Table of contents for July 2021 in SFX

BONE OF CONTENTION Ilona Kosmowsky, email Re: the Shadow And Bone feature in SFX 339. In the beginning of the article you stated that the Grishaverse books from Leigh Bardugo comprise Shadow And Bone, Siege And Storm, Ruin And Rising and the Six Of Crows duology. This is not quite right. You forgot to mention the novels King Of Scars and Rule Of Wolves. They are essentially a sequel to the other books and take place after the civil war, when Nikolai (who was a small protagonist in the other books) is king. I am reading Rule Of Wolves at the moment and Alina and the Darkling have a small part in the book. SFX Thanks for the info, Ilona. In our defence it’s kinda hard to make out the…

Monsters At Work JUNE IS THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY of Monsters, Inc., Pixar’s second theatrical release. Wildly successful, the universe created by directors Pete Docter and David Silverman has never faded from the zeitgeist because of new stories, including prequel Monsters University, several animated shorts, videogames and even theme park rides. Now with the dawn of Disney+, there’s an original animated series too, Monsters At Work, which reunites the original characters of Mike (Billy Crystal), Sulley (John Goodman), and Celia Mae (Jennifer Tilly), with a new crew responsible for helping to retro-fit the scare floor into the laugh floor. Steering the series is veteran animation writer and executive producer Roberts “Bobs” Gannaway, who has previously adapted big Disney theatrical hits like 101 Dalmatians and Lilo & Stitch into successful animated TV…

IF YOU DON’T HAVE A KID, OR A young relative of tween age, you may not be aware of Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society books, illustrated by Carson Ellis. Appealing to readers with a penchant for quirky characters and mystery-filled adventures as investigated by four gifted children, they’ve won a slew of prestigious Young Adult book awards. Because of their narrative vibe, which rests somewhere between Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and A Series Of Unfortunate Events, the books were ripe for colourful adaptation – which is exactly what screenwriters Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (Clash Of The Titans) have done for their Disney+ series The Mysterious Benedict Society. Having received the blessing of Stewart and Ellis, the writers embarked on their first television series with the intention…

FOR FANS OF BATMAN comics, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween (1996-1997) remains one of the all-time great story runs. It inspired Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy and countless other depictions. Now it’s getting an animated adaptation, released in two parts. Batman: The Long Halloween, Part One drops in June, with Jensen Ackles (Supernatural) voicing Bruce Wayne/Batman, Billy Burke as James Gordon and Josh Duhamel (Jupiter’s Legacy) as Harvey Dent, in a story exploring the crime families of Gotham City and the origin story of Two-Face. Despite his long-time career as an animation scribe, screenwriter Tim Sheridan admits to Red Alert that tackling The Long Halloween caused him “tons of fear and trepidation” because of how revered it is among Batman fans. “We went in knowing that…

IT’S AMAZING TO think that in 2017, things were looking fairly bleak for actor Temuera Morrison, career-wise. “No one was ringing, if you know what I mean,” the actor behind Boba Fett tells Red Alert from his base in New Zealand. “Things were pretty humbling.” Thankfully, the 60-year-old’s fortunes have changed considerably since then. First there was Aquaman, where Morrison starred as Arthur Curry’s father, and then came a somewhat unexpected call from Lucasfilm. But more on that later. Also during that time was Occupation. In 2018, newbie director Luke Sparke cast Morrison in his low-budget Australian-set SF actioner, a movie that, while hardly setting the box office alight, did well enough on streaming to spawn a follow-up. Occupation: Rainfall is more of the same, as the human race fights…

Will we see a different Loki now he’s no longer in Thor’s shadow? Loki needs to evolve. The cycle was: Loki is trusted, he betrays, he becomes a villain, he learns to trust again, he’s betrayed, he becomes trusting again, he can be trusted again, then he betrays or feels betrayed. It’s just this endless cycle of trust and betrayal and resistance. And the character is essentially singing the same song over and over and over again. He’s trapped on a wheel of repetition, a compulsion to repeat the same damage, the same story. We are breaking that record. We’re releasing him from that trap. In this story, we’re showing that he can change, that he can grow. What does the Time Variance Authority want with Loki? If you have…

A LOVE LETTER TO the summers of youth, set in a seaside town on the Italian Riviera, Luca takes the viewer to a beautiful holiday location infused with childhood nostalgia. There’s pasta, gelato, scooter rides and lots of jumping off cliffs into the murky green ocean below. Oh, and Luca and Alberto happen to be teenage sea monsters, so you know it’s going to get complicated… Did you always want a fantastical element to this story? When I develop things I always think about two elements: the fantastical and a lot of imagination, and then the heart of the story and more of a personal relationship or something that I experienced in my life. La Luna (2011), the short, it was very similar – I thought about my family. What…

