SFXSeptember 2023的目錄

SMALL BUT PERFECTLY FORMED Brian Bray, email In SFX 367 Robert Dodd asks how they could make 26 episodes per series of Star Trek: Voyager in the 1990s yet only make 10 episodes per series of Discovery in the 2020s – despite it being easier and cheaper to do special effects now. It’s because of a few issues: actor availability, post-production is easier for shorter series, fans are more likely to watch the whole series, cost… and when did a BBC series last 26 episodes, apart from soaps? So you could say that maybe Hollywood has learnt that serialisation lends itself to longer series, but storytelling is best over a shorter period. Also, streaming has led to a shorter episode run as it is easier to binge-watch six to 10…

KNOCK KNOCK! WHO’S THERE? Sorry, we can’t say: spoilers! That’s the question at the heart of new chiller Cobweb. It centres on eight-year-old Peter, who starts to hear unexplained thumps coming from behind his bedroom wall. Rats, his dad suggests – except rats don’t usually whisper… Could it be a ghost? Many years ago, a neighbourhood girl went missing while trick or treating. As the film progresses, Peter’s mother (Cloverfield’s Lizzy Caplan) and father (The Boys’ Homelander, Antony Starr) start to seem increasingly suspicious… We won’t ruin it for you. Let’s just say that the film keeps you guessing, delivering several effective twists. Cobweb represented “a lot of first times” for French director Samuel Bodin: first feature; first time working in English; first time adapting someone else’s work. The script…

Tell us about your protagonist. → Cara is a teenage Chinese American ghost speaker. Her ghost grandmother wants Cara to follow in her footsteps and embrace her ghost-speaking powers, but Cara’s mother, who’s suppressed her powers, wants Cara to mirror her instead. Then Cara stumbles upon Zach, the local golden boy, who insists on being resurrected. What are the rules of ghosts in this particular world? → Only Class A, the most powerful tier, can touch the living. (Except for Halloween, when all spirits become strong enough to reach into your chest and pull out your beating heart.) Obviously you can’t touch ghosts in return – except for Zach… How long did the novel take to write? → I started it in 2013, so this summer will actually be the…

THIS INTERVIEW WAS CONDUCTED PRIOR TO SAG-AFTRA STRIKE ACTION THE BABYLON PROJECT WAS A dream given form. A five-year form, to be precise, as Babylon 5 creator J Michael Straczynski mapped out an epic story of the eponymous five-mile space station, writing 92 of its 110 episodes himself. The show may have been a contemporary of Jean-Luc Picard, Benjamin Sisko and Kathryn Janeway’s adventures on the final frontier, but it took an altogether less idealistic view of humanity’s future – light years from the cosiness of the Federation, Earth found itself under the control of a dictator for much of B5’s run, while the cast of alien races tended to spend more time squabbling than getting along. It also broke the mould with its famous five-year plan as Straczynski (aka…

THIS INTERVIEW WAS CONDUCTED PRIOR TO SAG-AFTRA STRIKE ACTION OF THE 10 BEST-selling authors of all time, some names are obvious – William Shakespeare tops the chart, with sales of over (minimum estimate) two billion, and JK Rowling, Agatha Christie, Barbara Cartland and Enid Blyton are all in there. Then there’s Eiichiro Oda. With estimated sales of around half a billion (just think about that for a second), the Japanese author/artist has outsold Dr Seuss, Tom Clancy and Stephen King. Not bad for a writer who’s not yet 50 and who only penned his most successful creation One Piece (the biggest selling manga title of all time) in 1997. If you’re one of the 500 million people who’ve bought one of the 105 collected volumes of One Piece (or indeed…

Moiraine opens the season really pushing al’Lan’s buttons! It’s uncharted territory for him, and for me, as an actor. It’s a strange thing sometimes when I have to show big emotion. When I do, I’m almost not used to hearing those levels of volume come from myself, as him. I have to play with it a bit to find where it lives. But I’m excited when I see where they’re going. What’s his solo journey about? I think this is good for him. This is something he needs to go through to probably prepare himself to be in a “big boy” relationship at some point. Also, to be a more well-rounded human being. I think it’s good that he’s leaning on his fellow Warders and asking questions.…

How is Aes Sedai training going for the friends? Nynaeve and Egwene are having very different experiences at the White Tower. Nynaeve is succeeding and excelling, and is gaining all of the attention of everyone. Egwene has sort of become invisible in the process. There’s been this communication breakdown and a fracture in their relationship. What’s her journey to come? I think being an idealist and an optimist, that comes crashing down on her. She gets a reality check of how the world works, how the Aes Sedai and the different Ajahs work. And even the relationships between the sisters within certain Ajahs is very complicated.…

“Whether there were ghosts or whether it was people’s imagination, I do think that you could feel the history. When you were alone in the room – these were old stone rooms, and some of them you could just feel the weight of the building, you could feel the weight of history. I never experienced anything – other people have had experiences so I don’t want to steal their thunder about their spooky stories. But I definitely feel like you could feel that many people walked those halls, you could feel that many people have lived and died in there.”…

