Table of contents for May 2021 in SFX

THIS WILL NOT STAND Robert MacDonald, email I was reading through this month’s edition of SFX, which arrived today. I always look forward to the Red Alert section. What I couldn’t help but notice is that there seems to be a distinct lack of original material being made, either for the cinema or the TV. The MCU aside, the words remake/reboot have cropped up a lot over the past few years. It would seem that studio execs are scared of anything new… The Stand, anyone? The original was bad and even a bigger budget and stellar cast couldn’t save this new version from being ho-hum… SFX All we need now is a reboot of the ReBoot reboot and the universe will implode. That is how physics works, isn’t it? RESIDENT OF…

MARVEL’S 2021 SUMMER crossover imagines a world where Earth’s Mightiest Heroes never existed (at least not in the form we know them) – where Tony Stark never built Iron Man armour, Wakanda is dismissed as a myth, and Thor despises hammers. Written and drawn by the regular Avengers team of Jason Aaron and Ed McGuinness, Heroes Reborn grows out of recent developments in the House of Ideas’ leading team book. “Heroes Reborn is a storyline that was going to be simply an arc in Jason’s Avengers, but which proved to have greater scope and legs than that, so we blew it out into a larger line-wide event,” says Marvel Executive Editor Tom Brevoort. Isn’t the fact that well-known characters like Captain America, Iron Man and Black Panther are conspicuous by…

A HELL OF A LOT HAS A happened in the world since the end of season three of The Handmaid’s Tale left us with the image of June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) bleeding out from a bullet wound in the wake of transporting almost 100 innocent children out of Gilead to safety in Canada. In the 20 months since that season finale, the global pandemic hit, multiple lockdowns have ensued, and the American election has dumped Trump out of office. With all of that real-world chaos still percolating, the return of the show for its fourth season feels almost quaint. Executive producers Bruce Miller and Warren Littlefield are just excited to be back telling June’s story after their own extended hiatus due to Covid-19-induced production delays, and they hope this season…

SURVIVAL IS A throughline in Alexandre Aja’s filmography. From The Hills Have Eyes to Piranha 3D to 2019’s gator-infested Crawl, he clearly relishes putting his protagonists through the wringer – and himself, too, it turns out. “I’ve always been attracted to those movies that allow you to think about who you are, and what you will do in that type of terrible scenario,” he tells Red Alert. “Always imagining or expecting the worst. I like those movies where I feel I’m living something that hopefully I will never really live myself.” Oxygen, his latest, is built on a suitably life-threatening hook. In the near future, a woman wakes in a cryogenic pod. Trapped in what feels like a technological coffin, she has no memory of who she is or how…

Are you shooting the Walking Dead movie? I’m not filming at the moment. I’m still very much in lockdown. We’re very excited about how, at the first available opportunity, we’re going to go into production – there’s talk of it being spring. I can’t wait to get those cowboy boots on again, is all I’m telling you. Have you missed Rick? Initially, I didn’t miss him too much because it was such a great finish to my story on the TV show. Also, I am in very, very close communication with all of my friends from Atlanta, so I’m always in touch with them. But then this extraordinary situation happened in the world and we all pushed the pause button, and also there had been so much happening in a…

DON’T BREATHE A WORD TO SIRI or Alexa but new animated comedy The Mitchells vs. The Machines may just be a stealth warning to humanity. “It’s like, ‘Hey, kids, here’s a funny cartoon,’” laughs helmer Michael Rianda, before switching to a dread whisper. “Also: ‘Look out!’” The latest from Sony Pictures Animation finds our screen-addicted, perma-swiping world facing an AI uprising. Led by a malevolent personal assistant – voiced by Olivia Colman – it’s a revolution enforced by an army of robots, out to rid the Earth of “fleshlings”. Our only hope? An everyday family named the Mitchells, an admittedly dysfunctional “bunch of weird humans” inspired by Rianda’s own relatives. “I basically had this opportunity to pitch a movie,” he tells Red Alert, “and I was like, ‘What? What? What?’…

IF YOUR COMIC BOOK TASTE runs a bit classic, keep an eye out for the latest instalment in the DC animated universe, Justice Society: World War II. A full-on celebration of the Golden Age of DC history, the feature-length story finds modern-era Barry Allen (Matt Bomer) zapped back to the Second World War, where he meets the original members of the Justice Society of America, led by none other than a very bad-ass Wonder Woman (Stana Katic). Though long an era that has enraptured current DC Animated Universe supervising producer Butch Lukic, it’s sadly not been the backdrop for any long-form animation projects at DC in literally decades. However, the success of the live-action Wonder Woman set during the First World War proved that modern audiences would show up for…

NO ONE EVER ACCUSED Mark Millar of thinking too small. The Scot is the mastermind behind such comic books as The Ultimates, The Authority and Superman: Red Son. Other creator-owned titles belonging to his Millarverse – Wanted, Kick-Ass and The Secret Service – were all adapted into feature films. And, lest we forget, he also penned Civil War and Wolverine: Old Man Logan, which served as the inspiration for the blockbusters Captain America: Civil War and Logan. Millar, however, imagined even bigger – if that’s at all possible – with Jupiter’s Legacy. Calling the upcoming Netflix TV series “Star Wars for superheroes,” he says that his lofty goal was to craft “the greatest superhero story of all time.” IT’S MILLAR TIME “I know that sounds like such a Stan Lee…