ALTHOUGH THE NEWEST instalment in the Purge franchise arrives amid a global pandemic and ongoing political unrest, filming was completed in February 2020, prior to Covid-19 being declared a pandemic, and long before the siege of the United States Capitol. Despite that, series creator James DeMonaco says that the latest movie about the murderous yearly ritual of Purge night is very relevant, finally arriving in 2021. “People who have seen an early cut are amazed that the film was completed over a year ago,” says DeMonaco, who serves as producer and also wrote the script of The Forever Purge, the fifth and supposedly final entry in the series. “I think that the film’s prescience will really frighten and grip audiences and make them ask and answer some difficult questions, even…

Before Clash you worked on Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger. Was that the first time you crossed paths with Harryhausen? Yes – and his notorious producer, Charlie Schneer! He was a character. Ray was a beautiful man, quiet, unassuming and just a very nice person. He was a genius. How did you find him as a collaborator? He had a reputation as a one-man band… He was, for sure. He knew exactly what he wanted and what he needed, and of course with the kind of work that he did he had to be in charge and feel like he was directing it, because he had to use it afterwards to put his critters in. Ray always took the credit for everything. If you look I didn’t have…

⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! 18 | 93 minutes ⏵ Director Darren Lynn Bousman ⏵ Cast Chris Rock, Samuel L Jackson, Max Minghella, Marisol Nichols John Kramer, the Jigsaw Killer, is dead. He’s been dead for a long time. But if the Saw franchise taught us anything, it’s that there’s always someone else willing to grab a pig mask and a soldering iron to continue his trap-based reign of terror. This time around, a masked killer is targeting dirty cops – and sending Detective Zeke Banks (Chris Rock) cute little gift-wrapped clues while they’re at it. Director Darren Lynn Bousman directed Saw II to IV, so he nails the grimy, industrial aesthetic, and even resurrects the fast-moving quick-cut visuals that made the original movies look so, well, like Saw movies. But…

⏵ RELEASED 9 JULY 12A | 103 minutes ⏵ Director Zaida Bergroth ⏵ Cast Alma Pöysti, Krista Kosonon, Shanti Roney, Robert Enckell It’s tough to watch this biopic of Finnish artist Tove Jansson – creator of the Moomins – without cringing at what the woman herself, who was deeply private, might have thought of it. Instead of focusing upon the growing popularity of her hippo-like forest creatures over the 20th century, it details her bohemian lifestyle instead; Jansson had affairs with, among others, a married man and a female theatre director. She would have been mortified to see her sex life on film, and it’s hard to look past that. The good news, however, is that at least this love triangle is handled with sensitivity: there’s no sense of exploitation…

⏵ RELEASED 18 JUNE 18 | 89 minutes ⏵ Director Chris Baugh ⏵ Cast Jack Rowan, Nigel O’Neill, Louisa Harland, Michael Hough Ever heard of Abhartach? There are those who suggest that this Irish legend about a magical dwarf (or, in some versions, a blood-drinking chieftain) who keeps returning from beyond the grave inspired Bram Stoker. It certainly inspired this film, set and shot in Northern Ireland and taking its name from a Pogues song. Noughts + Crosses star Jack Rowan plays the hapless Eugene, who, as part of a road crew working on a bypass, knocks down a pile of stones which – so folklore has it – keeps Abhartach imprisoned. Bad news for the residents of his rural small town. To its credit, County Hell has an original…

UK/US Netflix, streaming now ⏵ Showrunners Jim Mickle, Beth Schwartz ⏵ Cast Christian Convery, Nonso Anozie, Adeel Akhtar, Dania Ramirez, Stefania LaVie Owen, Aliza Vellani EPISODES 1.01-1.08 It’s very strange to see a big, lavish fantasy TV series respond to the pandemic while we’re still living through it. Shows like this take years of development, and indeed Sweet Tooth has been in the works since 2018 – and it goes back yet further, as it’s based on the acclaimed Vertigo comic by Jeff Lemire, which started in 2009. But it wasn’t until April 2020 that Netflix acquired it from Hulu, and it was shot in New Zealand when restrictions there eased – so it’s inevitably coloured by knowledge of the real world. It opens with a deadly flu-like illness raging…