1953 THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT(TV) The name was everything. Commissioned to write a new Saturday night serial, Nigel Kneale nearly christened his hero Professor Charlton – but that was too mundane for the unsettling tale he had in mind. Scouring the London telephone directory the BBC staff writer pounced on Quatermass. The surname belonged to an East End fruit seller, but it held a distinct magic: three syllables that suggested units of scientific measurement (quarter, mass) but in combination had a queasy, unknowable power, hinting at unearthly biologies. Fitting for a rational hero confronting alien forces – and perfect for a TV drama set to bring a shudder of the uncanny to post-war Britain. With one curious, inexplicable word, Quatermass defined itself. The world was still four years away from the…

▶ RELEASED 1 SEPTEMBER 15 | 88 minutes ▶ Director Samuel Bodin ▶ Cast Lizzy Caplan, Woody Norman, Cleopatra Coleman, Antony Starr → With no horror since 2021’s Malignant has it been so vital to go in spoiler-free. Whoever cut the trailer for Cobweb understood that, but the poster designers didn’t get the memo – don’t so much as glance at it. Trading in archetypal childhood fears – bumps in the night, the possibility that your parents are not what they seem – it centres on Peter (Woody Norman), a quiet loner who, upon knocking on his bedroom wall, hears something knocking back. Soon a voice is whispering advice to him on how to deal with the school bullies. With its upside-down turns, towering shadows and back garden full of rotting…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 107 minutes ▶ Director Patrick Wilson ▶ Cast Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Ty Simpkins, Lin Shaye → It’s not often that fifth entries in horror franchises deliver more than tired repetition looking to revisit old glories. Happily, there’s a pleasant surprise lurking within this latest Insidious outing. Adding director to his CV, star Patrick Wilson acquits himself honourably here, shaking off early over-artfulness for a solid legacy sequel that (five years on from the last film) digs deeper into the mythology. It’s 10 years since we saw the Lambert family, and they’ve been splintered by divorce and death. Sullen Dalton (Ty Simpkins) is headed to college, where the creepy realm known as “the Further” is about to haunt him once more. Meanwhile father Josh…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! U | 76 minutes → There’s no way to call a film “adequate’” without sounding harsh, but sometimes that’s genuinely all you can say. This Norwegian animated film is the perfectly adequate tale of a little girl who isn’t sure she has enough talent to take over the title of Super Lion from her superhero dad. He doubts her; she doubts herself; her kickass granny steps in to help. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before in The Incredibles (even the animation style) and kids will enjoy it. Adequate, then – that’s not an insult.…

▶ UK/US Netflix, streaming now ▶ Showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich ▶ Cast Henry Cavill, Anya Chalotra, Freya Allan, Joey Batey EPISODES 3.06-3.08 Henry Cavill’s Geralt of Rivia grunts off into the sunset, and it’s less with a bang than a whimper. Anyone hoping for The Witcher’s leading man to get a worthy send-off should prepare for disappointment, as season three’s anticlimactic second volume leaves you wondering why Netflix decided it was worth splitting the run in two. These last three episodes are spectacularly front-loaded, kicking off with the epic scrap teased by Volume One’s quasi-cliffhanger. The resulting CG fest is more Battle of Hogwarts than Battle of the Bastards, however, and barely hangs together as a piece of action. From there, things get overly talky, particularly in a penultimate episode that…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2023 | TBC | SVOD ▶ Director Boris Kunz ▶ Cast Kostja Ullmann, Corinna Kirchhoff, Marlene Tanczik, Iris Berben NETFLIX In this ironically titled German film, time is money. Thanks to the AEON corporation’s “time donation” process, you can give years of your life to a suitable genetic match, for hard cash. How exactly? Well… er… look, it’s just a thing, okay? It’s a system that’s working well for cog-in-the-machine donation manager Max (Kostja Ullmann) – until his apartment burns down, the insurers won’t pay out, and his wife is left with a debt worth 38 years. As you’ve probably guessed, the story serves as a metaphor for the exploitation and commodification of the poor by the rich, though as Max and the now aged Elena…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2023 | 15 | SVOD ▶ Director Juel Taylor ▶ Cast John Boyega, Teyonah Parris, Jamie Foxx, Kiefer Sutherland NETFLIX Juel Taylor’s audacious debut may utilise nightmarish futuristic technology to create clones, conspiracies and mind-control but it has its roots firmly in the ’70s high period of blaxploitation. The central trio of John Boyega, Teyonah Parris and Jamie Foxx play blaxploitation archetypes, as a drug dealer, a sassy sex worker and a pimp respectively, subverting the most insidious stereotypes about the black community and satirising America’s preoccupation with villainising and policing it. As with the best satire (and the best sci-fi), the messaging comes second to the action, however; They Cloned Tyrone is first and foremost a fun, pulpy rollercoaster ride. It doesn’t hold its cards…

▶ RELEASED 28 AUGUST 2023 | 15 | Download → Laurence Vannicelli’s debut feature is couples therapy as psychological thriller: inheriting the house of his dead mother, emotionally wounded Emmett finds her capricious, overbearing soul seemingly reborn in his fiancée, Anya. It can feel like an extended drama class session but there’s an effectively creepy, low-lit ambience, where simple objects are charged with memory and meaning. And possessed by the drawling, chain-smoking spirit, Teen Wolf’s Holland Roden brilliantly channels another generation.…

