and white hair, gradually de-ageing the more he feeds. He’s more verbal too, Lee declaiming passages from the text with relish. But we don’t recall a chapter where mangy taxidermy comes to life, with all the blood-freezing terror of Pipkins… And other key elements – like the ship…

RELEASED 17 JUNE 2013 | 15 | Blu-ray BLU-RAY DEBUT The 1978 mass suicide/murder orchestrated by Jim Jones is the model for Ti West’s taut thriller, with the Peoples Temple substituted by a modern-day cult, and events filmed by a VICE camera crew. The speed at which things go to hell in a hand-cart is winding, and the found-footage conceit stretches credibility (just drop the camera and run!), but the performances have conviction, and the use of handheld camera makes for an immersive experience. + Extras Five interviews; video essay; Making Of.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2023 | 12 | 4K/Blu-ray/DVD/download Following a manned lunar mission crippled by solar flares, this South Korean drama is indebted to the likes of Gravity and Apollo 13, a survival tale of damaged tech and resilience. Do Kyung-soo (aka DO of K-pop group Exo) makes for a suitably vulnerable lead, and the ambitious effects shots help sell the jeopardy. At over two hours some of the tension inevitably leaks like a punctured spacesuit, but the grounded storytelling has emotion to spare. + Extras Korean/English language.…

If you’re too lazy to visit a cinema for its 14 June reissue you could always buy STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK (out now). After the Vulcan’s death in The Wrath Of Khan, Kirk and co discover that his spirit lives on in Bones’s mind, stealing the Enterprise for a mission to reunite it with his body, regenerated by the Genesis device. We said: “Powered by character, by the concepts of love and loss… reminds you of a lost age when Star Trek dared to truly move you.” In the 2016 South Korean horror TRAIN TO BUSAN (out now), passengers on a bullet train are menaced by speedster zombies created by a biotech leak. We said: “Piling on the tension until you’re digging your nails into your palms,…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | 18 | Blu-ray Director Tereza Nvotová Cast Natalia Germani, Eva Mores, Juliana Olhová, Zuzana Konečná Though promoted with an emphasis on its debt to supernatural horror, this Slovakian film is at heart a straight drama. Director Tereza Nvotová toys with images of sinisterly staring wolves and naked figures dancing around a bonfire. But ultimately they’re put to the service of depicting how superstition and misogyny can still be interwoven in rural areas of her homeland. On receiving a letter about an inheritance, Šarlota (Natália Germáni) returns to the village she ran away from as a child. Setting up home in a cabin that belonged to a woman scorned as a witch, and forming a bond with another outsider (first seen lying naked in the moonlight),…

RELEASED 4 JULY 576 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Paolo Bacigalupi Publisher Head Of Zeus There are times when writers reach a creative impasse. As he outlines in his interview with SFX this issue, this was a situation encountered by Paolo Bacigalupi. Having first made his name in 2009 with the extraordinary (and extraordinarily successful) biopunk thriller The Windup Girl, he arrived at a point where he suspected that his own work, so often fuelled by anxiety over environmental concerns, was echoing the fears of the moment rather than nudging conversations in any useful direction. Trying to find a new way forward, Bacigalupi began to write not for publication but for his own pleasure, trying out new ideas and approaches. Thus Navola, a fantasy novel set in a milieu just off…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 512 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Manda Scott Publisher September Publishing Manda Scott no longer thinks it’s enough to describe the world’s problems. In her mind, things are so dire that we need what she calls thrutopias, fictions that offer routes to a better world – and get us there quickly. The title of this ambitious but flawed thriller, largely set in 2023 as a way to emphasise the urgency needed (do it yesterday!), is a reference to a speech by Ursula K Le Guin, in which the most august of SFF’s grand dames reminded us that, “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” Or those who have become post-human, because Scott’s central character dies at the end of the first chapter. Lan, a…

