Table of contents for January 2024 in SFX

WILD BLUE PONDER Michela M, email I hate spoilers so I usually read your magazine very slowly (I’m a few issues behind). I knew that David Tennant was coming back along with Catherine Tate, but I was happily surprised to see Yasmin Finney as Donna’s daughter. I loved her in Heartstopper, she’s brilliant and was perfect in the first new special. “Wild Blue Yonder” was brilliant and kind of terrifying and I think it could fit perfectly in the old Tennant/Smith eras. It echoes a number of elements from back then but in its own way – a worthy update. I loved it, how it looked, how it all eventually clicked… brilliant. What is lacking at the end of it is, of course, the Doctor going back to Isaac Newton…

♦ Season one, episode two, coming later in 2024, is called “The Devil’s Chord”. ♦ Music from “The Church On Ruby Road” was released on 11 December. “The Goblin Song” is available free on BBC Sounds and can be purchased on other platforms, with all proceeds going to Children In Need. ♦ Viewing figures for “The Star Beast” provided the biggest audience for Doctor Who in five years, reaching 7.6 million people. It was the biggest drama launch of 2023. ♦ Big Finish shows no sign of slowing down, with a slew of new releases announced. Tenth Doctor box set Defender Of The Earth, narrated by Jacob Dudman, was released in November. Dudman retires from playing the role of the Eleventh Doctor in February’s Victory Of The Doctor, which sees…

“We illustrated lots of different versions of the console… lots” FOR A TIME MACHINE, TIME seems to stand still when you’re inside the TARDIS. Because it’s so mind-boggling and, quite frankly, overwhelming to step into – especially when you’re doing so before it’s been seen on television. It’s housed in Stage 6 at Wolf Studios in Cardiff – the biggest of them all. What you see on screen is all actually there physically. It’s housed up metal steps, accessible via two flights, where the Police Box doors welcome you (and us, the first non-licensed publication on set) to the console room. It’s enormous. When you hear it described as “cathedral-like”, they’re not exaggerating. But apparently that still wasn’t quite enough… “This is the tallest stage we have, 50 feet tall,…

MAYBE IT’S IN THE BLOOD, BUT Jamie Anderson is a self-confessed Terrahawks fan. “You make it sound like it’s a bad thing!” laughs the son of television legend Gerry, quick to defend the honour of a series often regarded as a lesser entry in his dad’s iconic canon. “I don’t think it is for a minute. “Much like every fan of Doctor Who has their Doctor, which is normally the one they joined the show with, every Anderson fan has their Anderson show. Obviously for many that’s Thunderbirds, or Space: 1999. But then you’ve got the ’80s kids, and for those people Terrahawks is their first Anderson love.” For Jamie, now flame-keeper of the Anderson empire, it’s a series he grew up with. Literally. “Technically I was on set during…

MY BROTHERS AND I made a film filled with all of the things we enjoyed and wanted to see in a movie,” says Stephen Chiodo, one quarter of the sibling filmmaker team behind 1988’s colourful and brilliantly titled Killer Klowns From Outer Space. “We threw in all of the ’50s and ’60s sci-fi elements that we loved, plus bits of Looney Tunes and Laurel and Hardy. We made it for ourselves,” he smiles. “It’s remarkable that people have taken to it and that it’s still around.” Now 35 years old, the Chiodo brothers’ bizarre mash-up of horror, sci-fi, comedy and attention-stealing practical effects made their sole directorial effort a late-night classic. However, in a turn of events that surprised even them, its legacy has lasted more than three decades, spawning…

▶ RELEASED 12 January 15 | 141 minutes ▶ Director Gabriele Mainetti ▶ Cast Aurora Giovinazzo, Franz Rogowski, Claudio Santamaria, Pietro Castellitto Ignore the tacky title. This bewitching Italian fantasy skews more towards Pan’s Labyrinth and The City Of Lost Children than kitsch fare such as Strippers Vs Werewolves. We’re in the heart of the Second World War, where Franz, a Nazi officer with the power to see the future, is hunting a troupe of fugitive circus performers, hoping their uncanny abilities – essentially they’re carny X-Men – will save Germany from defeat. Director Gabriele Mainetti immediately delivers a statement of intent. No sooner do our misfit heroes dazzle a crowd than a bombing raid tears their circus tent apart, hurling us from whimsy to real-world carnage. It’s an audacious gear-shift,…