AN AUDIENCE WITH Christopher Eccleston is rare. And while this writer has enjoyed being in the audience for many of Eccleston’s stage and screen performances, there’s one role in particular that will stay with the actor forever. Which makes it all the more exciting when he grants SFX an extremely rare interview to talk about it. We are, obviously, referring to Dougal Siepp in The League Of Gentlemen. Nah, not really – it’s Doctor bloody Who. Sixteen years since he led the revival of the BBC’s biggest sci-fi show, Eccleston is once more stepping on board the TARDIS, in a series of adventures that fans never thought would happen. He’s not one to speak to the press often – unless there’s a project he’s passionate about, and even then it’s…

Clones got their first mention in that galaxy far, far away a long time ago – in 1977, in fact, when Obi-Wan Kenobi told Luke Skywalker he’d participated in the Clone Wars years earlier. The Clone Wars were named after the Grand Army of the Republic (aka the Clone army), which fought alongside the Jedi against the Confederacy of Independent Systems (Separatists). The Clones were created on Kamino, a water planet located just outside the main Star Wars galaxy. The Kaminoans already had a long history of producing clones to order. The Republic’s Clones were ordered by a Jedi Master named Sifo-Dyas, who was operating without the authorisation of the Jedi Council. Prior to the Invasion of Naboo in The Phantom Menace, Dyas had visions of a great war ravaging…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | TBC | SVOD Director Michael Matthews Cast Dylan O’Brien, Jessica Henwick, Michael Rooker, Dan Ewing NETFLIX Liked Zombieland? Then you’ll probably like this slice of found-family feelgood. Didn’t like Zombieland? Well, you still might, because rather than riding on the coat-tails of George Romero it creates its own colourfully imaginative world Set after an apocalypse that turned all of Earth’s cold-blooded creatures into freakish mutants, it centres on the hapless Josh (Teen Wolf/The Maze Runner’s Dylan O’Brien – think Christian Slater with the Jack Nicholson dialled right down). Having tired of life in a bunker where he’s the only one not coupled-up, he embarks on a suicidal 85-mile trek to a reunion with the girlfriend he last saw seven years ago. It reaches peak Zombieland…

RELEASED 3 MAY 2021 | 15 | Download One for the Covid-19 conspiracy theorists, this off-brand Zoom-call thriller, set in a police-state LA in 2022, suggests the future is even bleaker than we thought. After having to cancel a trip to Vegas, Evan finds himself celebrating his birthday on a video chat with his friends instead. They drink, pop MDMA, then find themselves embroiled in a police chase. Somehow it’s even more implausible than it sounds, and honestly, haven’t we all done enough video calls to last us a lifetime already?…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | 18 | Download Is “You’d make a good murderer” really a compliment? Wannabe filmmaker Gillian (writer/director Gillian Wallace Horvat) takes her friend’s remark seriously, and plans a documentary about the perfect murder. Soon she’s rampaging around the independent film circuit, honing her skills and filming as she goes. There’s some deeply uncomfortable humour here and Horvat is an uninhibited performer; the rage she (via her fictional counterpart) aims at the industry feels entirely real, and mostly justified.…

RELEASED 26 APRIL 2018 | 15 | Blu-ray Directors Haruka Fujita, Taichi Isidate Cast Yui Ishikawa, Daisuke Namikawa, Takehito Koyasu BLU-RAY DEBUT VioletEvergarden is an alternate world story, but emotional drama takes priority over worldbuilding. Violet, a young woman, has silver prosthetic hands and speaks like an android. But she’s human, a former child soldier who’s never connected with her emotions. Now the war’s over, she finds a job composing letters for a range of clients. Travelling widely, she comes to understand other people’s feelings better than her own. Drawn with dazzling beauty, the series’ fictional countries resemble the likes of Italy and Russia, in a vague, precomputer era. It’s not explained how such a world developed Violet’s prostheses, and her background makes little sense – a killer child becoming…

RELEASED 3 MAY 2020 | 15 | Blu-ray Director Adam Stovall Cast Natalie Walker, MacLeod Andrews, Amanda Miller True love is hard to find – have you been on Tinder lately? But down-on-his-luck Jack (MacLeod Andrews) may have found it in the most unlikely place of all: a haunted house. Tasked with cleaning a property before its sale, Jack encounters the ghost of Muriel (Natalie Walker). After the initial terror subsides they strike up an unlikely friendship, but their growing attachment could have disastrous consequences for Muriel. Adam Stovall’s directorial debut makes the most of its (very) limited resources to tell a heartfelt and very funny love story with a couple of twists. Andrews and Walker are both excellent, their characters carrying a weight of sadness that’s unexpectedly lifted when…

UK/US Prime Video, streaming now Creator Little Marvin Cast Deborah Ayorinde, Ashley Thomas, Alison Pill, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Melody Hurd, Ryan Kwanten EPISODES 1.01-1.10 If you’re planning on bingeing Them, consider having something reassuring to hand for afterwards, like an Ivor The Engine DVD. This first run of an American Horror Story-style anthology may be the most viscerally upsetting fantasy series we’ve ever seen The trailer prompted online bile, with people latching onto the title, the presence of Us’s Shahadi Wright Joseph and credits for white directors to pre-judge it as a Jordan Peele rip-off. Ill-informed on two counts: firstly, the show is overseen by two black producers. Secondly, it has more in common with Watchmen and Lovecraft Country. Just as those series educated viewers about the Tulsa race massacre…