RELEASED 20 JUNE 384 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Sarah Brooks Publisher Weidenfeld & Nicholson As Agatha Christie taught us, long-distance trains make a great setting for stories. They’re hotels on rails, full of strangers with secrets: a cross-section of the social classes cooped up together in a metal tube steaming across a continent. Sarah Brooks’s debut takes place in the late nineteenth century, and centres on a journey via the Great Trans-Siberian Express, from Moscow to Beijing. It’s a transit through an uncanny landscape – echoing Area X in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy or the Zone in the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic – that passengers are warned not to spend too long gazing at. But it’s totally fine, the Trans-Siberia Company assures everyone; the reinforced walls and windows of…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Ronald Malfi Publisher Titan Books What if the worst thing you ever did as a teenager came back to haunt you? For most of us, it probably wouldn’t be that big a deal. But for happily married lawyer Andrew Larimer…? That thing might be about to blow up his entire life, courtesy of a spooky phone call from a long-lost friend whose wife has gone missing… Many of the twists and turns in Ronald Malfi’s aptly (if unimaginatively) named small town horror novel are pretty predictable. After all, vengeful ghosts do tend to have similar motivations, and Andrew’s friends all seem to have grown up into stock characters (the cop who abuses his power, the struggling single mother, the desperate drug addict),…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 192 pages | Hardback Author Ian Nathan Publisher Palazzo Editions From micro-budget cult carnage met with moral outrage to a Best Director Oscar nomination, the Mad Max films have come a long way while changing very little. Well, okay, Beyond Thunderdome tried experimenting, but that was the exception that proved the rule. Otherwise, the Mad Max saga is the tale of one man, director George Miller, sticking to a vision: cinematic action as visual poetry and the natural evolution from silent comedy as the purest form of big-screen storytelling. This glossy coffee book captures that tale beautifully, while actually offering little new: there are no original interviews here and no rare images, just a pacy, entertaining biography of a franchise, written by somebody who clearly knows their…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Image Comics Writer/artist Derek Kirk Kim ISSUES 1-3 Ever looked at The Little Mermaid and thought “What this needs is more mecha suits”? The latest ongoing title from Image is here to solve the problem with a visually impressive postapocalyptic saga. It’s the story of a lone mermaid in a devastated world, where the only thing keeping her alive is a hulking, waterfilled environment suit. She’s on a quest to find potential shelter, but the desert she’s travelling across is harsh, and the suit may not last much longer. Three issues in, this is a compelling, well-crafted series with a nifty line in ticking-clock suspense and a strong emphasis on the visuals (especially thanks to the unusual, wider page format). Writer/artist Derek Kirk Kim is keeping plenty…

RELEASED 19 JUNE Publisher Rebellion Writer Ken Mennell Artist John Burns COLLECTION Celebrating 60 years since these Arthurian adventures first appeared in the pages of Wham!, Rebellion’s latest reprint collection also honours artist John Burns, who passed away late last year. One of the true masters of British comics, Burns’s elegant but dynamic style suits this storybook vision of Camelot, where castles shine, dragons prowl the land and wizards rock conical hats decorated with stars. Kelpie is Merlin’s young, towheaded apprentice and makes for an endearingly flawed hero, botching sorcerous experiments and muddling spells while stepping up to face such villains as the Black Raven, Badarach the witch and throne-lusting tyrant Tygron. There’s an awful lot of shape-shifting into animals – the name Kelpie itself is a clue in that…

WITH FALL OF X HAVING brought the Krakoan period to a devastating close, the X-Men are now entering an all-new epoch. Written and drawn by an entirely new line-up of writers and artists, From The Ashes heralds the launch of a new range of comic books, which see the Children of the Atom leaving their island home and settling among various human populaces. “Our new run is certainly going to be different from the Krakoan era in that mutantkind will once again be fractured and scattered across the globe rather than operating as a singular and united world power,” says Marvel Executive Editor Tom Brevoort, who has now taken charge of the X-office. “The fact that mutants have spent the last couple of years telling regular humans that they don’t…

AFTER ALMOST A two-year wait, it’s time to collect your chain mail and dragon kibble: Westeros is ready to rumble once more. The first season of House Of The Dragon left audiences in fear for House Targaryen when by season’s end, fans – spoiler alert – witnessed King Viserys Targaryen’s (Paddy Considine) nauseating death. That left an even messier line of succession for his kin to fight over. On one side is his firstborn daughter and heir apparent, Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy), in whom Viserys confided secret prophecies, and who enjoyed his favour. On the other side is Rhaenyra’s depraved and entitled half-brother Aegon II Targaryen (Tom Glynn-Carney). A leader he is not, yet he’s persuaded by his mother, Dowager Queen Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) and the Small Council to…