▶ RELEASED 28 AUGUST 2023 | 15 | Download → Isn’t it weird how fast Covid-19 paranoia stories have dated? In one of this boneheaded meta-slasher’s narratives, masked-up wannabes move into a reality TV house to be bossed around by Paris Hilton; in the other, a cam girl goes to a remote house in the woods to be stalked by dudes, with only sheriff Pamela Anderson to save her. There’s not a single convincing character, or a single original idea, and the ending’s so obnoxious you’ll begrudge every minute you spent watching it.…

EXTRA ▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1990 | 15 | Blu-ray ▶ Director Stephen Tung Wei ▶ Cast Lam Ching-ying, Wilson Lam, Michael Miu, Wong Mei-way BLU-RAY DEBUT What do you get if you take the vampire out of Mr Vampire? Er, Mr. And this film. It shares a leading man with the 1985 Hong Kong horror-comedy hit, and a supernatural threat, but the setting is contemporary rather than historical (cheaper, y’see). Lam Ching-ying plays Feng, a retired cop with all the skills of a Taoist monk, who helps out when the Hong Kong police discover that someone is using recently revived corpses to smuggle drugs. The plotting is paper-thin, and the horny idiocy of the younger officers with whom the brusque Feng teams up soon starts to grate. On the plus…

Though it’s set in the 14th century, anime musical INU-OH (out now, Blu-ray/DVD) features modern rock numbers with electric guitars. It centres on a blind travelling musician who teams up with a deformed man, subject of a curse which can be broken when he sings and dances. We said: “Visually delightful, but distinctly hollow… let down by pedestrian plotting and weak musical numbers.” The Collector’s Edition includes art cards, a 40-page artbook and an A3 poster. If you weren’t sufficiently flush to buy the Bob Clark Horror Collection box set, all three films are now out separately. Our pick: 1974’s DEATHDREAM (out now, Blu-ray). This “The Monkey’s Paw”-esque take on zombies sees a young soldier returning home from Vietnam strangely altered… We said: “Clark’s portrait of a fractured family is…

▶ RELEASED 15 AUGUST 256 pages | Hardback/paperback/ebook ▶ Author Ramsey Campbell ▶ Publisher Flame Tree Press → Joe Hunter’s dying granddad telling him “We’re all just cocoons for the dead” is about as much exposition as you’re going to get in horror grandmaster Ramsey Campbell’s latest. Internal plot logic and The Lonely Lands are like strangers from different planes of reality. Which fits the ethereal, existential tone of the book perfectly. For curiosity shop owner Joe, the veil between this life and the next is particularly thin. His dreams and recollections of departed loved ones – first his grandad, then his wife, Olivia – affect their afterlives in ways that can be reassuring or horrifying. And the last thing he wants is for his granddad and Olivia to meet…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 412 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Genevieve Gornichec ▶ Publisher Titan Books → Norse mythology has been big business for a while now, with everyone from Marvel to Neil Gaiman to Joanne Harris putting their own spin on Viking stories. There’s more to the sagas than the gods, though, and this reimagining of Norse royals, with a feminist spin, is an intriguing introduction to tales many of us will be less familiar with. The Weaver And The Witch Queen retells the story of Gunnhild, mother of kings, seen here first as a young child abused by her mother and finding solace in her friendship with two sisters, Oddny and Signy, before running away from home to train as a witch. Twelve years later, the sisters’ farm…

▶ RELEASED 15 AUGUST 336 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author James Kennedy ▶ Publisher Quirk Books → Out in the wide open spaces of the American Midwest, there should be room to run free. But that’s not the experience of the high school-age narrator of James Kennedy’s horror novel. As tornadoes moving with terrible purpose and, seemingly, murderous intent surround her hometown, she begins to realise she is at the centre of barely incomprehensible events. As too is the tornado killer, an enigmatic teen tasked with protecting the town, to whom she finds herself drawn. Should she resist this attraction, or is the connection between the two the key to escaping whatever fate the tornadoes and/or her increasingly deranged fellow townspeople have in mind? Small-town outsiders undergoing trying events aren’t…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ 86 minutes | Vinyl ▶ Label Varèse Sarabande/Craft Recordings SOUNDTRACK Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 sci-fi war movie had a mixed reception, many missing the satirical intent behind its OTT violence and skewering of military propaganda. Its bombastic aesthetic was aided by Basil Poledouris’s score, released in full here as a double LP (previously the soundtrack was heavily cut-down). It’s a gift for completists, but boy does it bang on… This is music to invade countries by: loud, puffed up, jingoistic and more than a little ridiculous. There are echoes of one of Verhoeven’s other collaborators, Jerry Goldsmith, as well as endless martial drum rolls and brass fanfares. In other words, it’s the perfect score for Starship Troopers. That doesn’t make it an engaging listen, however. It’s…

The long wait for the second instalment of Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi masterpiece could be longer than expected, with industry periodical Variety reporting that Warner Bros may be contemplating a delayed release for Dune: Part Two in 2024. Until then, or confirmation of schedule changes, the studio has released a selection of first-look images from the movie, alongside new trailers. Dune: Part Two is currently due in cinemas from 3 November. SCI-FACT! Production has now begun on a new version of the prequel series Dune: The Sisterhood.…