UK BBC One/iPlayer, streaming now ▶ Showrunner Russell T Davies ▶ Cast David Tennant, Catherine Tate, Bonnie Langford, Ncuti Gatwa ANNIVERSARY SPECIALS The Toymaker may be a stickler for following the rules, but Russell T Davies sure as hell ain’t. There’s a mischievousness about his writing which infuriates some and delights others, and the 60th anniversary specials are business as usual for the man who had the Daleks trash-talk the Cybermen, and grew a spare Doctor from a disembodied hand. Nothing is off the table – not even the sort of big, bold ideas which would once have been dismissed as fan-fiction fodder. It makes for excitingly unpredictable viewing. Thankfully, these specials don’t get too bogged down in continuity. An odd statement considering that they bring back the 2008 TARDIS…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2023 | 15 | SVOD ▶ Directors Zack Snyder ▶ Cast Sofia Boutella, Ed Skrein, Michiel Huisman, Charlie Hunnam NETFLIX Zack Snyder’s epic space opera doesn’t start with a crawl, but a cheesy voiceover. Which, since this has been enthusiastically marketed as “Star Wars with sex, violence and swearing” is a bit of a shame; it would have been great to see Rebel Moon, Part F**king One scrolling up the screen. In fact, the sex, violence and swearing elements are all pretty tame. This isn’t adult Star Wars by any stretch of the imagination. It’s more like one of those post-original Star Wars knock-offs (Battle Beyond The Stars, Krull, Star Crash), with the benefit of CG effects and the kind of low-rent designer violence that makes frat boys…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2023 | 15 | SVOD ▶ Director Sam Esmail ▶ Cast Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, Myha’la NETFLIX This end-of days thriller brings Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel to the screen with slow-burn power and paranoia to spare. A brittle Julia Roberts is Amanda, who rents an upmarket holiday home for a family getaway. The glossy lifestyle-porn vibe soon gives way to something more disturbing: an eerily drifting oil tanker ploughs into a local beach, while two strangers arrive in what seems to be the world’s most courteous home invasion. As a nationwide blackout cripples technology it’s clear something’s deeply wrong – but what? There’s an unmistakable touch of Shyamalan in the creeping existential dread, complete with flashes of inexplicable imagery. The film maintains an effective…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2023 | NR | SVOD SHUDDER After slasher riffs on Freaky Friday (Freaky) and Back To The Future (Totally Killer), it’s Frank Capra’s turn, as a girl who offed a serial killer wishes she was never born. Cue a town still stalked by death. Featuring a Torchwood-level LGBT quotient, it boasts a sweet romance and a gnarly candy-cane killing, but is rife with baffling plotting. From the mysterious lights which created this alternate universe to the shock twist (and beyond), little here makes sense.…

It’s two months since Halloween, which means a slew of horror-themed physical media! David Gordon Green’s THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER (4K/Blu-ray/DVD, 8 January) sees not one but two girls becoming possessed, and brings back original cast member Ellen Burstyn. We said: “It takes some nerve to make an Exorcist film that isn’t firmly centred on Catholicism… Might be the worst entry in the series.” Bonuses: commentary by Green and three of his collaborators, plus six featurettes (running “over 30 minutes”). A Collector’s Edition steelbook adds four art cards. Set between Saw and Saw II, SAW X (4K/Blu-ray/DVD, out now) sees Jigsaw punishing the staff of a fraudulent Mexican clinic that claimed it could cure his cancer. We said: “It’s neither the best nor the worst of the Saw films.” Bonuses include…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 512 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson ▶ Publisher Gollancz In 2020, Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson was the inaugural winner of the Future Worlds Prize, an award funded by writer Ben Aaronovitch and actor Adjoa Andoh to highlight unpublished science fiction and fantasy writers of colour. The Principle Of Moments was written during Jikiemi-Pearson’s schooldays, and it’s as exuberant and full of Stuff as you’d expect from an exciting young imagination. There are prophecies and a space empire and time travel and reincarnation, but it’s all organised around the experiences of a pair of appealing black lead characters with strong moral centres and a lot of courage. Obi is a time-traveller who finds himself drawn to Regency-era London, and the prince he loves; in the far future,…