IOM HOLLAND. BENEDICT Cumberbatch. Henry Cavill. A frankly ludicrous number of British actors have portrayed superheroes on-screen, yet few of them have played British heroes on-screen. Thank Odin, then, for Andrew Onwubolu aka Rapman, who wants to finally give the United Kingdom a group of superheroes to be proud of. Except don’t call his new Netflix series Supacell a superhero show… “You know, I call it more of a superpower show,” he corrects SFX, “because they’re not superheroes. Well, not yet!” ORIGIN STORY Supacell centres on five South Londoners who have seemingly nothing in common except that one day, they all start developing powers. Why? It’s not clear – there’s no electrical storm or radioactive spider, though a sinister corporation seems to be involved. We do know, though, that Michael,…

TIMEY-WIMEY. ANY DOCTOR WHO interview is going to be caught in the vortex somewhat. It’s July 2023 and SFX is on a vast soundstage at Wolf Studios in Cardiff, where filming of the season one finale is underway. “Is this not shattering all your illusions?” Bonnie Langford asks, reclining in a chair with a jacket over her. We’re having the time of our lives, we tell the national treasure sat before us. “No, it’s great isn’t it?” she beams. At this point it hasn’t even been announced that Langford will be appearing in the 60th anniversary special “The Giggle” before returning for season one, but people do love it when a classic companion returns, we offer. “I’m glad you said that and not vintage,” she chuckles. “A very good vintage,…

RELEASED 12 JUNE  15 | 92 minutes Director Benjamin Brewer Cast Nicolas Cage, Jaeden Martell, Maxwell Jenkins, Sadie Soverall Monster bugs have taken over the world, leaving the few human survivors to scavenge for supplies by day and cower inside by night behind barricaded doors. In a farmhouse in the countryside, Paul (Nicolas Cage) and his two boys, Joseph (Jaeden Martell) and Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins), live a monastic existence that allows them to keep the predators at bay. Thomas, though, has fallen for a girl from a neighbouring encampment, and his daily trips to see her are putting the family at risk. Cut from the same cloth as A Quiet Place and Attack The Block, Benjamin Brewer’s lo-fi horror tale offers generic thrills in a minor key while leaving lots…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 12A | 104 minutes Director Muayad Alayan Cast Miley Locke, Johnny Harris, Sheherazade Makhoul Farrell, Souad Feres Palestinian director Muayad Alayan creeps into genre territory with A House In Jerusalem, though his politically freighted ghost story is less concerned with screw-turning thrills and chills than, say, Babak Anvari’s Under The Shadow. An understated affair that unfolds mostly in brilliant sunlight, it sees a grief-stricken Michael (Johnny Harris) relocating from the UK to the Israeli capital after the death of his wife. But it’s his daughter Rebecca (Miley Locke) that the film’s most interested in, taking her perspective as she begins to glimpse a mysterious girl of her own age. More interested in heartache than scares, Alayan, through Rebecca’s sleuthing, carefully unpackages a backstory pertaining to Israel’s victory…

RELEASED 14 JUNE 15 | 101 minutes Director Christopher Murray Cast Valentina Véliz, Daniel Antivilo, Sebastian Hülk Inspired by a true story – the 1880 trial of members of an organisation called La Recta Provincia, accused of witchcraft – this historical tale is remarkably subtle. The setting: Chiloé, an island off Chile’s west coast – which if this gloomy, rain-drenched film is anything to go by, must be a forbidding place to live. Colonisation, and resistance to it, are central themes. The protagonist is 13-year-old Rosa, a servant of German settlers, and a Christian. When the family’s flock is killed, the blame falls on her father, who has the dogs set on him – with fatal results. After appealing without success to the Mayor and the Church, Rosa turns to…

RELEASED 14 JUNE 15 | 88 minutes Director David Zellner Cast Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Christophe Zajac-Denek, Nathan Zellner If you’re someone who wishes that more directors would get the cash to take wilder swings at subjects instead of sitting through the 79th variant of franchise filmmaking, then Sasquatch Sunset may appeal. With writer/directors David and Nathan Zellner expanding on their shorts, this arthouse quirk-fest features the likes of Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough as sasquatches living in a hazy, beautifully shot northern California forest. And… that’s basically it in terms of concept and plotline. They eat. They sleep. They groom. They copulate. There is the lurking encroachment of human presence. Some loss. Unfortunately it’s so slight (zero dialogue beyond guttural grunts, howls, roars and one snatch of music) that…