UK/US Apple TV+, streaming now Creator Tony Basgallop Cast Lauren Ambrose, Toby Kebbell, Nell Tiger Free, Rupert Grint EPISODES 2.01-2.10 Whether the show left you spellbound or scratching your head, there’s no denying that Servant’s initial run firmly leaned into its weird concept: a couple (Lauren Ambrose and Toby Kebbell’s Dorothy and Sean Turner) whose baby has apparently died and been replaced with a weird doll to help them mourn, discover that he’s mysteriously alive again, potentially thanks to quiet, odd nanny Leanne (Nell Tiger Free). The first season successfully wrapped mystery and heightened weirdness around emotional trauma, and ended with Leanne going on the lam with the living Jericho. For the second, the dial is turned much more towards dark humour, as the search for them continues. While that…

RELEASED 4 MAY 484 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Andy Weir Publisher Del Rey The Martian went where few self-published novels had gone before, turning author Andy Weir into an overnight sensation before being taken to the big screen by Sir Ridley Scott. His second novel Artemis – a crime caper set on the Moon – was less impressive. With his third outing, however, the author returns to more comfortable “put the ‘sci’ in sci-fi” territory, and it’s a smart move. While the civilisationending threat of a dying Sun is bigger than anything Weir’s explored before, “science-ing the shit” out of the problem is what the writer is best at Echoes of The Martian are clear as scientist Ryland Grace wakes up alone – and confused – on interstellar spacecraft the…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Charlie Jane Anders Publisher Titan Books There’s an admirable crispness to the prose in Charlie Jane Anders’s first YA book. No messing: within a few paragraphs, we learn that teenage protagonist Tina is an alien awaiting pick-up from Earth. This will occur when her internal beacon lights up – which it duly does. Soon, Tina, the tweaked-to-make-her-look-more-human clone of near-legendary alien commander Captain Thaoh Argentian, is zipping around the universe aboard a Royal Fleet starship, one of the good guys – for all that the book plays with the idea that people trying to do good can make bad calls. She’s accompanied by best friend Rachael and a quartet of nerds, transported onboard after proving their superior intelligence. All bring different degrees…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 224 pages pages | Paperback/ebook Author Izumi Suzuki Publisher Verso Izumi Suzuki is something of a countercultural icon in Japan. She posed for erotic photographer Araki, and her relationship with avant-garde saxophonist Kaoru Abe (who overdosed aged 29) inspired both a novel and its biopic adaptation, Endless Waltz. This first collection in English of seven of her bleak, wry short stories (written between 1978 and her suicide in 1986) at times feels prescient. The title story, with its character who “puts a frame around everything I see” – reacting to a street attack by filming it – feels très 2021. But the indifference or nihilism of her protagonists also feels very of its “blank generation” era. Suzuki tends to gaze, dead-eyed, at humanity from a distance, finding…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 416 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Lynette Noni Publisher Hodder & Stoughton It takes an impressive amount of skill to set your book in a horrific prison, toss in a killer disease sweeping through its inmates and then add some deadly, Hunger Games-esque trials without making the whole thing so bleak that your readers give up entirely. Fortunately Lynette Noni has just about managed to avoid this pitfall – although you may still want to look at pictures of kittens every few chapters to cheer yourself up. Set in a world torn between warring royal families, The Prison Healer focuses on its titular doctor, Kiva, who tries her best to patch up her fellow inmates while struggling to stay alive herself. A spate of new arrivals – including…

RELEASED 6 MAY 368 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Rivers Solomon Publisher Merky Books The Black Lives Matter movement of recent years has taught us many things: most importantly, that awareness is just the first step. All the shock and solidarity in the world doesn’t matter if nothing actually changes. Over the course of Sorrowland, protagonist Vern comes to the same hard realisation. The United States is, she reflects, “a catalogue of known wrongs”, but each brutality is simply followed by another. The albino child of black parents, she has been raised in a separatist cult that’s not what it seems. Pregnant and on the run, Vern battles to survive while learning more about how the world works, and the uncanny strength growing inside her. Any story that namechecks racialised atrocities…

THINGS ARE RARELY what they seem in the kaleidoscopic world of cult spy show The Avengers. So it’s no surprise that original star Linda Thorson’s return to the franchise is set to upend your expectations As the plucky Tara King, Thorson stood pistol to brolly with Patrick Macnee’s John Steed, battling threats to British security. Now she joins Big Finish’s range of audio adventures based on TV Comic’s Avengers strips of the ‘60s. But she’s not reprising the role of Tara; instead she’s playing Russian grandmother Tatiana, who’s masquerading as Gertrude, aunt of Steed’s boss Mother. Never trust anyone in the spy game… “I loved playing Tatiana,” Thorson tells Red Alert. “She’s so over the top. She’s such an imperious and outrageous character, and Big Finish have made Gertrude, who…