WITHIN THE CANON of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has greenlit plenty of outside-the-box creations like Marvel One-Shots (Agent Carter, Item 47), Marvel Studios Special Presentations (Werewolf By Night), in-world books (forthcoming Ant-Man memoir Look Out For The Little Guy!) and theme park rides. Now comes an official musical. Rogers: The Musical is playing exclusively, just for the summer, at the Hyperion Theatre in Disney California Adventure Park in Anaheim, California. This live, 30-minute, original musical is all about the life of the MCU’s version of Captain America/Steve Rogers, told through eight songs that chart his life to the aged version seen at the end of Avengers: Endgame. No, it’s not poking fun. Rather, it’s a very earnest throwback, weirdly in keeping with the upstanding, old-school…

THIS INTERVIEW WAS CONDUCTED PRIOR TO SAG-AFTRA STRIKE ACTION WHEN ÁNGEL MANUEL SOTO MET XOLO Maridueña at Sundance Film Festival, something happened. The director was promoting his impressive coming-of-age story Charm City Kings when his producer introduced him to Cobra Kai’s spritely Maridueña. “I saw a really nice, relatable kid,” Soto tells SFX. “He had moves, but he also had charisma. The way he expressed himself was very mature, but then you see him laughing and making jokes, and he’s a kid who definitely lives in the present.” What Soto didn’t realise was that he had been bitten by the Maridueña bug. A year later, the filmmaker was invited by Warner Bros to discuss bringing DC stalwart Blue Beetle to cinemas, and as Soto started reading the superhero’s many comics,…

ANUN IN HIDING, A DEMON on the run, a retired playboy at a boarding school – throw in some references to a women’s prison drama, some spuds and a Sylvester Stallone blockbuster and you’ve got director Michael Chaves’s latest chapter in the Conjuring Universe, The Nun II. The film, shot in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille in the south of France, sets Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) and Maurice, aka Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet) from 2018’s The Nun, on a “collision course” with titular nastiness Valak, whom they’ll have to face for a second time. But Sister Irene isn’t coming out all guns blazing. “After her big adventure in the first movie, she’s gone into hiding, she’s living this very anonymous life in a convent in Italy,” Chaves explains. “I really liked that idea,…

EW ZEALAND-BASED PRODUCTION DESIGNER NICK BASSETT had a head start when he was hired to work on Evil Dead Rise: a veteran of TV show Ash Vs Evil Dead, he was well-versed in Sam Raimi’s universe. With the film centred on the apartment of Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), a mother who becomes possessed and menaces her children, two elements came to the fore in his initial discussions with director Lee Cronin: claustrophobia and family. “His desire to create a level of isolation and claustrophobia was always a part of the design brief,” Bassett tells SFX. “What was really at the heart of it is that this is different because whereas most Evil Dead films would go to the cabin, and it would be this doomed place, this was going to come…

The impact of The Quatermass Experiment was felt immediately. When Kneale denied Hammer the rights to a quickie sequel, the studio essentially created its own knock-off in 1956’s X The Unknown, pitting Dr Adam Royston of the Atomic Energy Establishment against a primordial subterranean force. 1965’s Invasion – storylined by future Doctor Who writer Robert Holmes – presented an alien infiltration that echoed Quatermass II. It’s Who that truly mined Quatermass for ideas: a malevolent fall of meteorites in “Spearhead From Space”; possessed astronauts in “The Ambassadors Of Death”; extraterrestrial influence on mankind’s superstitions in “The Daemons”; an ancient skull in “Image Of The Fendahl”. The entire UNIT set-up in the Jon Pertwee era feels inspired by the military presence in Quatermass And The Pit, while some playful dialogue in…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 12A | 114 minutes ▶ Director Greta Gerwig ▶ Cast Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Will Ferrell, Ncuti Gatwa → Barbie is having a crisis. That’s a problem, because Barbie doesn’t have crises. In fact, she doesn’t have problems either, because she lives a perfect life, in a perfect world – Barbieland, to be precise. And that’s where things become SFX-relevant… Because Barbie – the original version, played by Margot Robbie – is having thoughts about death, she has to cross over into the real world to put things right with the girl who owns her. But this journey – on which she’s accompanied by Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling) – causes things to unravel further still when she realises that Barbies haven’t quite empowered women as she…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 120 minutes ▶ Director Naoyoshi Shiotani ▶ Cast Kana Hanazawa, Tomokazu Seki, Noriko Hidaka, Takako Honda → Newbies are not encouraged. This anime film (screening in both dubbed and subtitled versions), is part of the Psycho-Pass franchise, set in an authoritarian Japan where merciless judgements are doled out by the transhuman Sibyl System. You’ll be okay if you’ve seen the first TV series from 2012. The film’s story fits before the Psycho-Pass 3 series, and involves a big change to the franchise’s status quo. The enemy this time is a rogue paramilitary unit, seeking documents that could alter Japan’s future. The deceptively petite commander Akane leads her forces against the threat, but her feelings are complicated by the return of her former ally, the…

▶ RELEASED 1 SEPTEMBER 15 | 102 minutes → Half an hour into this end-of-the-world horror-comedy, one clown attempts to ask another if she’s familiar with Stephen King’s IT. An Abbot and Costello-esque misunderstanding ensues… and that’s probably the funniest joke in this whole farce. Odd thing to say re: a film about clowns, but it should’ve been played straighter. Structurally it’s perfect: all the plot threads tie up. But the jokes are so awful they render it almost unwatchable.…