UK/US Netflix, streaming now Director Masahiro Ando Cast Akihisa Wakayama, Atsumi Tanezaki, Mamoru Miyano, Ayako Takeuchi EPISODES 1.01-1.12 Evenfor anime, TP Bon is a very strange show. This time-travel toon is mostly silly, childish and innocent, closer to the cheesy ’90s cartoons of Bill & Ted and Back To The Future than anything like Rick And Morty. Yet it blithely drops in images of torture and beheading to mentally scar any tot stumbling upon it. Anime, eh? Japanese schoolboy Bon encounters the Time Patrol, a future organisation with the Quantum Leap-ish job of saving ordinary people from tragic deaths. Accepted as a trainee, and mentored by pretty girl Ream and her jelly-like companion Buyoyan, Bon heads off for adventures through history: the Jurassic era, ancient Greece and Egypt, the Wild West…

RELEASED 17 JUNE 1971-1978 | 18 | Blu-ray Director Pete Walker Cast Susan George, Robin Askwith, Stephanie Beacham, Sheila Keith, Susan Penhaligon, Jack Jones, Anthony Sharp BLU-RAY DEBUT “I don’t think I ever made horror movies,” said Pete Walker, master of the dank, cruel and distinctly British chiller. “I made terror movies.” It’s a distinction explored in this lavish seven-disc box set. Shunning the supernatural and rejecting Hammer’s gothic playground in favour of the shadows and decay of the ’70s, these are films powered by a very human darkness, where psychopaths, self-righteous crazies and assorted obsessives carve a bloody trail. Die Screaming, Marianne feels like an outlier: a straight, sunlit Euro thriller that fails to thrill, sunk by a muddled and meandering screenplay. The Flesh & Blood Show skews closer…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2023 | N/A | SVOD Director Ole Bornedal Cast Fanny Bornedal, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Ulf Pilgaard SHUDDER  A Danish take on a Hitchcockian thriller, 1994’s Nightwatch saw Martin, a student working as a nightwatchman at a morgue, tangled up in a serial killer case, with the necrophile murderer finally unmasked (spoilers!) as the investigating detective. This 30-years-later sequel sees four cast returning, thanks to a retcon: the bad guy wasn’t shot dead, but survived. To unearth a tragic backstory her dad’s never shared, Martin’s daughter takes the same job, then visits the killer in a psychiatric hospital. But this restarts the cycle of violence, placing her family in danger. Featuring some pleasing callbacks (music on a Walkman; moths trapped in a light fitting), the follow-up has more of…

RELEASED 17 JUNE  1984 | 15 | Blu-ray BLU-RAY DEBUT Fronted by TV star Robert Urich, this anarchic space opera finds a bunch of brigands looting precious water reserves in a galaxy blighted by drought. Mixing cosmic princesses and jive-talkin’ pimp-droids, the tone is relentlessly goofball, playing like a cross between a Saturday Night Live sketch and some lawyer-dodging Italian Star Wars knock-off. The modelwork is decent, but can’t save a film forever smirking at itself. Look out for a young Ron Perlman as one of the pirates. + Extras Trailer.…

RELEASED 1 JULY 2024 | TBC | Download Director Chris Cronin Cast Sophia La Porta, David Edward-Robertson, Elizabeth Dormer-Phillips Beginning more like a true crime doc, and gradually slipping into folk horror/Blair Witch/Conjuring territory, this slow-burn indie combines real emotional depth with shiverinducing eeriness. Set in a Yorkshire town where, 25 years ago, a series of children were abducted, it taps into both the centuries-old mystique of the moors and their grim modern associations; Ian Brady and Myra Hindley inevitably cast a shadow. The early focus is the effect of these events on locals – particularly Bill (David Edward-Robertson), who ropes in Claire (Sophia La Porta), a childhood friend of his missing son, to publicise his search for a body. Things get much stranger when a young woman with dowsing…