WITH HER 2012 NOVEL SHADOW And Bone, Leigh Bardugo introduced readers to a world of magic, monsters and drama. The tale spawned two other bestsellers – Siege And Storm and Ruin And Rising – as well as the Six Of Crows duology. The property always seemed poised to get adapted by a studio, network or streaming service. Inevitably, Netflix scooped it up, before securing Eric Heisserer (Arrival, Bird Box) as showrunner. Heisserer was already acquainted with the title, having discovered it after making a New Year’s resolution to indulge in more pleasure reading. “The last 12 books I had read prior to Six Of Crows were all for possible adaptations,” he tells SFX. “You go in with a work brain that is constantly analysing what you are doing. I reached…

Which of your TV episodes are you most proud of? I’m equally proud of all 13 episodes. What’s your favourite scene/moment from your episodes? The scenes I performed with Richard Wilson, a person, actor and director for whom I have huge respect. What’s your fondest memory from filming the series? Witnessing the brilliance, humility and honesty of our make-up designer, Davy Jones. An extraordinarily gifted artist and beautiful human being. What’s it like being an action figure? It makes me feel small.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | 15 | DVD/download Across the globe a million “doors” appear – inexplicable manifestations with the power to send people elsewhere. Portal takes a portmanteau approach to this hook, its linked vignettes showcasing everyone from vanishing schoolkids to scientific research teams. Given the shifting focus it’s hard to invest in the characters, while the elliptical storytelling is more concerned with mood than explanation. But there’s a palpable sense of high-weirdness and some arresting images (like murderous petals). Extras None.…

RELEASED 26 APRIL 1988 | 12 | Blu-ray BLU-RAY DEBUT Was anyone crying out for Short Circuit 2 to get the Special Edition treatment? 88 Films’ artwork is lovely, but the actual extras are minimal. As for the film… Yes, Johnny 5 is a very cute robot, and his proto-Chappie adventures doing crimes are charming, but it’s impossible to get past the fact that his BFF is Fisher Stevens in brownface. Swap him for an Indian actor and this would be delightful. As it is: yikes. Extras Commentary; Stevens profile; trailer; 80-page booklet; poster; six art cards.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | TBC | SVOD Director Corinna Faith Cast Rose Williams, Charlie Carrick, Gbemisola Ikumelo, Theo Barklem-Biggs SHUDDER Another ghostly horror set in an empty hospital? Oh goody. Thankfully, it’s not a derelict mental institution, and there’s a solid rationale behind this one. The Power unfolds in London in January 1974, during a period of regular power blackouts. Rose Williams plays Val, a novice nurse put on the night shift after most of the patients are evacuated. Cue spooky goings-on in the dark: a candle blown out; something bodily pulling her back. The period is evoked in unvarnished fashion: the other nurses are no angels, the hospital an arena of casual, petty cruelty. The sound design is unnerving, all wind wail and laboured breathing, To a degree,…

RELEASED 26 APRIL 2021 | 15 | DVD/download Guy Pearce plays a cool, renegade exorcist who smokes and swears a lot in this tropey but fun demonic horror that plays like a buddy cop movie. His charge is wet-behind-the-ears new recruit Daniel (Vadhir Derbez) who’s trying to save the soul of Charlie (Brady Jenness), a young boy who butchered his own family, possibly while possessed. It’s predictable but enjoyable, mostly because of Pearce’s anarchic turn. Nonsense, but we’d love to see this become a True Detective-style franchise. Extras None.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2005 | 18 | Blu-ray Director Yudai Yamaguchi Cast Issey Takahashi, Aoba Kawai, Kenichi Kawasaki, Shôichirô Masumoto BLU-RAY DEBUT How best to describe Meatball Machine? Imagine a group of actors covered in so much latex they can barely move, hitting each other with giant rubber drills. Now add in some creepily sexual imagery and more tentacles than a Cthulhu convention, and film it all on the world’s cheapest digicam. The central premise is that alien parasites have travelled to Earth to use humans as hosts in their gladiatorial “games”. Young Yôji (Issey Takahashi) falls for Sachiko (Aoba Kawai), but when he takes her home they’re both mutated into “Necroborgs” by the aliens and forced to do battle. Meatball Machine is messy, dumb, occasionally viscerally repellant but also…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD Directors Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead Cast Anthony Mackie, Jamie Dornan, Katie Aselton, Ally Ioannides New Orleans is a city with a storied history, which makes it the perfect location for this unusual time travel thriller. A new designer drug is sweeping the streets. Paramedic Steve (Anthony Mackie) takes it and discovers that it allows a haphazard form of time travel. When his colleague Dennis’s daughter vanishes, Steve suspects the drug is involved and sets out to find her Directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead proved adept at reinventing old tropes with previous films The Endless and Resolution, and so it goes here. Synchronic feels more like horror than science fiction. The visual effects recall the nightmarish surrealism of Annihilation and the city’s…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | TBC | Download Director Neil Marshall Cast Charlotte Kirk, Sean Pertwee, Steven Waddington, Joe Anderson Dog Soldiers/The Descentdirector Neil Marshall’s latest closes with a title card about the estimated numbers of women killed by witchhunters, but don’t expect a sober, earnest affair. This gruellingly over-extended 17th century horror feels like the sort of lurid shocker Hammer might have made, if censorship standards were as they are now. Sean Pertwee, resplendent in a very silly hat, plays Moorcroft, a Witchfinder called in after plague widow Grace (Charlotte Kirk, whose Aussie twang feels weirdly anachronistic) fights off the local squire’s rapey attentions. He subjects her to four days of grim torture, but Grace somehow maintains both her resolve and her just-stepped-out-of-a salon tumbling locks. All this female…