▶ RELEASED 16 JANUARY 304 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Jenny Kiefer ▶ Publisher Quirk Books Why do characters in horror stories always want to go running off into the middle of nowhere? For most of us, the idea of staying comfortably on the sofa is more appealing. But at least Jenny Kiefer’s intrepid band of doomed pals have a good reason: PhD student Clay wants to pioneer a new technique for discovering uncharted territories, while climbing influencer Dylan dreams of being the first to scale – and set routes across – a virgin rockface. Dragging along Clay’s friend and Dylan’s boyfriend to help out, the two of them head out into the wilds of Kentucky, and are then never seen again. The book opens with the remains of several…

▶ RELEASED 18 JANUARY 272 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Writer Ali Millar ▶ Publisher White Rabbit Books Following an acclaimed memoir dealing with growing up amid Jehovah’s Witnesses, Ali Millar’s debut novel also deals with family matters. Specifically, it focuses on middle-class influencer Anna, whose grief draws her towards a young woman, Ava, who reminds her of her lost child. The duo’s destructive relationship plays out over just a few days, but at different moments seems to consume both of them. Against a near-future backdrop of anxiety over accelerating climate change, a sense of crisis and things not being quite as they seem pervades a book that, in key respects, calls to mind Iain M Banks’s The Wasp Factory. Throughout the novel, there’s a visceral poetry to be found if…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Publisher Anderson Entertainment ▶ Writer Angus P Allan ▶ Artists Jim Baikie, Steve Kyte COLLECTION Terrahawks’ stint in kids’ mag Look-in was short-lived but nevertheless entertaining, as this collection – released to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Gerry Anderson’s final puppet show – shows. Angus P Allan’s brisk scripts perfectly capture the series’ oddball tone, which resembles a bizarre mix of UFO, Star Wars and The Dark Crystal. However the four main stories – broken down into two-page instalments of four to six episodes – are all resolved a little too neatly, with the first, which tapped into the growing videogame craze, and the second, which sees a robotic cuckoo infiltrating Hawknest, proving the most intriguing. Given his ability to re-clone himself, lead character…

▶ OUT NOW! RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Publisher DC Comics ▶ Writer Si Spurrier ▶ Artist Mike Deodato Jr ISSUES 1-3 While the Scarlet Speedster’s recent big-screen outing concentrated on Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash has long taken a backseat in DC’s comic book universe. This new monthly, like its predecessor, keeps the focus on Wally West, who has always been a more engaging protagonist than his uncle. Like our hero, you might ask yourself “What the absolute screaming hell is going on?”, as writer Si Spurrier discombobulates the reader as much as Wally himself. With his powers out of control, Wally is sent reeling through the Speed Force, which is depicted as an elemental field similar to Swamp Thing’s the Green. For a title about the Fastest Man Alive,…

JAMES WAN WAS SWIMMING around his pool late one night when he thought he saw someone watching him. A shiver ran up his spine. The malignant mind behind the Saw, Conjuring and Insidious franchises was scared. Yet he knew where he had seen this scene before: in a short film. “When you scare James Wan, there couldn’t be a higher compliment,” Bryce McGuire, the director of Night Swim, tells Red Alert. Nine years on, his terrifying viral short has been expanded into a feature-length film, produced by Wan and horror super-producer Jason Blum. “It’s been a long and somewhat winding road,” McGuire says of Night Swim’s journey to the big screen. The initial problem was that the filmmaker – along with the short’s co-creator Rod Blackhurst – couldn’t come up…

DISAPPOINTED FANS DON’T often get a second chance when a beloved book gets botched in a Hollywood adaptation. Take the legions of readers who adore author Rick Riordan’s YA fantasy series Percy Jackson & The Olympians, who are still smarting from director Chris Columbus’s 2010 retooling of The Lightning Thief into an aged-up movie that barely resembled the source work. Movie Percy only survived two instalments, while Riordan went on to sell more than 180 million copies of his six-book saga about a boy who learns that he’s the son of Poseidon. But that kind of success makes studios like Disney incentivised to try and get it right, which is why Percy Jackson And The Olympians has been reimagined into a Disney+ series with Riordan and his wife, Rebecca, executive…