RELEASED 24 JUNE 1981 | 18 | 4K/Blu-ray Director Joe D’Amato Cast Luigi Montefiori, Annie Belle, Charles Borromel, Katya Berger The latest video nasty to get the UHD treatment is aptly named – though since it began life as a follow-up to cannibal horror Anthropophagous (before taking another direction), Preposterous might have been even better. The two films share the same director and writer, with the latter – actor Luigi Montefiori, credited as George Eastman – playing both killers too. Absurd is clearly modelled on US slashers, in particular Halloween. Montefiori’s murderous Mikos not only has recuperative powers (echoing Michael Myers’s indestructibility), but a Loomis-like priest (Edmund Purdom) on his trail. Beyond his towering 6’ 9” frame, he’s not an iconic figure, though – just a bloke in jeans and…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Vajra Chandrasekera Publisher Solaris First published in the US last year, this science-fantasy tale of gods and revolution has been scooping up all the plaudits. At the time of writing, it’s won the Crawford award for best fantasy debut, and is shortlisted for prizes from both writers (the Nebula) and readers (the Hugo). Fetter is a Chosen One. Or rather, he was supposed to be, but got rejected by his messianic father. Now he’s scraping a living in the vibrant and turbulent city of Luriat. In theory, he’s been honed by vengeful maternal training into a weapon directed against his holy deadbeat dad; in practice, he’s got a boyfriend, joined a support group for un-chosen ones, and keeps quiet about his ability…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 336 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Emily Hamilton Publisher Gollancz Twenty years ago, the crew of the Providence disappeared the moment their experimental dark matter engine was engaged. They were supposed to head to the stars to settle on an exoplanet – furthering the future of the human race. Enticed by this enduring mystery, a group of friends climb aboard the nowabandoned ship to have a poke around. Before they can say “Whoops!”, the engine suddenly fires up and they’re shot into space, doomed to recreate that initial journey. Their only guide is the ship’s hologram, Billie, recreated from the profile of the first crew’s captain. Which is awkward, because reluctant new crewmember Cleo is kind of in love with her… Thus the stage is set for a…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 352 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Gretchen Felker-Martin Publisher Titan Books A group of teens battle both human and cosmic evil in Cuckoo, a viscerally-felt horror novel with more than a hint of classic Stephen King. It’s the summer of 1995. Following a terrific prologue, which almost feels like a terrifying self-contained short story, we jump ahead a few years to the kidnapping of a disparate group of teenagers with one thing in common: they’re all members of the LGBTQ+ community who have been betrayed by their families. One by one they find themselves transported to the remote Camp Resolution, a brutal conversion facility deep in the scorching desert which holds a very strange secret… Despite its period setting, Cuckoo’s focus on the bigotry routinely faced by marginalised…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 277 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author ST Gibson Publisher Angry Robot Billed as “urban fantasy romance”, this tale of sorcerers, mediums and demons in Boston is the first in a new series by bestselling author ST Gibson – and though there’s plenty of fantasy, it’s really the romance that’s the star. Professional medium and high-powered lawyer David Aristarkov is performing a standard communion with a client’s dead husband when he is shaken by a psychic attack from an unknown demon. Unsure where to turn, he contacts his ex-boyfriend Rhys, who along with Rhys’s wife Moira becomes increasingly drawn into the mystery of just what demonic fate is coming for David. As per family legend, it appears his ancestor made a deal with the Devil, and David’s soul is…

RELEASED 18 JUNE 352 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Rosalie M Lin Publisher Tor Books Lots of kids grow up feeling the pressure to get into the family business. But most don’t involve sewing new magical silver arms onto gangsters… Cabaret dancer Jingwen has a complicated relationship with both her mother and her grandmother: her mum’s dating a Shanghai policeman, while her grandmother provides mystical medicine for the criminal underworld. Her moral compass gets another good spin when she discovers that one of her wealthy clients is trying to use shamanistic magic to take over the city. This is Rosalie M Lin’s debut novel, and unfortunately it feels like it. For at least half the book, the prose is so overwritten that it’s hard to follow what’s meant to be happening:…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher DSTLRY Writer/artist Jock ISSUES 1-3 Like the comic book equivalent of IMAX, DSTLRY’s oversized, double-length format places the emphasis firmly on the artwork, and you can almost feel the sheer depth of outer space in the numerous single and double-page spreads that Jock generously awards himself over the course of this three-issue series. Gone’s strength lies in Jock’s visceral cartooning, which is further enhanced by his and Lee Loughridge’s evocative colours. The story is more characterthan plot-driven. Combining the dystopian social commentary of Halo Jones with the grittier Star Wars of Rogue One and Andor, it centres on Abi, a young girl from a backwater planet who sneaks onboard a luxury starliner in search of food – only to find herself stranded upon it after it…

“MY DAD GAVE ME SOME GREAT advice. He said, ‘Pick the thing that feels like an endless well – something you would never tire of going deeper into.’” As the daughter of The Sixth Sense director M Night Shyamalan, Ishana Night Shyamalan is aware that her surname brings a weight of expectation. Her debut feature The Watched, adapted from Irish writer AM Shine’s folklore-flavoured chiller The Watchers, is produced by her father and brings his mentorship full circle. “My whole technique has come from watching him and talking with him about his processes,” she begins. “I think the main thing I’ve taken away is seeing his emotional resilience. He is a relentless worker. He does not stop. That’s been the greatest inspiration to me.” Ishana cut her directorial teeth shooting…