RELEASED 26 APRIL 1986 | 15 | Blu-ray Directors Brendan Faulkner, Thomas Doran, Eugenie Joseph Cast Felix Ward, Dan Scott, Alec Nemser, Maria Pechukas BLU-RAY DEBUT Outlandish monsters like an Asian woman who transforms into a spider are the main draw of this Evil Dead-ish effort, in which bickering pals mess with a Ouija board in a deserted mansion. The rubberfest is oddly interrupted by cutaways to a powdery-faced, Dracula-accented cove mouthing grandiloquent waffle, and a hook-handed werecat who’s forever peering around corners and through windows at the cast. All becomes clear once you learn that after screaming arguments and crew exits, producer Mike Lee hired another director for reshoots comprising over 50% of the final cut. This isn’t all bad news: the inserts provide a couple of memorable moments…

UK Netflix, streaming now US TNT, finished Showrunner Graeme Manson Cast Jennifer Connelly, Sean Bean, Alison Wright, Daveed Diggs EPISODES 2.01-2.10 Not so much high concept as long concept, Snowpiercer season one powered through its central conceit: Snowpiercer is a train, around 1,000 carriages long (varying according to plot twists), continually lapping a frozen, post-apocalyptic Earth, keeping alive the remnants of humanity. The upper classes are at the luxurious front, with some unticketed stowaways in the tail (the “tailies”) treated like dirt. There is, of course, class war, and season one ended with the tailies in control, but with Snowpiercer’s original, despotic creator, Joseph Wilford (Sean Bean) – previously presumed dead – re-appearing and latching onto Snowpiercer’s tail. Season two feels a little like a plot-driven attempt to give the…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 468 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Leone Ross Publisher Faber This is the sort of book that gets reviewers wheeling out words like “smorgasbord” or “cornucopia”. We’ll go with “kaleidoscopic”. This One Sky Day is a feast for the senses – and the heart – in novel form, full of colour, taste, smell and sensation, described in gloriously rich prose. The archipelago of Popisho is a fantasy Caribbean: sun, sea, magic, a history of slavery and speech peppered with Jamaican Patois, from broughtupsy (manners) and gyal (girl) to obeah (witchcraft) – no surprise, given that Leone Ross grew up in Jamaica. We follow the central characters – a healer who can’t heal herself, a rebel who feels physical pain when he hears lies, a chef who can change…

RELEASED 27 APRIL 384 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Kristen O’Neal Publisher Quirk Books It would suck to be a werewolf. The pain of changing form; the inconvenience of having to lock yourself up; the cats you’d eat if you escaped. And so debut author Kristen O’Neal has done something rather logical: comparing the furry shitshow of having to turn into a wolf once a month to a selection of real-life chronic illnesses. Her narrator is Priya, a wannabe doctor forced to leave university after contracting Lyme disease. In need of support, she joins an online group for other poorly folk around the world – not realising that one of them, Brigid, who’s evasive about the source of her illness, is actually a werewolf. Accompanied by some incredibly entertaining online discussions…

RELEASED 29 APRIL 258 pages | Hardback Author Amy Ratcliffe Publisher Abrams Go behind the scenes on Disney’s Star Wars theme park with this impressively detailed coffee table tome. There are over 300 illustrations, from first ideas to final build. Design teams from Walt Disney Imagineering and Lucasfilm have contributed blueprints, sketches and concept art. It’s not just the design of Black Spire Outpost – a spaceport located on the remote Outer Rim planet Batuu – you see here, but also the ambitious rides. Over 4,000 people worked on creating Galaxy’s Edge. Creatives explain the process via in-depth interviews. The as-yet-unseen, two-night interactive experience Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser is also covered.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 560 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook Author Ciannon Smart Publisher Hot Key Books Author Ciannon Smart has successfully soaked her Jamaican heritage into this debut novel, bathing her pages in the culture, patois and descriptions of that beautiful island. Witches Steeped In Gold isn’t actually set in Jamaica, mind you: this is a magic-filled fantasy world stuffed to the rafters with powerful women and narrated by two witches. Jazmyne is the daughter of a hateful dictator she’s desperate to see unthroned, while Iraya, who begins the book in jail, is the rightful heir to the kingdom. It’s not long before she escapes and embarks upon a mission of revenge, but will Jazmyne join her cause? Annoyingly, both women are written in the first person in their own chapters, which…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 368 pages | Paperback/ebook Author AJ Elwood Publisher Titan Books Say the word “fairy” and there are two possible images that arise: the beautiful flower folk, as pictured in famous hoax the Cottingley fairies, and also an older, darker kind – the kind that sour your milk and steal your children. Which is more likely? And, of course, are fairies real at all? That last point is the killer one in this lacklustre novel, which tells the story of Rose, a young woman back from university who takes work at a care home to make ends meet. She’s introduced to Charlotte Favell, a meanspirited resident who slowly allows Rose to read her collection of letters, written in the 1920s by an elderly Cottingley man, describing the fairies…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher DC/Black Label Writer John Ridley Artists Giussepi Camuncoli, Andrea Cucchi ISSUES 1-3 This five-issue miniseries looks at the long and peculiar history of the DC universe from the perspective of some of its more marginalised heroes. Penned by 12 Years A Slave screenwriter John Ridley, it unpicks the racial politics lurking beneath the lore. Each issue focuses on a different narrator (in 1-3: Black Lightning; Mal and Karen Duncan, who share issue two; and Katana). It moves through different time periods too, starting in the ’70s. We see major events like Crisis On Infinite Earths and the death of Superman retold from the point of view of these relatively minor players, while gaining insight into their home lives and the day-to-day problems they face that the…