IN THE WORLD OF YOUTUBE creators, Vivienne Medrano is a gold standard example of a self-made success story. An illustrator and animator who worked under the moniker “VivziePop”, Medrano joined the platform in 2012 to share her self-made comic ZooPhobia, along with a progression of colourful, highly stylised animated shorts centred on an array of Hell-based characters. By 2016, Medrano’s following was so large that it enabled her to start a Patreon to fund her own animation studio, SpindleHorse Toons, in order to create a pilot episode for her passion project Hazbin Hotel. Four years and 92 million YouTube views later, that pilot has evolved into a brand-new, A24-produced series of the same name for Prime Video. Hazbin Hotel’s premise and genre-defying tone has remained the same, with Medrano serving…

PROLIFIC, EMMY-WINNING TV director Robert Butler saw himself as “a hired gun”, but his peers in the industry regarded him as the Pilot King, a man whose magic touch ensured success for such small-screen classics as Batman, Moonlighting and Star Trek. Born in Los Angeles, Butler broke into TV working as an usher at CBS. Graduating to stage manager and then director, he soon proved his versatility, helming everything from comedies to Westerns and detective shows, refining a style he described as “very real, very dry and very naturalistic”. In 1964 Gene Roddenberry wanted that crucial sense of verisimilitude for “The Cage”, the pilot episode of Star Trek. Butler hesitated to accept the offer at first, finding the script hard to follow. He was also concerned by the pacing of…

WOLF STUDIOS, Cardiff. They should just rent us a room, really. The one we’re in today is jokingly referred to as “the Meeping Room” as it’s filled with concept art from the first two specials, as well as props and costumes including the full-size Jimbo robot. It’s pre-transmission; we have no idea what it is, but we are slightly alarmed at a painting of Donna blowing up… Today we’re continuing our tour with production designer Phil Sims, who’s showing us a foam Meep head, almost like a half-mask, with no fur, like a Siamese cat. The finished Meep is, obviously, bigger for full face and animatronics. Beside it are a rubbery latex shoe/foot and gloves with very long fingers. Coming face to face with the Meep, you see it has…

“We’re still actively developing it,” Jamie Anderson reveals. “Around 10 months ago it was about to go into formal pre-preproduction development, shall we say, with a major international partner. And then there was a change of guard and it got dropped, as so often happens. What we’ve come up with is a fantastic way to feed into the past, while making it more contemporary and more resonant with an audience now. “These days, for true international appeal, the aspiration is live-action, and it has been developed as such. It’s a proper premium live-action science fiction drama.” In the original series, Kate Kestrel was the candyfloss-coiffed pilot who combined planetary defence with a pop career (raise your game, Taylor Swift!). “What is always so key when you’re redeveloping an existing property…

▶ RELEASED 29 December 15 | 100 minutes ▶ Director Paris Zarcilla ▶ Cast Max Eigenmann, Jaeden Boadilla, Leanne Best, David Hayman While the world is not exactly crying out for more horror films infused with social commentary, writer/director Paris Zarcilla’s feature debut manages to feel like a fresh new entry in what’s become an overcrowded field. It places undocumented Filipina immigrant Joy (Max Eigenmann) in a gothic house of horrors when she accepts a housekeeping job at the rickety estate of Mr Garrett (David Hayman), who is immobilised by terminal illness. His niece Katherine (Leanne Best) flits in and out of the palatial home, but provides Joy with an oppressive set of rules. To make matters worse, Joy has to make sure they don’t discover that her daughter Grace…

UK BBC Two/iPlayer, streaming now ▶ Writer/director Mark Gatiss ▶ Cast Kit Harington, Freddie Fox, Colin Ryan, John Heffernan This year’s enjoyable addition to classic strand A Ghost Story For Christmas deviates from the norm in two key respects. Firstly, it’s one of the rare entries not based on an MR James tale; secondly, there are no ghosts. Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Lot No 249” is, instead, a mummy horror, centred on three students – one of whom, it becomes clear, can command an Egyptian relic to bump off those who’ve wronged him. Mark Gatiss makes three main changes. For starters, he adds some interesting subtext by rendering the villainous Bellingham explicitly gay. This is not a stretch: the text’s repeated references to how he is “not a healthy Johnny” can…