STICK AN ANDROID IN a person’s home against their will and you’ve got the perfect scenario for murder and mayhem. Irish author Colin O’Sullivan explored that premise in his 2018 sci-fi/noir novel The Dark Manual. A few years later, screenwriter Katie Robbins (The Affair) saw the potential in it for a television series about grief, marital secrets, tech paranoia, female friendship and the Yakuza. SUNNY DAZE Robbins’s idea is now the Apple TV+ show Sunny, a darkly witty near-future remix of O’Sullivan’s book. Both centre on Irish expat in Japan Suzie Sakamoto (Rashida Jones). She’s just lost her husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and young son in a freak plane crash, and is adrift trying to figure out what’s next – not expecting that it might be a murder mystery about…

THE FIRST QUIET PLACE FROM 2018 was a model example of in medias res, a film that dropped us into the middle of an unimaginable dystopia, 471 days after the Earth was invaded by an army of visually impaired ETs. Yet while 2020’s A Quiet Place Part II included an 11-minute pre-title sequence finally depicting that first attack, there’s still much we don’t know about how the world of A Quiet Place came to be. That’s all about to change. By the end of Part II, we were 477 days into the alien occupation. Now, spin-off movie A Quiet Place: Day One rewinds the story to the very beginning, while moving the focus away, for the first time, from the Abbott clan. The result promises to be a markedly different…

The show deals with normal people who get superpowers. Was that what attracted you to the script? ⬤ You’ve got these five people from South London but they’re all from different walks of life. The one thing they have in common are these powers. It’s so grounded and it’s so South London, where I’m from. I was like, “I could see some people doing this.” It makes it accessible. It doesn’t mean thousands of monsters coming down and you have to save the universe. It’s just like, “I hope I get some money by the end of this!” Your character’s the leading hero. He can teleport and see the future, yet he still feels like an authentic person. ⬤ Michael’s a regular guy. He’s not too tough, or a gangster…

RELEASED OUT NOW! U | 104 minutes Director John Krasinski Cast Cailey Fleming, Ryan Reynolds, John Krasinski, Phoebe Waller-Bridge Oh look, yet another movie about a kid losing a parent; why does Hollywood hate them? This film’s grieving sprog is 12-year-old Bea (The Walking Dead’s Cailey Fleming, excellent), who’s still getting over the loss of her mum a few years back – something compounded by the fact that her dad (John Krasinski) now needs heart surgery. While staying in New York with her gran (Fiona Shaw, wonderful), Bea meets Cal (Ryan Reynolds) – who, like her, can see an assortment of weird creatures. They’re IFs (imaginary friends) who linger, useless, long after their children have grown up. Bea and Cal set out to reunite these monsters with their old companions.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 91 minutes Director Renny Harlin Cast Madelaine Petsch, Rachel Shenton, Gabriel Basso, Froy Gutierrez The central premise here is a chilling one: that a group of homicidal lunatics can invade your home with just a desire to kill, based on wholly impersonal motives. The concept was best executed in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, but the Strangers films have made for some solid entries in this subgenre. The 2008 Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman-starring original supplied some decent scares as “Dollface”, “Man in The Mask” and “Pin-Up Girl” tormented the unsuspecting couple. Sequel The Strangers: Prey At Night had its moments too, but with the puzzlingly titled The Strangers: Chapter 1, the dead horse is well and truly being flogged, with a creatively bankrupt cash-grab. A…