EXTRAS ⏵ RELEASED 21 JUNE 1980 | 15 | Blu-ray ⏵ Director Sammo Hung ⏵ Cast Sammo Hung, Leung Suet-mei, Chung Fat, Huang Ha BLU-RAY DEBUT Horror comedy addicts, get ready to add to your collection. Encounter Of The Spooky Kind deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as movies like Ghostbusters and Evil Dead II, not least because it probably inspired both of them. Sammo Hung’s pioneering mash-up of gore and gags was a huge success, transforming the burly martial artist into a household name in Hong Kong. The film almost certainly found its way into Sam Raimi’s screening room, with direct homages popping up in Evil Dead II and Army Of Darkness. Like those movies, Encounters shoves a charismatic lead into a slim plot, allowing dark forces…

EXTRAS ⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1988 | 18 | Blu-ray BLU-RAY DEBUT Ignore that title: Killing Birds (as it’s also known) has no link to Zombie Flesh Eaters (aka Zombie 2). Students in search of a rare woodpecker (!) stay in a Louisiana house where a Vietnam vet killed his wife, and are menaced by zombies (usually one) that can smash through walls in this Italian horror. Kills so random that they surprise (one guy catches fire), and a decent score, don’t make up for the incoherence. Extras Commentary; four interviews; alternate titles; trailer.…

EXTRAS ⏵ RELEASED 28 JUNE 2020 | 15 | DVD/download Climate change and late-stage capitalism are pretty scary. But do they make good horror movie villains? No. For its first three-quarters, Unearth is a depressing drama about poverty-stricken farmers. After an oil company sets up a fracking machine, everything gets even worse, but in non-supernatural ways. Then, finally, there’s a glimpse of body horror – but not really. It’s well-intentioned, a warning that fracking’s bad for the environment, but didn’t we already know that? Extras None.…

EXTRAS ⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2008 | 15 | Blu-ray ⏵ Director Joel Anderson ⏵ Cast Rosie Traynor, David Pledger, Martin Sharpe, Talia Zucker BLU-RAY DEBUT This slow-burn, faintly Lynchian Aussie chiller’s cult following laud it as one of the scariest films ever made. An overly bold claim, but it tickles your neck hairs alright. The ingenuity of its construction impresses. It tells the story of a small-town family whose daughter drowned in the local lake; her spirit then appears to haunt their home, captured in grainy video whose indistinctness makes it all the more chilling. It not only uses a documentary’s visual grammar but was shot like one, with no scripted dialogue and the actors improvising their responses to interview questions. An array of recording media was used, from…

⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! 592 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook ⏵ Author Tasha Suri ⏵ Publisher Orbit Books You don’t get much romance in epic fantasy. What with all the trekking and questing and world-saving, there just isn’t time for meet-cutes or pining or cataloguing every not-so-accidental arm brush. Right? Wrong, says the opening volume of Tasha Suri’s follow-up to her award-winning Books Of Ambha duology; in fact, why can we not have both? In this lush fantasy version of medieval India, an imprisoned princess can take on an evil emperor and also make space in her schedule to ogle her maidservant’s excitingly muscly arms. Said maidservant can be both a secret acolyte of powerful, forbidden magic and still sometimes forget how to breathe when she makes eye contact with the infuriatingly…

⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! 432 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ⏵ Author Joanne M Harris ⏵ ublisher Gollancz Once, there was an author who started to write stories on social media. She tweeted her tales out, piece by piece, until she had enough for a book, and engaged the services of an illustrator of some fame to bring her characters to beautiful visual life. Finally, the book was ready and the writer called it Honeycomb. Okay, we’ll stop trying to be cute now. Joanne M Harris’s latest novel is constructed from 100 short (sometimes very short) stories in the fairy tale tradition. Roughly speaking, this is the saga of the Lacewing King – a cold, capricious being, prone to playing tricks, who may have found his match in the wicked Spider Queen.…

⏵ RELEASED 22 JUNE 300 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook ⏵ Author Alex De Campi ⏵ Publisher Solaris Books As workplace romances go, Evie and Misha’s torrid love affair in Heartbreak Incorporated might be the most ill-advised ever. After taking a mystery office job due to New-York-rent-paying desperation, Evie finds herself working for a professional break-up artist. Misha’s clients are super-wealthy types planning on getting divorced, who hire him (and his team of sexy freelancers) to seduce their partners. A few compromising photos quickly destroy the unwanted spouse’s hopes of a decent settlement. It’s a fun premise with potential for drama, especially when clients start dropping dead, and things get even more interesting when the occult angle kicks in. Then there’s the romance. Without intending the derision this comparison might imply, Alex…