▶ RELEASED 8 January 2023 | 15 | Download As primal fears go, writer’s block is pretty niche. This indie chiller makes a compellingly nightmarish metaphor out of it, trapping a struggling novelist in a fully automated writer’s retreat whose malfunctioning AI imposes a deadline in the most terrifying sense… Anchored by a sympathetic performance by Rachel Shelley as the unravelling author, Blank dodges deeper questions of artificial authorship, but its tech-driven psychological horror should keep you in zeitgeisty shudders until the next Black Mirror.…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2023 | E | DVD/download This doc on William Friedkin’s 1973 classic boasts two useful interviewees: his biographer, and writer William Peter Blatty’s widow. They deserved better than being dumped into this poorly structured mess, with its cliché-riddled narration and shameless padding (like the director’s Oscar speech for The French Connection). Adding insult to injury, archive clips are stretched out of the correct aspect ratio. Untold? If only. + Extras None.…

EXTRAS ▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1983 | 15 | Blu-ray ▶ Director Michael Dugan ▶ Cast Bobbie Bresee, Marjoe Gortner, Norman Burton, Maurice Sherbanee BLU-RAY DEBUT Despite coming with all the ’80s trash horror trimmings – a sexy blonde lead actress, gratuitous nudity, practical gore, and nonsensical supernatural business – this inept tale of demonic possession by way of, erm, a haunted mausoleum is a real slog to sit through. The new 4K restoration isn’t particularly sympathetic to it, either. Still, it’s almost worth it when the poor possessed heroine’s final form is revealed: this rubber-faced monstrosity, complete with man-eating “bitey boobs”, has to be seen to be believed. + Extras Building on the extras from Vinegar Syndrome’s 2018 US release (commentary by star Bobbie Bresee; a nine-minute interview with…

▶ RELEASED 18 JANUARY 269 pages | Hardback/ebook ▶ Author Aliya Whiteley ▶ Publisher Solaris Aliya Whiteley’s work is tricky to categorise. This may be why – in a career of over 15 years, and despite being shortlisted for awards in fantasy, science fiction and horror – she has flown curiously under the radar. Her best-known work to date is the unsettling post-apocalyptic body horror The Beauty (2014), a novella about gender, fungus and how and why communities tell stories about themselves. Originally published by much-missed small press Unsung Stories, it is due to be reissued in 2024 by Solaris, along with three other books from Whiteley’s back catalogue. This is a good year, in other words, to discover her. Her latest novel is characteristically strange: the sort of story…

▶ RELEASED 18 JANUARY 372 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Saara El-Arifi ▶ Publisher HarperVoyager This first instalment in a new series starts as a grimdark tale of neverending war and morphs into a throbbing romance. Author Saara El-Arifi excels at world-building, conjuring a vibrant setting for her faerie fantasy. Hers is a land dominated by Elf tribes, whose ongoing territorial war has left them impoverished. Living in crystal caves beneath the battlefields are the Fae, beautiful and rich but trapped and bitter. There’s a gentle undercurrent of social commentary: look out for racial prejudice, cultural misunderstandings and generational conflict. “Our ignorance made victims of us” is how Elf Rayan articulates the moral of the story. Tonally, it has a YA feel. Yeeran is the youngest colonel in the Elf…

▶ RELEASED 16 JANUARY 416 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Alastair Reynolds ▶ Publisher Gollancz Such has been Alastair Reynolds’s creative restlessness down the years that it still genuinely comes as a surprise when he returns to the Revelation Space universe with which he made his reputation. A follow-up to 2018’s Elysium Fire, Machine Vendetta marks the third time Reynolds has written a novel starring Prefect Tom Dreyfus, an upright but quietly maverick copper in the Panoply – a force whose beat is the Glitter Band, a collection of 10,000-plus disparate habitats circling the planet Yellowstone. Without giving away too much (especially as the book can, at a pinch, be read as a standalone), it’s work complicated by Dreyfus’s own past. He’s been less than honest about his interactions with…