RELEASED OUT NOW! PG | 87 minutes Director Christian Ditter Cast Isla Fisher, Greg Kinnear, Ryan Guzman, Easton Rocket Sweda With shades of Back To The Future and Happy Death Day, and a dash of The Parent Trap, time travel comedy The Present is very much standing on the shoulders of giants. Isla Fisher and Greg Kinnear play a couple on the verge of separation – a state of affairs which their kids are keen to avoid at all costs, with the help of a magical grandfather clock (don’t ask). As the rules state that the clock can only turn time back 12 hours (again, don’t ask), the parents’ three children – two teenagers and a mute pre-teen who communicates using a Barack Obama voice app – have to find increasingly…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 92 minutes Directors Anna Halberg, Spenser Cohen Cast Harriet Slater, Jacob Batalon, Avantika, Adain Bradley Tarot can be spooky. Sometimes in a reading you’ll experience moments of insight that feel uncannily accurate or which later prove eerily prescient. Does that mean there’s anything to it? Probably not, but there’s the potential for a genuinely unsettling horror story that exploits that feeling. This, however, is very much not that film. A group of teens rent a mansion in the Catskill Mountains to celebrate one of their number’s birthday, only to discover a mysterious – and needlessly creepy – handpainted tarot deck. Breaking an apparent “unspoken rule” to never use someone else’s cards, the group are then offed one by one in a series of mysterious accidents…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2024 | 18 | Blu-ray Director Quarxx Cast Hugo Dillon, Arben Bajraktaraj, Manon Maindivide Anyone who’s seen a few Quentin Dupieux films might detect similarities in the MO of his countryman Quarxx: the same perverse unpredictability. But while not without mordant humour, this is a darker affair. An anthology film, it opens intriguingly as, in the aftermath of a collision on a mountain road, two men slowly realise they’re dead. We follow Nathan (Hugo Dillon) to an ashy grey hellscape, where he’s doomed to experience the suffering of others through their stories. Lucio Fulci fans will recognise a visual steal from The Beyond – a film which “blew the mind” of the young Quarxx. These further tales are no less bleak, with denial and guilt recurring themes.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2024 | 18 | 94 minutes Director Robert Morgan Cast Aisling Franciosi, Stella Gonet, Tom York, Caoilinn Springall SHUDDER Anyone who’s seen that The Fast Show sketch about stop-motion (“Just a tiny amount…”) may be sceptical about its potential as a dramatic subject, but animator Robert Morgan’s feature-length debut successfully mines the craft for a metaphorical rendering of his love-hate relationship with the process. It follows Ella (Aisling Franciosi), who works assisting her overbearing mother, a renowned animator. After a stroke leaves mum in a coma, Ella strikes out on her own. Egged on by a mysterious little girl (Caoilinn Springall), she shoots a sinister short featuring a monstrous “Ash Man”, using increasingly grotesque materials: first raw meat, then the corpse of a dead fox. You don’t…

RELEASED OUT NOW!  2024 | N/A | Download “Genre-bending” has become so trendy of late, it’s almost a genre itself. New Life starts pretty ordinarily – we’re in comfortable spy thriller territory, albeit the slower, character-led indie flick variety. Then, halfway through, after a low-key plot twist, the film goes full-blast horror. It’s a gear change the movie struggles to make work, and the two sides of the movie don’t mesh well together, proving that two fairly impressive halves don’t necessarily make a successful whole.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2024 | PG-13 | SVOD Director Brad Peyton Cast Jennifer Lopez, Simu Liu, Mark Strong, Gregory James Cohan NETFLIX It’s a mark of just how real an existential threat Artificial Intelligence feels right now that we buy the premise of Brad Peyton’s brash SF actioner from the get-go. And that’s despite the opening scene being a blur of frantically edited infodumps, plunging us into a global state of emergency as mankind’s clever little digital Frankensteins rebel against their fleshy masters. Yes, it’s the same set-up as last year’s The Creator, but direct comparisons are soon dodged as the story heads off-world. A time jump of 28 years finds Jennifer Lopez’s flinty, emotionally stunted tech expert Atlas Shepherd drafted for a military mission to the Andromeda galaxy, hunting…

Busy month, so we’ll stick to the highlights. In ALL OF US STRANGERS (17 June, Blu-ray/DVD) a writer (Andrew Scott) visits his childhood home, only to find his dead parents impossibly living there still, unaged. We said: “Moving, soulful and erotically charged… Like all good ghost stories, has spine-tingling surprises in store.” Bonuses? Two featurettes (six minutes each). Denis Villeneuve returns to Arrakis in DUNE: PART TWO (out now, 4K/Blu-ray/DVD), which sees Paul Atreides learning the ways of the Fremen so he can lead them into battle as their messiah. We said: “A landmark achievement… If David Lean had made a sci-fi film, it’d probably have looked something like this.” Extras: about an hour’s worth of behind-the-scenes featurettes. Another eight bonuses are digital exclusives. Boo! Written by Juno’s Diablo Cody, the…