⏵ RELEASED 17 JUNE 480 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook ⏵ Author Hannah Whitten ⏵ Publisher Orbit Books Wolves run through fairy tales, flashing a tooth here, a tail there. But if you pick this up expecting to see familiar motifs popping up, you’ll be disappointed – or possibly pleasantly surprised. There are glimmers of fairy tales: second-born princess Red is to be sacrificed to the Wolf in a magical forest in the hope that he’ll return the world’s captured gods. Your mind can’t help turning to Little Red Riding Hood and Beauty And The Beast. But Hannah Whitten isn’t telling either of those tales. She’s not telling the tale of Snow White and Rose Red, either, although with Neve (the older princess) dressed all in white, and Red in scarlet, it’s…

⏵ RELEASED 1 JULY 496 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ⏵ Author Steven Erikson ⏵ Publisher Bantam Press Steven Erikson’s Malazan books stink. This is not a criticism. They also appear to bleed, shout and, as his characters move through windswept and desolate northern landscapes, induce a sense of being chilled to the marrow. When it comes to crafting visceral grimdark fantasy, Erikson is up there with the best. Accordingly, any new series set in the Malazan universe is to be welcomed. This first volume in the Witness trilogy is set a few years after the final volume in the Book Of The Fallen sequence, The Crippled God. By Erikson’s fantasy standards, it’s a slim volume, but there’s a lot packed in. In part, that’s about the book being trailed as picking…

You’d think the last thing a 10-year-old would want to do on getting home from school was whip out a pad and pen to take notes. But that’s what many of us did in 1983, pretending we were students of the SOLVE Academy. The high-concept of this children’s sci-fi show was ingenious. Captain Zep (“super space detective”, as the foot-tapping theme tune calls him) presents a recording of one of his cases to the students (50 kids in orange robes, with slicked-back hair). They must spot the clues in this week’s outer-space whodunnit, then are given 10 seconds to scribble the solution. Get it right, and they receive an “I SOLVEd it!” badge. At the end, Zep – who sometimes seemed more preoccupied with tea and snacks than crime-solving –…

WHILE SLAINE RECENTLY KISSED his last axe in 2000 AD, Rebellion has a new fantasy hero in Black Beth, who now stars in her own one-shot after appearing in the Scream! & Misty Special. However, the Blas Gallego-drawn sword-maiden actually pre-dates the Celtic warrior by over a decade, having originally been developed for an unpublished comic – also called Scream – in the early 1970s, before being resurrected in the 1988 Scream! Holiday Special. “I was a die-hard Scream! reader and had no idea what a sword-opera strip was doing in a horror book, but it totally won me over all the same,” recalls writer Alec Worley. “I got a bit obsessed with it and wanted to read more. Alas, I never knew the strip was a cancelled IPC project…

PERUSING WRITER/artist Jeff Lemire’s creator-owned comic books, Sweet Tooth isn’t the first one that comes to mind as an easy adaptation for live-action. It’s a post-apocalyptic story about a virus that overtakes humanity (spooky, yes), and creates human/animal hybrids. Gus is one of those hybrids: a little boy with deer ears and antlers. Protected from what’s left of humanity by his father, Gus eventually emerges into the outside world to find more of his kind. Complex for sure, but the concept attracted the eyes of Susan and Robert Downey Jr.’s production company, Team Downey. “When one of our executives put this comic book on my desk, and there’s this deer boy on the cover in a little plaid shirt, I was like, ‘What the heck is this?’” Susan Downey admits…

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What creatures and films were inspirations growing up? There are many famous creature designs that inspired me, from Giger’s Alien to Godzilla and everything in-between. When I saw Predator for the first time, the design blew me away and fired my imagination. I had never seen something like that before. What elements do you look for when creating a hostile creature? There are many different ways of how you can make a creature look hostile and scary, but I found there are three main elements; the teeth, cheekbones and the eyes. The teeth are probably the most important. Actually, “scary-looking teeth” is the most common note I get when I work on a design. I like well-designed teeth, therefore I try to spend a bit more time working on the…

IF YOU WERE A HORROR KID IN THE ’90S, your shelves were probably dominated by one name: RL Stine. Often described as “Stephen King for kids”, the prolific author has spent the past four decades churning out chillers at a terrifying rate, penning over 60 Goosebumps titles, nearly two dozen Point Horrors and, in the US, over 50 instalments of teen horror series Fear Street. The latter, set in the fictional Ohio town of Shadyside, featured a cast of beautiful teenagers getting killed in humorous and imaginative ways. Unlike Point Horror, the series only belatedly made it to UK shores, but it’s arriving in film form this month courtesy of a nostalgia-soaked Netflix movie trilogy overseen by director Leigh Janiak. A super-fan whose own horror credentials include the Scream TV…