▶ RELEASED 4 JANUARY 704 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Bradley P Beaulieu ▶ Publisher Ad Astra Epic fantasy meets police procedural in The Dragons Of Deepwood Fen, the first in a new series from The Shattered Sands author Bradley P Beaulieu. There’s an extensive roster of characters, but the main protagonists are Lorelei Aurelius, an Inquisitor (essentially a police officer) in the city of Ancris, and Rylan Holbrooke, a dragon singer and thief. There is an enormous amount of worldbuilding and lore to establish in the first half, which proves to be a drag on the pace. Ancris is one of the main cities in the Empire, which has forcibly subjugated the arboreal wilds of the Holt, where rebels called the Red Knives agitate to overthrow their oppressors. There’s…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 280 pages | Paperback ▶ Author Andy Davidson ▶ Publisher Chinbeard Books/Oak Tree Books The Tomorrow People gets a Spider-Man: No Way Home-style reboot in this ambitious novel, which uses parallel worlds to draw together characters from the ’70s, ’90s and 2013 TV series into one unified continuum. Not that this is immediately obvious. At the beginning of the book telekinetic, telepathic, teleporting teens are conspicuous by their absence. We’re introduced to an alternate-history 2023 Earth, where humans happily cohabit with an alien race called the Thargons – even interbreeding with them. But one person knows this world isn’t as it should be: a global teen pop sensation called Gabriel. And he has a plan to get things back on track. Based on a treatment by…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Publisher Marvel Comics ▶ Writers Iman Vellani, Sabir Pirzada ▶ Artists Carlos Gómez, Adam Gorham ISSUES 1-4 After her recent death, Kamala Khan has been resurrected with undue haste even by Marvel’s usual standards. Recasting her as a mutant brings the comic book character in line with her MCU equivalent, and hiring Ms Marvel actor Iman Vellani to co-write this four-issue miniseries (with Sabir Pirzada) further enhances that synergy. Taking her out of her New Jersey element, it sees Kamala enrolling at New York’s Empire State University, and while we miss her family and friends, best pal Bruno at least comes along for the ride. Tying in with the ongoing Fall Of X line, the plot sees her infiltrating a tech programme run by anti-mutant…

THREE YEARS AFTER THEIR RUN on Hellblazer came to an end, Si Spurrier and Aaron Campbell are returning to the mage with John Constantine, Hellblazer: Dead In America, which sees an ailing John Constantine crossing the Atlantic as he flees murder charges in his native Britain. “It’s certainly where we always intended to take him, which was John in the US on the run from the law and slowly realising that his body is essentially dead so he has to do something about that,” explains Spurrier. “It’s all still exactly the same but with some additional, quite meaty incentivisation, which came about because we sat down and thought about a lot of the greatest hits, the things that really matter if you’re interested in the life and times of John…

“This is something different, because it sits so deeply in the hearts of the British public” IT’S THE ANNIVERSARY WEEK OF DOCTOR Who and SFX is in a London hotel, opposite a legendary pub where fans used to meet, and in the shadow of the iconic BT Tower. Ncuti Gatwa (in a Prada sweater, with shirt underneath, and yellow socks on display under cropped trousers) and Millie Gibson (a grey waistcoat, trousers and glasses that are “just for fashion, darling!”) are taking a day off filming season two to be introduced to select press with showrunner Russell T Davies. This interview has been edited for laughter. ♦ What kind of Doctor are you going to be? NG: Ohhhh. I don’t want to say. Just ’cos I feel like… [mock-shouting] I’m…

FEW TV SHOWS HAVE HAD AS MUCH LASTING INFLUENCE as Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The beloved series ran for seven seasons between 1997 and 2003 and, in one swift strike of a wooden stake, changed the way that fantasy dramas looked and felt forever. Buffy paved the way for more daring and emotional small-screen storytelling, and without it it’s hard to imagine shows like Cobra Kai, Riverdale or Russell T Davies’s heartfelt reinvention of Doctor Who. There’s little doubt that it’s been a rough few years for the show’s legacy. A planned reboot was announced in 2018 but remains “on pause”, perhaps permanently, while the show’s creator and former geek godhead Joss Whedon has spent the last few years mired in controversy. It was a surprise and delight, then, when…