UK/US Netflix, streaming now ▶ Creator Malenga Mulendema ▶ Cast Zowa Ngira, Namisa Mdalose, Kimani Arthur, Nancy Sekhokoane EPISODES 1.01-1.08 South African studio Triggerfish bring us this hyper-kinetic, vibrant cartoon, which has the honour of being the first animated series produced for Netflix in Africa. The titular Supa Team 4 are four schoolgirls in Lusaka, Zambia, recruited by the elderly Mama K (Pamela Nomvete) to fight evil and keep their city safe. Given superpowers ranging from the ability to powerfully kick a football to majorette staff skills, the girls are an eclectic mix with issues of their own – one, hilariously, is always hungry and will do anything for a bun. The show makes full use of Zambian dialects and so subtitles may be required for older audiences, although younger ones…

EXTRA ▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2004 | 15 | Blu-ray ▶ Director Jeff Lieberman ▶ Cast Alexander Brickel, Katheryn Winnick, Joshua Annex BLU-RAY DEBUT Remember the moral panic about videogames? Satan’s Little Helper makes a strong case for not letting kids play unsupervised. Nerdy nine-year-old Douglas spends so much time playing the titular game – a platformer where the player earns points by helping Satan commit sins – that when an actual serial killer shows up in a Halloween Devil costume, he gleefully helps him out. Writer/director Jeff Lieberman made his name in the ’70s with Squirm and Blue Sunshine, so it’s no surprise this is a pretty spiteful, grimy piece of work. The practical effects are cheap but stomach-churning, while the silent figure in the Satan mask is genuinely unnerving;…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | TBC | Download → Filmed/set in South Africa, this frisky folk horror is unmistakeable evidence that Ari Aster made a big splash in the rainbow nation. Sticking Hereditary and Midsommar into a blender, then taking that blender on a bender, it follows a gang of diverse, party-happy teens who go on a coastal holiday without reading the Tripadvisor reviews mentioning histrionic cult murder. Pretty, but predictable and shallow, it frequently feels more like a music video than a movie.…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2023 | 15 | SVOD ▶ Directors Álex Pastor, David Pastor ▶ Cast Mario Casas, Georgina Campbell, Diego Calva, Naila Schuberth NETFLIX Given its staggering popularity (89 million views in the first four weeks), it’s no wonder Netflix greenlit a follow-up to Bird Box – the 2018 film where people must go about blindfold outside, or be driven to suicide by the sight of invisible creatures. This Spanish-made sequel expands the universe in some surprising ways. The biggest twist (revealed 14 minutes in) is to make the protagonist one of those who, having seen the mysterious beings, is driven to force others to do so – in the belief he’s saving their souls. This makes for a different type of suspense: what will this saboteur do…

EXTRA ▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | 15 | Blu-ray ▶ Director Lucile Hadžihalilovic' ▶ Cast Paul Hilton, Alex Lawther, Romaine Hemelaers, Romola Garai → “David Lynch if he had a dentistry fixation” is one way to nutshell this gloomy, abstruse cinematic nightmare, and for many it will have a similar effect to going under the gas. Based on a 2019 novella by sculptor/performance artist/author Brian Catling, it centres on a man paid to act as guardian for a cloistered young girl. Their bizarre daily routine sees her fitted with ice dentures made from freezing saliva, collected using an apparatus strapped to her face. The purpose of the protagonist’s employment is just one thing left bewilderingly unclear in a film purposefully made to evoke the logic of a dream. If…

▶ RELEASED 17 AUGUST 432 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Lauren Beukes ▶ Publisher Michael Joseph → The multiverse is a potent storytelling device, and not just because you can do a big shocking main character death while still bringing the actor back. It lets an author show us characters from different angles, and it sucks readers and viewers into the emotional heart of a story with that tantalising question to which we can all relate: “What if?” After all, who doesn’t wish they could know what would’ve happened if, at a key point in their life, they’d made a different choice? Who wouldn’t want to speak to a departed loved one again, if they got the chance? It’s this last temptation that proves impossible to resist for Bridge (short…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 810 pages | Hardback/ebook ▶ Author John Ajvide Lindqvist ▶ Publisher riverrun → John Ajvide Lindqvist’s latest novel explores the fragile threads that hold society together. The story takes place in the town of Norrtälje, which feels like a Swedish counterpart to the New England locations found in many of Stephen King’s books. The two writers share a fondness for creating rich portraits of everyday life in small communities, which are disrupted by the intrusion of the unnatural or fantastic. The Kindness is built around a core cast of six residents. Max and Johan are old school classmates from opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum, Marko and Maria are the children of Bosnian refugees, and Anna and Siw are bonded by their status as outsiders. In…