RELEASED 23 APRIL Reviewed on PlayStation 4 Also on Xbox One, PC Publisher Square Enix VIDEOGAME Yoko Taro is known for his offbeat approach to JRPG genre conventions, and this cult classic remastered for modern systems is a prime example. For instance, Nier acknowledges that it is a little odd that one of your comrades is running around in her underwear – but she has her reasons. A straightforward tale of a lad attempting to harness terrible power to save his sister soon reveals it’s more than just that old chestnut. Yoko’s quirky sensibility extends to narrative structure too: hitting the credits for the first time, while telling a complete story, doesn’t give you everything. Replaying the last act offers more time with your engagingly eclectic party, plus new scenes…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 240 minutes | Vinyl/CD/download Publisher Big Finish AUDIO DRAMA One of classic Who’s more soap opera moments comes when Sara Kingdom reveals that (spoilers!) Bret Vyon is her brother during 1966’s “The Daleks’ Master Plan”. If you found this confession just as exciting as the story’s quest to stop the Time Destructor, Dalek Universe could be the saga for you. Mining the back catalogue of Terry Nation Dalek stories for all its worth, this first set of three hour-long stories explores the Kingdom dynasty even further. Fourth Doctor Big Finish companion Anya Kingdom and fellow Space Security Service agent Mark Seven – an android who first appeared in 1966’s The Dalek Outer Space Book – encounter the Tenth Doctor, who’s once again mysteriously found himself displaced in…

My parents inexplicably splashing out on Sky TV in the early ’90s was a joy. Not only was I able to record repeats of old Doctor Who on UK Gold, but I suddenly had a world of new shows available. After the success of The X-Files, new sci-fi series such as Space: Above And Beyond were offered on Sky One. But one in particular would stay with me forever: Earth 2. Before Kathryn Janeway beamed into the hearts of geeks globally as “the first female captain”, another one beat her out of the shuttle bay doors. Devon Adair, played by Debrah Farentino, appeared on US TV on 6 November 1994 – over two months before the USS Voyager began her fateful journey. A co-production between Spielberg’s Amblin and Universal, Earth…

CHRONICLING WHAT HAPPENS to Boba Fett and the captive Han Solo during their journey from Cloud City to Tatooine between The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi, new comic War Of The Bounty Hunters was initially conceived by Charles Soule when he began writing Marvel’s flagship Star Wars title in 2018. “It came out of a larger brainstorm session I had about how the main characters needed to change and evolve between Empire and Jedi, and this story was right there as part of that,” says Soule, who is thrilled to be writing a series starring the armoured freebooter “Getting to play with every toy in the Star Wars toybox during this time period while telling a story with cool twists and surprises, starring Boba Fett, is definitely…

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Is the transformation into the older version of your characters an enjoyable or tedious process? Daniels: The old Walter is a two-hour make-up. It’s not that much fun any more. It was kind of fun for about five minutes. That, in combination with the super-suits… I don’t know if anyone else has talked about the super-suits and how awful they are. I mean, they look amazing. I love my Brainwave suit, but it’s really vile to wear. I had it on for about five hours yesterday doing a sequence where I’m stuck inside someone’s brain. It was torture. It was so hot! The sweat through the muscle suit… they don’t breathe at all. It’s great weight loss. How much does the wardrobe inform your performance? Bibb: Comic books are not…

How would you describe Kirigan’s relationship with Alina? It’s interesting, because Kirigan’s the most powerful and the most knowing character in the world. He knows that Alina is something extremely special and that she’s the antithesis to him in a lot of ways. He has the power to control the darkness, and she has the power to control the light. He knows that she’s important to him, which is an interesting jumping-off point for two characters to meet. And Alina is looking at him thinking, “I know nothing about this man. He’s completely mysterious to me. I don’t know whose side he is on. I don’t know if he has my best interests at heart, but I know he knows more than me about what’s going on with me.” What’s…