▶ RELEASED 19 January 12A | 106 minutes ▶ Director Mahalia Belo ▶ Cast Jodie Comer, Katherine Waterston, Joel Fry, Benedict Cumberbatch Adapted from Megan Hunter’s 2017 novel, this debut feature from Mahalia Belo is an unusually intimate post-apocalyptic drama, favouring the sensory and the tactile over spectacle and set-pieces. The ever-impressive Jodie Comer is Mother. We meet her when she’s heavily pregnant, her waters breaking as flood water breaches the London home she shares with R (Joel Fry). An environmental crisis submerges London, and the couple flee with their newborn to R’s parents’ place in the country. It’s the start of a perilous journey that takes in a government shelter, an island commune and a brief meeting with the film’s producer, Benedict Cumberbatch. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is the…

▶ RELEASED 5 January 18 | 96 minutes ▶ Directors Jane Giles, Ali Catterall Is it possible to have nostalgia for something you never experienced? It’s a feeling this documentary love letter to London’s most infamous cinema gets close to generating. And even if (like most of us) you didn’t live in the capital in the ’80s, it may revive fond memories of a dive hangout. From 1978-1993, initially in Fitzrovia and latterly a grotty King’s Cross, the Scala became a magnet for a generation of misfits. Its status as a midnight movie venue made it the perfect home for FrightFest precursor Shock Around The Clock and The Avengers conventions. But it was also a place you could discover arthouse obscurities and gay cinema. The interviewee list here is dominated…

▶ RELEASED 29 December 2023 | 12A | Download ▶ Director Marc Turtletaub ▶ Cast Ben Kingsley, Harriet Sansom Harris, Jane Curtin, Jade Quon BLU-RAY DEBUT It’s easy to approach Jules as a cynic: “Hmm, a low-budget sci-fi starring Oscar-winner Sir Ben Kingsley as an old geezer who finds an alien in his back garden? He must have fancied some quick cash to put in a new swimming pool.” Maybe he did, but it doesn’t matter; against the odds, this tiny pocket-money film is bloody lovely. When pensioner Milton (Kingsley) discovers that a flying saucer has squashed his azaleas, nobody in his local community believes him, assuming he’s just senile. As he helps the alien pilot Jules (Jade Quon) to fix the craft, local busybodies Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris) and…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2023 | 7+ | VOD PRIME VIDEO Batman’s a sturdy enough icon to take on all manner of weird shapes, including this kid-friendly cartoon movie. The focus is on Damian Wayne, Bruce’s son, taking his first, faltering steps into crimefighting as the Joker returns to ruin Christmas. The art style is amusingly gnarly – Batman’s rogues’ gallery is reimagined as a parade of grotesques. Some sly digs at the big-screen franchise help keep the seasonal tweeness at bay.…

EXTRAS ▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1981 | 18 | Blu-ray ▶ Director Riccardo Freda ▶ Cast Stefano Patrizi, Martine Brochard, Henri Garcin, Laura Gemser BLU-RAY DEBUT Both a comeback and a last hurrah for Riccardo Freda (director of landmark Italian horror I Vampiri), this amusingly preposterous affair is a wobbly attempt to straddle both the Giallo and gothic genres. It unfolds at a country house in an ersatz Surrey, often lit by candles due to its dodgy electrics. Thunder cracks; windows blow open; characters have strange dreams featuring bats on strings… But there’s also a killer slicing through the cast. The lead suspect: Michael (Stefano Patrizi), an actor who, as a child, killed his father. Much too obvious, right? The red herrings heap up – practically every character turns out to…

▶ RELEASED 2 JANUARY 288 pages | Hardback/ebook ▶ Author AJ Steiger ▶ Publisher Severn House AJ Steiger’s first adult fiction novel has some of the trappings of a horror story – curses, sinister phone calls, hints of possession – but it’s more accurate to think of it as a portrait of obsession and loneliness. Eddie Luther is haunted by the ghosts of his military past. Recently fired from the job that was his last connection to the world, he’s hit rock bottom. But then he hears a voice in the woods calling for help. This leads him to a journal filled with cryptic writing that sets him on a journey to discover the truth about what really happened to a woman known only as Noelle. Devil’s Fork, Nebraska, is…