▶ RELEASED 24 AUGUST 480 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Authors Helen MacDonald, Sin Blaché ▶ Publisher Jonathan Cape → Helen MacDonald had a bestselling hit with H Is For Hawk, her moving study of nature and grief. She makes the unexpected shift to genre fiction with this SF thriller, co-written with short fiction author Sin Blaché. When an American diner materialises from nowhere in a field in England, a pair of agents are despatched to investigate. Sunil Rao is able to instantly determine the truth of things (there are shades of Natasha Lyonne in Poker Face here), but is an emotional time bomb, while his comrade Adam Rubenstein is a lethal operative with a troubled past. They soon uncover a phenomenon that turns nostalgia into a deadly weapon. Prophet is…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 528 pages | Hardback/ebook ▶ Author Gabriela Romero Lacruz ▶ Publisher Daphne Press → Two women search for belonging and self-worth in the first volume of new series The Warring Gods. Gabriela Romero Lacruz crafts a complicated world, home to three races – humans, valcos and nozariels – plus competing religions and a complicated history of colonisation and war. Reina is a nozariel, despised by the other races, and longing for acceptance from her grandmother – a powerful witch called Dona Ursulina. The second protagonist is the half-valco Eva, dreaming of liberation from the human family that’s ashamed of her mixed blood. They become entangled in a plot to tap into the power of banished god Rahmagut, whose return would plunge the world into chaos. With…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 240 pages | Paperback/ebook ▶ Author David Connor ▶ Publisher Melville House → Our brains are weird little dudes. They account for 2% of our body weight, but run more or less everything – behaviour, movement, emotions, intelligence – and there’s still so much left to learn about them. We don’t understand why the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body (or why the right controls the left), and a recent series of ambitious experiments concluded that none of the major scientific theories can explain how consciousness works. Fertile territory for SF stories, right? In theory. Author David Connor certainly has the credentials – he works in a neuroscience lab – but his debut effort is so elliptical that it disappears…

▶ RELEASED 17 AUGUST ▶ Publisher Faber & Faber ▶ Writer/artist Emily Carroll GRAPHIC NOVEL The ghosts of past relationships have a way of haunting the present – quite literally, in Emily Carroll’s gorgeous, doomy new graphic novel. Abby lives with her husband David and his daughter from a previous marriage, Crystal, in a cottage by a lake. She’s happy, probably, even if it sometimes feels like her husband talks at her more than to her. Sure, she still doesn’t really know Crystal, and there’s a big question mark hanging over how exactly her mother Sheila died, but it’ll all work out, as long as she ignores the apparition that’s started following her around… Although the initial set-up of A Guest In The House may seem like a departure from Carroll’s…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Publisher Marvel Comics ▶ Editor Devin Lewis ▶ Artists Various ISSUES 1-5 After the massive success of the Spider-Verse in both comics and movies, it’s no surprise that Spidey villain-turned-antihero Venom is also on the multiversal bandwagon. The Venomverse actually first cropped up in 2017, and now Marvel are warming up to an epic “Death Of Venomverse” event with this anthology miniseries. The basic set-up is that all the alternate versions of Venom are being systematically murdered by evil symbiote Carnage, and a small army of remaining Venoms is being recruited from across the multiverse to fight back. Each instalment of this five-issue miniseries features three separate tales, all provided by different creative teams, most of which showcase wildly different takes on the character. These stories…

THIS INTERVIEW WAS CONDUCTED PRIOR TO SAG-AFTRA STRIKE ACTION TWO YEARS AGO, READERS of Robert Jordan’s beloved high fantasy series The Wheel Of Time were handed a gift that was 30 years in the making. Prime Video bestowed upon them a lavish adaptation of book one, 1990’s The Eye Of The World, and cast Rosamund Pike as the embodiment of the intense magic wielder of the Aes Sedai, Moiraine Damodred. In the sweeping first season, Moiraine travels to a remote village in search of a young channeller who might be the Dragon Reborn, a reincarnation of the champion of the Light, prophesied to either end the world or save it. She collects five young potential candidates in hopes of discovering who it is, and trains them to help her battle…

“I think that this does get darker. Even audiences have said this, when we screened it. It is definitely more violent than what they expected from a Conjuring movie. It’s always a delicate balance. It’s definitely scary, it’s 100% delivered on that. Just as horror audiences have developed the appetite for horror, the appetite for violence has started to increase, and so there are some violent elements in this. “We’ve had to throttle that throughout a series of test screenings because sometimes we will want more, but then you can tell there is a limit to that and I think that we’ve dialled in something. I think we’ve hit the right balance with the cut that we have.”…

WHEN SFX JOINS JANET Fielding for a natter, she’s on a break from recording a Doctor Who audio play for Big Finish. But don’t expect her to divulge anything about the plot. “I could tell you, but I think I’d have to kill you!” she laughs. However, she can reveal that “It’s a fun story. It’s more episodes than usual. And as per usual it’s a great cast.” Secrecy is nothing new for Fielding. NDAs accompany virtually every Doctor Who job she lands, whether it’s a documentary, commentary or audiobook. However, no project in recent years has been on quite the same scale as her return to the television series. A few white lies were told to ensure that the news didn’t leak. “I had to,” she stresses. “People all…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! PG | 100 minutes ▶ Director Jeff Rowe ▶ Cast Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown Jr, Nicolas Cantu, Brady Noon → Between the dudes-in-rubber-suits monstrosities of the ’90s, 2007’s all-animated feature and the Michael Bay CG-athons from the 2010s, the heroes in a half-shell dreamed up by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird back in the ’80s have had as many big-screen reboots as Spider-Man. Yet there’s always room for another if it’s as playfully irreverent as Mutant Mayhem, conceived by director Jeff Rowe (The Mitchells Vs The Machines) as an artfully scrappy, deliberately imperfect adventure channelling the energy of a daydreaming adolescent’s whimsical doodlings. Placing the emphasis squarely on the teenage section of the TMNT initialism, Rowe and his four co-writers (which include producers Seth Rogen and…