CONTRARY TO POPULAR belief, not all clones are created equal. Although the Clone Troopers all emerged from the same Petri dishes on Kamino, their DNA a photocopy of Jango Fett’s, The Clone Wars TV show revealed that they had radically different personalities – and a penchant for distinguishing themselves with extremely questionable hairstyle choices. Some of Star Wars’ clones break the mould even further than mohawks and dye jobs, however. When the long-awaited final season of The Clone Wars debuted on Disney+ last year, we were introduced to an elite special unit of commandos unlike anything we’d seen before. Hunter, Crosshair, Wrecker and Tech – aka Clone Force 99 – were all born from the same primordial soup as their Clone brothers, but freak mutations had given them unique attributes…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 1967 | U | Blu-ray/DVD/download Director Don Sharp Cast Burl Ives, Troy Donahue, Lionel Jeffries, Terry-Thomas BLU-RAY DEBUT As the real-life space race accelerated, cinema retreated into Victorian nostalgia with this loosest of adaptations of Jules Verne’s 1865 novel From The Earth To The Moon. It’s parlour room sci-fi, all frock coats, whiskers and mahogany, but producer Harry Alan Towers – an inveterate chancer – is chasing another kind of box office success: whimsical, star-stuffed period romps like Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines. Familiar faces like Burl Ives, Gert Fröbe and Britain’s very own gap-toothed rapscallion Terry-Thomas populate this tale of lunar rivalry, elevating it to charming guff, at least. It’s an ambitious movie by Towers’s penny-pinching standards. Panavision makes the most of the film’s…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | 12 | Download/VOD Auggie shamelessly riffs on Her by having its central character, Felix (Richard Kind), fall in love with an AI woman – a pretty hologram (Christen Harper) he can have cyber-sex with. Yes, she’s half his age, and yes, it’s creepy. Ick factor aside, the cast here give their all, but there’s simply not enough plot for 88 minutes. Also, one man’s mid-life crisis is much like another: it would have been better focused on Felix’s wife (Susan Blackwell), who gets a far meatier storyline in which she’s tempted by a co-worker.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | 15 | Download Director Jennifer Sheridan Cast Sophie Rundle, Matt Stokoe, Olive Gray, Nathan McMullen “What would you sacrifice for someone you love?” asks this confident debut feature from Brit director Jennifer Sheridan. While the title evokes Love, Rosie the film has more in common with It Comes At Night (which Sheridan watched in the lead-up to filming) and Let The Right One In; it’s intimate, delicate and ever so slightly bleak. Rose (Sophie Rundle) and Sam (Matt Stokoe, who also wrote the screenplay) live isolated in the woods, surviving off the land away from human contact. Rose is ill, but Sam does everything he can to try to make a life for her. The nature of Rose’s sickness is part of the mystery which…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | 15 | Blu-ray/VOD Making a film is tough enough, but finding the money to make one is something else entirely. Shot over five years, this documentary follows director Justin McConnell as he tries to drum up support for his next movie, with input from genre faves like Guillermo del Toro and the late George Romero. A bracingly honest glimpse into indie filmmaking. Extras Three commentaries; deleted scenes; extended interviews; two McConnell docs; 13 shorts.…

RELEASED 26 APRIL 1990 | 18 | Blu-ray BLU-RAY DEBUT This well-intentioned but dopey US college slasher justifies its existence with one moment of gloopy practical gore, when the undead former “pledge” who’s been making Hell Week an actual, y’know, hell week stickily emerges from inside a frat boy. It’s jaw-dropping. But then it’s over, and so’s the fun. The rest of the horror comes from how physically revolting teenagers are: not as interesting as the filmmakers think it is. Extras Four interviews; locations featurette; trailer.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | PG | Blu-ray (4K/standard)/DVD/download Directors Pete Docter, Kemp Powers Cast Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Graham Norton, Rachel House Making a family movie about midlife crises, death, metaphysics and jazz is a bold move – even for Pixar – but as the animation studio proved with WALL-E and Inside Out, it’s never better than when it’s pushing the envelope. From its stunning, photo-real New York to the soft-focus Great Before (managed by sentient line drawings who look like an Eastern European cartoon from the ’70s), Soul is yet another Pixar masterclass in visual innovation. While kids will be more interested in the talking cat than the themes of lives unfulfilled and second chances, the film should be applauded for asking some big questions – in a…

If you bought Arrow’s 2016 Blu-ray, whether to upgrade DONNIE DARKO (4K Blu-ray, 26 April) comes down mainly to the UHD format – there are no new on-disc extras, with excellent 85-minute doc Deus Ex Machina and a host of archive bonuses carried over. Included is the longer Director’s Cut, which reinstates worthwhile scenes but whose use of on-screen text some feel diminishes the enigma. It comes with a 100-page book which reprints an in-depth Kelly interview from 2001’s The Donnie Darko Book, fold-out poster, and six postcards. Thanks to its recent BBC Two run THE TERROR (Blu-ray/DVD/download, 3 May) will be on iPlayer for the rest of 2021, but if you must have a copy for your shelf you can also buy the disc. This tale of a 19th…

UK Prime Video, streaming now US Starz, finished airing Showrunner Charles H Eglee Cast Ricky Whittle, Emily Browning, Ian McShane, Yetide Badaki EPISODES 3.01-3.10 AmericanGods has had a troubled life. Showrunners have come and gone, actors have complained about their treatment (and been fired), and for its third and final year, an entire story arc had to be hacked out at the last minute. That’s because it starred Marilyn Manson, whose allegedly abusive behaviour hit the headlines just after his first scenes had aired. Remaining footage of his character was swiftly snipped. And it shows: scenes don’t quite gel, dialogue leads nowhere. Regardless, it was the correct decision. The good news is that American Gods is still a fascinating, often gorgeous experience – even if, at times, it ricochets too…