BAN VIDEO SADISM NOW!” screamed the cover of the Daily Mail in July 1983, at the height of the furore over so-called “video nasties”. With home video in its early days, not subject to any official control, enterprising independent labels coined it in distributing low-budget horror films using the twin draws of gruesome gore and lurid cover art. The ensuing moral panic saw a total of 72 films at one time or another deemed liable to contravene the Obscene Publications Act, and placed on a list by the Director of Public Prosecutions, putting them at risk of seizure by the police. In 1984, legislation was passed requiring all videos to be officially certified. Censor takes place the following year, when the British Board of Film Classification became responsible for awarding…

ON 12 JUNE 1981, TWO HEROES went whip-to-sword at the American box office. Their respective movies represented not just competing styles of heroism – one noble and toga-clad, the other morally ambiguous in a junglebattered leather jacket – but rival eras of filmmaking, the old guard of cinematic magic flexing against the new. Raiders Of The Lost Ark may have been rooted in the breathless serial storytelling of the 1930s but it teamed George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, the geeks with the golden touch who had redefined the blockbuster with Star Wars and Jaws. Clash Of The Titans, meanwhile, offered the timeless appeal of Greek myth and the stop-motion sorcery of Ray Harryhausen, who had spent a 40-year career chasing the wow he’d felt on first glimpsing King Kong in…

⏵ RELEASED 18 JUNE 12A | 103 minutes ⏵ Director Paul WS Anderson ⏵ Cast Milla Jovovich, Tony Jaa, Ron Perlman, Meagan Good After years of pumping out Resident Evil movies together, writer/director Paul WS Anderson and star/wife Milla Jovovich strike out in a bold new way by, er, making another adaptation of a videogame franchise – in this case, Capcom’s sprawling Monster Hunter. Swapping zombies for giant critters, the aim here is to stay true to the source material while opening things up for those who’ve never touched a controller. The result? A noisy slog, for the most part. Jovovich can certainly still hold the screen, and remains a solid action performer, but the movie is largely content to have her run, jump, shoot and struggle in much the same…

⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 112 minutes ⏵ Director Michael Chaves ⏵ Cast Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Ruairi O’Connor, Sarah Catherine Hook With James Wan these days immersed in the Aquaman movies, he here settles for producer and “Story by” credits while handing the directorial reins to Michael Chaves, whose The Curse Of La Llorona was one of the weaker efforts in the Conjuring universe. Thankfully, this is a step up after that misfire, though the tension dissipates after a strong opening. Unlike its superior predecessors, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It is not an every-trick-in-the-book haunted house movie. It’s instead inspired by the true-life case of Arne Cheyenne Johnson (Ruairi O’Connor), who killed his landlord in 1981 and pleaded demonic possession as his defence in court.…

⏵ RELEASED 17 JUNE 12A | 140 minutes ⏵ Director Taichi Ishidate ⏵ Cast Yui Ishikawa, Daisuke Namikawa, Takehito Koyasu, Kouki Uchiyama Anime is famed for its excesses, and this film is certainly excessive. It’s a sequel to the Violet Evergarden series, and also a definite conclusion. It’s not recommended to newbies – not because it’s hard to follow, but because it presumes a level of investment in the characters stoked by the TV show. It returns to that series’ gorgeous alt-Europe, where Violet is now famed for her achievements as a professional letter-writer for clients throughout society. The focus is on Violet’s enduring feelings for her former army commander, Major Gilbert, long presumed dead. Then she receives some news relating to him; to say more would be spoilerish. Even…

UK/US Netflix, streaming now ⏵ Showrunners Joe Henderson, Ildy Modrovich ⏵ Cast Tom Ellis, Lauren German, Kevin Alejandro, DB Woodside EPISODES 5.09-5.16 What if the Devil was a detective? That was the simple, goofy premise which powered Lucifer in its early years. Although that’s still very much in place, its penultimate season – and particularly this second half – stress-tests the format to breaking point. God (Dennis Haysbert) has descended to Earth to put a stop to the squabbling between his sons Lucifer (Tom Ellis) and twin Michael (also Ellis, obviously, but with an evil turtleneck). It soon becomes clear, however, that he is every bit the disappointing absentee father that Lucifer made him out to be. When God announces his plans to retire, a power vacuum opens up that…