▶ RELEASED 25 AUGUST 15 | 97 minutes ▶ Director Tim Story ▶ Cast Dewayne Perkins, Antoinette Robertson, X Mayo, Melvin Gregg → Making a horror-comedy that’s actually scary and funny is no mean feat, but The Blackening succeeds at both tasks, while also creating a nuanced and highly intelligent satire of the African-American experience. The premise is familiar: a group of friends reunite in an isolated cabin in the woods, only to find themselves hunted by a sadistic murderer. But despite such well-worn territory, the film proves to be a raucous and refreshing rollercoaster, using the blackness of its cast to skewer racial and horror archetypes. To make matters worse, there are plenty of unresolved tensions within the group, particularly between best friends Lisa (Antoinette Robertson) and Dewayne (Dewayne…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! PG | 99 minutes ▶ Directors Oleh Malamuzh, Oleksandra Ruban ▶ Cast Laurie Hymes, Eddy Lee, Sarah Natochenny, Tom Wayland → There’s a strong whiff of Princess Mononoke about this Ukrainian fairy tale, although it details the tensions between humans and forest spirits without any of Studio Ghibli’s inventiveness or haunting imagery. It’s still pretty, though, with a pleasing animation style – all rather undermined by the teeth-grindingly earnest American dub (a Ukrainian language version will also be in cinemas). We open with a 2D retelling of an ancient encounter between humans and forest spirits that resulted in carnage. Cut to now, and human Lucas (Eddy Lee) is forced into the forest to find a plant that gives eternal youth. After a misunderstanding with some bison (hey…

UK/US Disney+, streaming now ▶ Director Kyle Bradstreet ▶ Cast Samuel L Jackson, Olivia Colman, Emilia Clarke, Ben Mendelsohn EPISODES 1.01-1.06 Nick Fury finally nabs a headlining gig in a series that keeps superheroes very much in the margins. Secret Invasion is the closest that Disney’s MCU has come to creating a gritty, urban conspiracy thriller, with a tone nearer to those old Netflix Marvel shows. Which is remarkable considering that the bad guys are shapeshifting green aliens. The series continues a plot that began in Captain Marvel, when a group of Skrulls fleeing a war with the Kree became secret refugees on Earth, with Nick Fury as their human go-between. Being able to take human form obviously made hiding their presence easier, but their shapeshifting powers, we learn, also had…

▶ RELEASED 21 AUGUST/14 AUGUST 1973-1994, 1976-1994 | PG | Blu-ray ▶ Producers Harve Bennett, Kenneth Johnson ▶ Cast Lee Majors, Lindsay Wagner, Richard Anderson, Martin E Brooks BLU-RAY DEBUT Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers, technologically-enhanced icons of ’70s TV, earn another upgrade with a pair of comprehensive Blu-ray box sets. Better, stronger, faster? Well, better, longer, sharper, at least. The Six Million Dollar Man takes a while to find its groove. The original TV movie retains some of the cynical, Watergate-era edge of Martin Caidin’s Cyborg, the novel that launched the whole bionic universe. Two more feature-length instalments attempt to turn our rebuilt hero into a cyborg Bond, complete with tux and title song – there’s even a guest shot by Britt Ekland, pre-empting her turn in The Man With…

EXTRA ▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1967 | 15 | Blu-ray ▶ Director Harald Reinl ▶ Cast Christopher Lee, Karin Dor, Lex Barker, Carl Lange BLU-RAY DEBUT While Hammer phonied up a blood-spattered Europe in the home counties, this German horror is the real deal, shot in the Bavarian town stalked by the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. That fairy tale feel suits a lively, lurid adventure, loosely inspired by “The Pit And The Pendulum”. Director Harald Reinl creates some haunting imagery – like mist-shrouded trees draped with severed limbs – but at heart this is a cliffhanger serial, all trapdoors and perils, from vulture-filled catacombs to pits of snakes. It’s fairground plotting, moving you through the funhouse. Christopher Lee, looking like a ghoulish hybrid of Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster,…

▶ RELEASED 16 AUGUST 2023 | 15 | SVOD ▶ Director Spencer Brown ▶ Cast Georgina Campbell, Eamon Farren, Mark Rowley, Amara Karan NETFLIX Our collective anxiety about AI lends a timely chill to this debut thriller from comedian turned filmmaker Spencer Brown. It’s essentially a tech-enabled cuckoo-in-the-nest tale. The eponymous TIM – a prototype Technologically Integrated Manservant – is assigned to cyber-developer Abi and her husband Paul. At first simply an uncanny, vaguely irritating presence in their home, TIM’s creeping malevolence deepens the cracks in their relationship before threatening their very lives. This is, for the most part, a provocative, engagingly played modern nightmare, with a clear touch of Black Mirror – even if it lacks Charlie Brooker’s satirical bite. Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell is a sympathetic lead, while Eamon Farren…

▶ RELEASED 14 AUGUST 2022 | 15 | Download → The Massachusetts Fall River axe murders of 1892 are the jumping-off point for this nicely shot but dreary supernatural thriller. Odessa A’zion impresses as Tara, a young descendant of the infamous Lizzie Borden. Schizophrenia seems to run in the family and Tara is haunted by brutal fantasies – but will she succumb to them? The film meanders along slowly and you’ll see the big reveal coming a mile off, but at least a comically daft final scene elicits a hearty chuckle.…