▶ RELEASED 9 JANUARY 416 pages | Paperback/ebook ▶ Author Alice McIlroy ▶ Publisher Datura Books Many of us have memories we’d rather not linger on. But would we choose to remove them if we could, to move on with our lives with no knowledge of what we once were – or why we even wanted them gone? And if we did, how would we ever know for sure that we could trust what’s left? This is how Iris’s story begins: waking in a hospital with no memories, a husband she doesn’t recognise at her side and a signed contract showing that she volunteered for the procedure. It was more than just traumatic memory removal, though, as an AI – Ariel – has now been planted in her brain, “helping”…

▶ RELEASED 18 JANUARY 496 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Frances White ▶ Publisher Michael Joseph High fantasy meets Agatha Christie in this whimsical murder mystery, set on a magical ship. The 12 leaders of the 12 realms of Concordia are on a 12-day ocean voyage, and one by one they’re being murdered. They should be celebrating peaceful co-existence, but the deaths reveal deep-seated antagonisms. So when the pretty-much universally reviled noble of the Union’s poorest realm, Ganymede’s “Pissfish” Piscero, takes it on himself to go full Poirot, he rubs up a lot of his co-passengers the wrong way. There’s so much world-building detail and so many hidden backstories in Voyage Of The Damned that it does all threaten to become Murder On The Exposition Express at times, and towards…

▶ RELEASED 16 JANUARY 400 pages | Paperback/ebook ▶ Author Kamilah Cole ▶ Publisher Atom If there’s one fantasy trope threatening to reach its sell-by date, it’s the idea of a dragon having to “bond” psychically with a special human rider. This hoary old concept is just one of many littered throughout this YA fantasy, a novel of, sadly, a million clichés. We enter its world five years after a war which was ended by a child, Faron Vincent, who channelled god-like powers to defeat her dragon-riding enemies. Now 17, Faron is a national hero. Meanwhile her sister, Elara, unexpectedly bonds with a dragon belonging to the bad guys and must leave to train with them. Devastated, Faron wants to break that dragon/human bond to save her sister’s life, but…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 271 pages | Hardback ▶ Author Jonathan Helm ▶ Publisher Cult Edge A labour of love, this print-on-demand making-of for the opening run of Terry Nation’s ’70s sci-fi saga about a bunch of freedom fighters takes a day-by-day approach. It kicks off on 9 September 1975, when the Daleks’ creator improvised a pitch in a meeting with the BBC’s Head of Serials, and closes by reproducing an audience research report from 18 June 1978. You’re swept along by a flood of data – with pleasing trivia nuggets bobbing up every so often. Did you know that they toyed with making our hero Blake a schoolteacher? That eyepatched baddie Travis’s outfit was sourced from an establishment revelling in the name Hardcore Leather? Or that a “power unit”…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ Publisher Marvel Comics ▶ Writer Saladin Ahmed ▶ Artist Aaron Kuder, Farid Karami ISSUES 1-3 Considering its reputation as one of Marvel’s most street-level and grounded superhero sagas, Daredevil has never been afraid to get surprisingly weird across its six-decade history. Marvel’s latest relaunch has to deal directly with that weirdness, picking up from the end of writer Chip Zdarsky’s recently concluded run with Matt Murdock having died, gone to Hell, and then mysteriously come back to life with no memory of his time fighting crime in a scarlet devil costume. On top of all this, Murdock is now a Catholic priest. But Daredevil isn’t about to turn into a character-driven religious drama, so these first three issues give us plenty of complications. Matt’s memories…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 48 minutes ▶ Director Anthony DP Mann ▶ Broadcaster Radio 4 Extra AUDIO DRAMA An adaptation of the folk horror classic starring Brian Blessed? Your first thought is that Howie – the copper who investigates a girl’s disappearance on a pagan island – might escape by belting out The Lord’s Prayer so loud the sacrificial edifice collapses. But Britain’s best bellower instead plays Lord Summerisle, employing a tone that’s the aural equivalent of Christmas pudding smothered in custard. Radio 4 Extra’s recent World Of The Wicker Man night gave this Canadian production its radio debut, though it was first released on vinyl in 2020. It hits all the main story beats, but is heavily compressed, shorn of musical sequences: there’s no pub belting out “The Landlord’s…