EXTRAS ⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1987 | 12 | Blu-ray ⏵ Producer John Nathan-Turner ⏵ Cast Sylvester McCoy, Bonnie Langford, Sophie Aldred, Kate O’Mara BLU-RAY DEBUT Sylvester McCoy’s first year in the TARDIS finds ’80s Doctor Who at its most pantomime. For many, these four stories mark the nadir of the classic series, a cheap and campy selection, complete with a Ken Dodd cameo, Bonnie Langford’s Mel screaming at the drop of a hat and McCoy playing the spoons on Kate O’Mara’s breasts. And yet… it’s also a season of transition. “Time And The Rani” is the worst regeneration story ever, but the other three at least have their moments. “Paradise Towers” is entertaining fluff – JG Ballard’s High-Rise as reimagined by Children’s BBC. “Delta And The Bannerman” is cheesier…

EXTRAS ⏵ RELEASED 21 JUNE 1969 | 15 | Blu-ray ⏵ Director David Lowell Rich ⏵ Cast Michael Sarrazin, Gayle Hunnicutt, Eleanor Parker, Tim Henry BLU-RAY DEBUT Regularly striking a note of febrile hysteria, this when-felinesattack thriller should by rights have starred Joan Crawford or Bette Davis. The work of expert hands – Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano wrote it; the music’s by Lalo Schifrin – it centres on a San Francisco hairdresser (Gayle Hunnicutt) who pairs up with a client’s estranged nephew (Gayle Hunnicutt) for a scheme to knock off his sickly, mog-loving aunt (Eleanor Parker) and split the inheritance. Sarrazin’s amoral hipster, a smirking pretty boy who spends half the film with his shirt off, feels like a Joe Orton character. The aunt/nephew relationship simmers with barely concealed incestuous…

EXTRAS ⏵ RELEASED 21 JUNE 1987 | 15 | Blu-ray ⏵ Director Peter Wollen ⏵ Cast Tilda Swinton, Bill Patterson, Patrick Bauchau, Ruby Baker BLU-RAY DEBUT This late-’80s oddity, written and directed by activist and film theorist Peter Wollen, finds a young Tilda Swinton in the role of android envoy Friendship, dispatched to Earth from a distant planet. Although her target destination is MIT, she instead lands in battle-scarred Palestine during 1970’s Black September and sparks up a curious friendship with war correspondent Sullivan (Bill Patterson). While every scene echoes ominously with the sound of gunfire, for the most part this is simply a series of conversations as Patterson and Swinton get to know one another. It’s skilfully done, with Wollen’s script working as both a melancholy treatise on mankind’s…

EXTRAS ⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | 15 | DVD/download Imagine how bleak the Final Destination films would be if, instead of all those Rube Goldberg-y traps, the victims just quietly keeled over instead. Now you don’t need to watch Don’t Look Back. Writer/director Jeffrey Reddick – who wrote Final Destination, and doesn’t seem to have had any new ideas since – swaps “the concept of death” for “the concept of karma” as the villain here, but otherwise remakes his own film with all the fun sucked out. Dreary moralising nonsense. Extras None.…

EXTRAS ⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | 12 | Blu-ray (4K/standard)/DVD/download ⏵ Director Adam Wingard ⏵ Cast Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry Is Godzilla vs Kong a bold experiment in avant-garde storytelling, where human characterisation is sacrificed at the altar of a pair of skyscraper-sized beasts? Or is it a tenuous excuse to make sure a pair of Titans get into some heavyweight bouts? We’re plumping for the latter, but who cares about coherent plotting when the pay-off is a big lizard wrestling a gorilla? A step up from its MonsterVerse predecessor King Of The Monsters, Godzilla vs Kong has fun mixing corporate skulduggery, bonkers adventures inside the Hollow Earth, and nods to the back catalogue of Godzilla studio Toho. The Homo sapiens are undeniably…

⏵ RELEASED 24 JUNE 550 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ⏵ Author GR Matthews ⏵ Publisher Solaris Books After years of self publishing, GR Matthews impresses with his first novel for Solaris. It’s the story of an empire in turmoil following the Emperor’s sudden death, and Matthews weaves his tapestry from disparate strands that eventually bind together. General Bordan commands the imperial military; a battle-worn veteran, his hopes for a quiet retirement are dashed by the emerging conflict over the succession. Meanwhile, Kyron is an apprentice magician with the troops transporting the Emperor’s body to the capital before his heir can be crowned. Matthews sets a strong pace that he maintains throughout, while the impressive worldbuilding adds layers to the drama. Kyron faces harassment from the priests of the Holy Flame, who…

⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! 384 pages | Hardback/ebook ⏵ Author Zen Cho ⏵ Publisher Pan Macmillan Everyone has experienced nagging older relatives, but most of the time the sharp words stop when the relative in question is dead. Not so with Jessmyn’s grandmother. Jess never knew her Ah Ma in life, but shortly after her death her voice appears in Jess’s head, and refuses to leave. Jess’s life is in turmoil already, as she and her parents move from America to Malaysia, a country she barely remembers. With no job, no money and no firm plans, Jess is drawn into a world of gods and gangsters – with the violent and vengeful Black Water Sister a particular problem. When she was alive, Ah Ma was the Sister’s medium, channelling the…

⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! 288 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook ⏵ Author Benjamin Percy ⏵ Publisher Hodder & Stoughton Comets colliding with Earth are usually the starting point for post-apocalyptic tales, but Benjamin Percy steers a different course with The Ninth Metal, one that belies his parallel career as a comic book writer. When the comet Cain impacts, it spreads large quantities of an alien metal over vast areas of the Earth’s surface. Dubbed “omnimetal”, it soon becomes the world’s new primary source of power, with knock-on effects on economies, society and even religion. It also alters a young boy in North America, giving him powers that the military is keen to exploit. Unbeknown to them, he may not be the only one of his kind on the planet. Sounds epic? Potentially,…

⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! ⏵ Publisher Image Comics ⏵ Writer/artist James Harren ISSUES 1-3 It’d be easy to look at the “augmented humans battle giant monsters” concept of this new ongoing series and assume we’re in familiar territory. However, the story – by writer/artist James Harren, with colour work by Dave Stewart – doesn’t wait long before pulling the rug out from under the reader, and the potentially standard set-up turns weird, wild and shockingly violent. We start in a world where a virus is changing ordinary people into monstrous kaiju, and the only people that can defeat them are three fighters who can transform themselves into the titanic Ultramega. When a secret from the past comes back to haunt one of the Ultramega, there’s a horrifying showdown. Then the…

⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! ⏵ Publisher DC Comics ⏵ Writer Ram V ⏵ Artist Mike Perkins ISSUES 1-3 DC’s Guardian of the Green has struggled to put down roots since the halcyon days of Alan Moore four decades ago, spawning several short-lived series. Cleverly combining old with new as it introduces a new avatar of the forest in Levi Kamei, while also boasting many callbacks to the classic incarnation, this new 10-issue series will hopefully have a more sustained impact. With the first issue opening with a disturbed Levi haunted by some verdantly vivid dreams as he flies back from India to New York, the Swamp Thing himself is initially a remote, confused presence. He’s then taken out of his usual element of the Louisiana bayou; something is amiss in…

THEY SAY “WRITE WHAT YOU know.” For George Olson, former advertising guy-turned-screenwriter, that meant when he was looking for inspiration for what is now his upcoming supernatural drama SurrealEstate, all he had to do was think back to a former estate agent client. “He told me once about this listing that he had: this big, older house, built in the ’20s. It was a great house, and they were sure that it was really going to sell fast. But the homeowner told him that there was a hitch. Whoever buys the house, they’re also buying ‘Sad Sally,’” Olson dramatically relays to Red Alert. “I asked, ‘Who is Sad Sally?’ And he said that’s the name his daughter came up with for the woman in the old-fashioned nightgown, who sits at…

WHAT DO THEY WANT?” ZACH Dean, writer of The Tomorrow War, considers of the film’s alien threat. “They want to live, just like we want to live. But we’re the means to that end. It’s that simple.” Yes, the world is under attack again – but this time our best hope for the future lies in the past. Time travellers from 2051 arrive to warn the present day that, 30 years from now, the planet is all but lost to an alien species they’ve called the White Spikes. An original sci-fi action movie, something director Chris McKay calls “increasingly rare”, it began life as Ghost Draft, with the film originally scheduled for a Christmas Day release in 2020. There was talk of a summer release, but Amazon – seeing a…

ONCE UPON A TIME, long before Thanos started fingersnapping people out of existence, there was a widely held belief that the Marvel Cinematic Universe wasn’t as good at creating memorable villains as the Distinguished Competition at DC. There was, however, an exception – a born trickster with a habit of stealing every scene he was in… From his first appearance in Thor in 2011, the god of thunder’s adoptive brother, Loki, quickly became one of the stand-out characters of the MCU. He was even brought back to play chief antagonist in Avengers Assemble. “Like so many people, I’ve just loved Loki across the whole MCU,” says Kate Herron, the director of Disney+’s hotly anticipated Loki TV show. “I mean, I love villains – when they’re done right, they’re the most…