RELEASED 22 APRIL 357 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Mizuki Tsujimura Publisher Doubleday This Japanese bestseller is the story of Kokoro, a girl who has been traumatised by run-ins with her classmates and now refuses to leave her house. Then her bedroom mirror glows and she passes into a magic castle, meeting six other Japanese kids who’ve been summoned the same way. A girl in a wolf mask tells them they can visit the castle for nearly a year, and if one of them finds a hidden key, it will grant any wish. But the castle has rules; if they’re broken, a wolf will gobble them up. In Japan, hundreds of thousands of people shut themselves away like Kokoro does (they’re often referred to as hikkikomori). Lonely Castle highlights this issue;…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 588 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Lavie Tidhar Publisher Head of Zeus Now this book exists, it feels absurd it didn’t exist sooner. As editor Lavie Tidhar points out in his introduction, no mainstream publisher has done a global SF anthology since the ’80s. Tidhar has already attempted to redress this with his five-volume small press series The Apex Book Of World SF, and now follows that up with this hefty, beautifully presented collection: 26 stories, most from the last few years, representing 23 different countries. It’s an excellent sampler and a delight in itself. Most of the stories have been published before, meaning Tidhar has been able to pick the cream of all the SF that’s come out recently, and the standard is very high. Its eclectic…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook Author Caroline Hardaker Publisher Angry Robot Norah has never seen a real bird. In the near-ish future dystopia she was born into, pollution and disease have wiped out nearly everything, including humans. But there’s still hope! Definitely-not-at-all-creepy genetics company Easton Grove offers a bespoke organ-growing programme, creating replacement parts for paying clients. Norah can only afford the basic package, though, which means coupling up with a genetically compatible bloke and taking care of their “ovum organi” at home. Inevitably, her relationship with the being (and with her fiancé) gets weird, and then it all goes a bit ontological. Author Caroline Hardaker makes the reader do much of the initial work, offering hints and half explanations for what’s going on and leaving the finer…

RELEASED 13 MAY 496 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Suyi Davies Okungbowa Publisher Orbit Books The Kingdom Of Benin, located in what is now southern Nigeria, endured for 700 years. So why, Nigerian SFF writer Suyi Davies Okungwoba asked himself on a visit to Benin City to see his parents in 2016, did so many of the stories he heard about the old days focus on the Kingdom’s troubled relationship with the acquisitive British Empire, which annexed the region in 1897? This is why the author’s Nameless Republic trilogy anchors itself in older stories of West Africa. So far, so intriguing. But what really sets this opening volume apart is the way Okungwoba so clearly has the writerly chops to use this starting point to make merry with the tropes of…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Rebellion Writers Ted Cowan, Jerry Siegel Artist Reg Bunn COLLECTION Billed as “the world’s most sinister crook”, as if he’s some twisted carnival attraction, there’s something uniquely freakish about the Spider, whose early exploits in Lion are reprinted here. He arrives fully formed and origin-free, all goblin ears and widow’s peak, dressed in an ink-black leotard. “My daring and genius will achieve the impossible!” he cackles, never short of ego. One early caption calls him “the spider man” but he’s an altogether ickier proposition than Marvel’s hero. With an outright villain as the protagonist, the stories play as grand-scale cops and robbers. Rival supervillains soon enter the mix, allowing us to root for the Spider. And there’s a febrile imagination at play: holographic dinosaurs menace New…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Vault Comics Writer Alex Paknadel Artist John Lê ISSUES 1-3 With no bombastic battles thus far, this five-parter is definitely not your usual giant robot comic book. Indeed, the skyscraper-sized mechs themselves – who bear a distinct resemblance to Transformers – are a rather muted presence. The surviving humans in this dystopian world have not only constructed a religion around their mysterious falling to Earth, but have also taken refuge inside their dormant, gargantuan bodies. There’s a beguiling lyrical tone to Alex Paknadel’s script, as he’s more concerned with the moral implications of the story (including intriguingly comparing robotic interactions with humans to the symbiotic relationship between people and bacteria) than the slowly unfolding plot, which centres on the murder of a Giga. A seemingly inexplicable…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Format PC, iOS, Android Publisher Maze Theory VIDEOGAME A found phone is the kicking-off point in Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassins, the “Blink” sequel you didn’t know you needed. It quickly transpires that the phone belongs to Larry (now Lawrence) Nightingale, Sally Sparrow’s sidekick in one of the high points of modern Who, and that Petronella Osgood is looking for him. With Osgood as your irrepressibly perky new messaging buddy and tech backup, you dig through Larry’s phone and gradually uncover a tale of what happened after “Blink” – a story that inevitably leads back to Wester Drumlins and the Weeping Angels. There are some touching moments along the way relating to the impact that the Angels have had on Larry’s life, not to mention some great…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 60 minutes | Vinyl/download Publisher Big Finish AUDIO DRAMA After a Covid-related five-month delay, Big Finish finally caps its contribution to Time Lord Victorious with this epilogue featuring two linked tales. Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor arrives on a space station where Jasmine (Kathryn Drysdale) is held prisoner by murderous entity The Network (Burn Gorman). Some time later, David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor lands on a planet where a team of looters are searching for a powerful weapon. How and why the two tales are connected is gradually revealed. The unusual format is perhaps behind some of the weaknesses in an otherwise solid release. The mystery of the McGann episode is intriguing, but the explanation is rushed through in five minutes of garbled exposition. The Tennant story is more…