RELEASED 11 JUNE 336 pages | Hardback/ebook/ Author Stuart Turton Publisher Raven Books Can you reboot a movie that technically never existed in the first place? Three decades after a low-budget indie movie shoot ends in tragedy, Hollywood comes calling: a hot young director wants to use the recently leaked screenplay to finally let people see Horror Movie, and she wants the film’s only surviving cast member to resume his role. But calling the nameless Thin Kid out of the shadows threatens to unleash something truly monstrous… The back-and-forth narrative, which also incorporates sections from the film’s screenplay, makes for an engaging mystery, with more than one nasty surprise along the way. And Paul Tremblay clearly knows his way around horror fandom; the scenes set at a convention have a…

RELEASED 13 JUNE 435 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Alexandra Rowland Publisher Tor If the cancellation of Our Flag Means Death has left you mourning for your queer pirate adventures fix, then step right this way – Running Close To The Wind has female pirates, gay pirates, non-binary pirates and more. It’s also got sea serpents and a very horny main character. Seriously, if you’re not a fan of sex fantasies or penis references, then you might as well move on. They are such fun though. It’s the story of Avra Helvaçi, a former intelligence agent who has stolen the world’s most valuable secret: the method that the Arashti use to keep their ships safe from serpents. Terrified for his life, he has offered to share the treasure with the crew of…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 416 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Helen Comerford Publisher Bloomsbury When The Boys not only exists but airs to huge viewing figures, you may find yourself wondering why we need a book about how joining a society of celebrity superheroes is a bad idea. But then you remember just how rude The Boys is; it’s nice to know that younger folk can read The Love Interest without being subjected to exploding penises. Helen Comerford’s debut is a cheerful adventure in which teenager Jenna Ray is rescued from a fire by a brand new superhero named Blaze. Their world is like ours except that superheroes and villains exist, with all sorts of mutant animals and weird natural disasters. As Jennna is the first person resuced by Blaze, the public and…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Tim Pratt Publisher Angry Robot All Glen Browning is hoping to find on a dating site is someone to have kinky sex with. Instead he unwittingly hooks up with a pansexual, multiverse-hopping spy called Vivy, who only slowly reveals all her secrets to him – usually only when she’s forced to. And the revelations only accelerate when Vivy is assigned a mission in our dimension which involves one of Glen’s exes. The Knife And The Serpent is short, silly and fuelled with a subversive sexual energy. It’s also a thinly disguised series of infodumps organised into the most perfunctory narrative possible, that feels less like a complete, fully-rounded novel, and more like the worldbuilding pilot episode of a teen-targeted sci-fantasy series for…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Marvel Comics Writer/artist Peach Momoko ISSUES 1-3 Have you ever tried to get into X-Men comics but picked the wrong one and been baffled by the millions of characters and multiple ongoing plotlines? If so, then Ultimate X-Men is for you. Written and painted by rising star Peach Momoko, this new ongoing series is an X-Men comic like no other. There are no battling teams of mutants here (hell, the “m” word isn’t even muttered until three issues in) and big name characters like Storm and Wolverine are notable by their absence. Instead, the series follows two young girls. Hisako is a loner, haunted by the death of her friend Tsubasa. Mei is more extroverted, but carrying her own troubled past. When a ghostly figure starts…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Running time 179 minutes Format CD/download Publisher Big Finish AUDIO DRAMA The huge advantage Big Finish has when it comes to Tarrant – the cocky space pilot from the last two TV seasons of Blake’s 7 – is how underwritten he was on screen, with a vague backstory full of contradictions. It’s like Terry Nation created him with a Big Finish box set in mind. This collection features three tales from various points in Tarrant’s timeline: two before he joined the Liberator crew, and one set shortly after. BF has bought in its most reliable scribes to wrangle them: James Goss, Andy Lane and Gary Russell. Steven Pacey returns to play the Solo-inspired rogue, though he’s the only original actor from the show to do so. The…

It can be embarrassing confessing what scared you as a kid. For example, I was terrified by Doctor Who’s Nimon – look, blokes in bull masks tottering about on platform boots are scary when you’re six. But I feel no shame about shivering at the thought of “Dragon’s Domain”. Space: 1999 was often rather po-faced and dull. But this season one episode descends into full-on horror, and has a Lovecraftian abomination at its heart. It centres on Tony Cellini, a never-before-seen character who, five years ago, went on a deep space mission, discovering a graveyard of spaceships. Inside one of them: a hideous, screeching, tentacled monstrosity, capable of hypnotically drawing victims towards it. When the crew of Moonbase Alpha encounter the same ships, light years away, Cellini must confront his…