EXTRA ▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2019 | 18 | Blu-ray ▶ Director Alejandro Fadel ▶ Cast Víctor López, Esteban Bigliardi, Tania Casciani, Stéphane Rideau → This cryptic Argentine monster movie is a visual masterclass with vibes to spare, but its slow-burn weirdness never quite resolves into anything substantial. Someone is decapitating people in a remote part of the Andes. Police officer Cruz (Víctor López) investigates, but his judgement is compromised by the fact that he’s having an affair with the chief suspect’s wife. After much standing around muttering gnomic dialogue, the investigation leads Cruz and his colleagues into an encounter with something terrible. The creature effects are effectively – and grotesquely – realised and the whole film is shot with real flair, but what Fadel is trying to say remains…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 384 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Olivie Blake ▶ Publisher Tor Books → A vampire, a ghost, a reaper, a demon and an angel walk into a casino, and the bartender says… no, wait, sorry, there’s no punchline. Instead, Olivie Blake’s supernatural creatures get to gamble at the tables of Death himself, playing an impossible game in order to solve a murder mystery, unravel a multigenerational death curse, and, ultimately, get a little closer to figuring out their own places in the universe. If it sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. And that’s not even the half of it. There are at least three star-crossed love stories in there, as well as multiple planes of reality and four characters with the same name. The…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 384 pages | Hardback/ebook ▶ Author Brandon Sanderson ▶ Publisher Gollancz → Brandon Sanderson tries his hand at Terry Pratchett-style comedic fantasy here, but doesn’t quite master the tone. It begins with protagonist Johnny waking up in a field with no memory of who he is or how he got there – a conceit that allows hero and reader to discover how this world works together. As Johnny gradually realises, he hails from a technologically advanced civilisation but finds himself in a dimension approximating the Middle Ages. Plus he’s landed in a world where it seems the Norse gods and magic are real. Along the way, there’s a villain called Ulric to defeat, a Viking invasion to repel and a beautiful girl to romance. Tonally, it…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 384 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Chloe Gong ▶ Publisher Hodder & Stoughton → You might already know Chloe Gong from her YA bestseller These Violent Delights and its assorted sequels and spin-offs. Immortal Longings is being touted as her first adult fantasy novel, but one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sex scene and some swearing aside, it’s hard to tell the difference. Every year in the twin cities of San-Er, desperate citizens take part in a deadly game. It’s pretty much your standard dystopian gladiatorial battle, with a couple of twists: one is that it’s played on the streets, among hapless civilians just going about their lives, and the other is that the players are able to swap bodies, jumping their “qi” from one vessel to another. This battle…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 304 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Nat Segaloff ▶ Publisher Citadel Press → There are surely few people better qualified to pen a book marking 50 years of The Exorcist than Nat Segaloff. Having first written about it in his 1990 biography of William Peter Blatty, he can draw on interviews with the author of the original novel (and others) stretching back to the ’80s – supplemented by fresh ones with the likes of Ellen Burstyn and first AD Terence Donnelly. Covering all the films and the 2016 TV series (there’s even a Q&A with David Gordon Green, in anticipation of The Exorcist: Believer), it has some recurring themes: the metaphysical concerns of the original film; whether or not The Exorcist is “a horror film”; writers’…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Publisher Marvel Comics ▶ Writers Collin Kelly, Jackson Lanzing ▶ Artist Kev Walker ISSUES 1-4 Writers Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing might be better known for Star Trek comics but there’s definitely something more of Star Wars about the Superheroes of Space’s latest iteration, which takes place in a galaxy far, far away and opens on a Tatooine-style dustbowl. Aimed at audiences who enjoyed the recent movie, it features a line-up that cleaves close to that seen on the big screen. With some mysterious event having fractured the previous team, bickering sisters Gamora and Nebula contribute much of the humour, alongside Nebula’s kookiness and Drax’s dry wit, making up for Rocket Raccoon and Groot’s initial absence. Groot actually provides the main threat in these first four…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Publisher Titan Comics ▶ Writers Jamie Lee Curtis, Russell Goldman ▶ Artist Karl Stevens GRAPHIC NOVEL Halloween star Jamie Lee Curtis has her first stab at comics here – although the project began as a screenplay (a Blumhouse movie is in the pipeline), and it very much feels like that. The title has a double meaning, referring both to Gaia and the maternal urge to protect your child. It centres on a water treatment project in an area of New Mexico previously contaminated by cobalt mining. A small town is beset by strange events, including tumbleweeds attacking a school bus and a rain of skull-perforating giant hailstones. Nature is fighting back, right? But there’s a little more to it than that, with Curtis also stirring in…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Reviewed on PlayStation 5 ▶ Also available on PlayStation 4, PC, Mac, Switch ▶ Publisher Netflix Games VIDEOGAME Opening a dimensional rift on your first day is definitely not ideal. With a new job and the hope of starting afresh back in her hometown of Camena, Riley Poverly stumbles headlong into a strange phenomenon seemingly intent on throwing the past back in her face. Armed with nothing but a pocket radio, she must tune out this force from beyond. Fans of the first game have heard this one before, and Lost Signals’ biggest flaw is how it’s trapped repeating that earlier title’s greatest hits. It’s not all bad; for one thing, VHS scanlines signalling supernatural interference is a visual motif that still hits. Furthermore, the…