“The Witch Who Came From The Sea is one that I adore – I think that’s actually an incredibly sophisticated piece of filmmaking. It was [on the DPP list] because of the sex scenes, I presume. There might be quite a few references to balls being chopped off, that’s probably what upset them. I love Basket Case, It’s just so much fun. That wasn’t ever really on the list, but it was kind of flirted with [some police forces seized copies]. It’s such a typical answer, but I think The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of the best horror films ever, because it’s just pure dread. I love The Beyond as well. When I first watched that and saw the ending I was like, “Wow, it’s taken me to…

⏵ RELEASED 25 JUNE 15 | 102 minutes ⏵ Director Christopher Landon ⏵ Cast Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Katie Finneran, Celeste O’Connor If the people in charge of ’80s horror franchises have any sense, they’ll offer suitcases full of cash to Christopher Landon. After Happy Death Day (and its sequel) he smashes it out of the park again here, with another ingenious horror-comedy with a very contemporary heroine. The pitch: Freaky Friday meets Friday The 13th. Attacked by the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn), a ’90s serial killer come out of retirement, bullied teen Millie (Kathryn Newton) is stabbed with an ancient knife, causing her to swap bodies with the Butcher. She has until midnight to stab him and switch back. It’s a brilliantly simple premise, one all concerned attack with…

⏵ RELEASED 9 JULY TBC | 93 minutes ⏵ Director Zoé Wittock ⏵ Cast Noémie Merlant, Emmanuelle Bercot, Bastien Bouillon, Sam Louwyck How far does your ability not to kink-shame a friend stretch? Probably not enough for you to wish them all the best in their new relationship with an amusement park ride… In this offbeat Franco-Belgian co-production, young park worker Jeanne (Noémie Merlan) becomes convinced she has a special connection with a “Move-It” ride she nicknames Jumbo. From what we’re shown, it seems she’s right: Jumbo flashes coloured lights in response to her questions, and emits faintly whale-like groans. But is it all real or delusion? Writer/director Zoé Wittock does a first-rate job of imbuing this inanimate object with life; all lit up during their night-time encounters, whirling about…

9 JULY BLACK WIDOW The much-delayed MCU movie will be simultaneously available to stream on Disney+ via Premier Access. OCCUPATION: RAINFALL This Aussie tale of a human fightback against alien invaders is playing in selected cinemas and available for download the same day. 16 JULY THE CROODS 2: A NEW AGE The caveman family must contend with Punch Monkeys and Wolf-Spiders in this animated sequel. ESCAPE ROOM: TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONS Escape your room to watch the sequel to the 2019 horror! THE FOREVER PURGE A Mexican couple fleeing a drug cartel find Texas isn’t exactly safe either in the franchise’s fifth entry. SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY Basketball star LeBron James teams up with Bugs Bunny in this (very) belated sequel. 23 JULY HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA: TRANSFORMANIA Van Helsing’s Monsterfication Ray…

EXTRAS ⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1924 | PG | Blu-ray ⏵ Director Robert Wiene ⏵ Cast Conrad Veidt, Alexandra Sorina, Fritz Kortner, Carmen Cartellieri BLU-RAY DEBUT This first of four features based on Maurice Renard’s 1920 novel was directed by The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari’s Robert Wiene. It steers far closer to realism than that expressionist masterpiece, but is still pretty out there, unfolding within cavernous yet strangely sparse sets, and bristling with neurotic anxiety. Conrad Veidt is Orlac, a pianist whose hands are injured in a train collision, then receives a note saying he’s had a murderer’s hands transplanted. Soon he’s compulsively practising stabbing motions… The acting style takes some getting used to: expect much thyroid-eyed glaring and somnambulist staggering. And you may want to mute the discordant cat-on-a-piano…

⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1973 | TBC | SVOD ⏵ Director George Romero ⏵ Cast Lincoln Maazel SHUDDER A never-before-seen George Romero film from the ’70s, released for the first time? Don’t get too excited. Firstly, this is not a full feature, running for just 52 minutes. Secondly, it was a commercial commission for Romero – who, as fans will know, began his career making industrial films. The patrons: the Lutheran Service Society. The brief: to make an educational piece about the pitfalls of ageing, and thereby encourage volunteering with the elderly. Romero took a metaphorical, fantasy-tinged approach. His short sees a white-suited elderly gent visiting an amusement park, becoming increasingly dishevelled and distressed as he’s variously patronised, ignored and menaced. It’s largely populated by volunteers – there’s fun to…

⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | TBC | SVOD ⏵ Director Damian McCarthy ⏵ Cast Jonathan French, Leila Sykes, Ben Caplan SHUDDER “Always ask to see the small print before accepting a job offer” is the main takeaway from this Irish horror, which at times plays like a seriously messed-up reality show task. Jonathan French plays Isaac, who accepts £200 a day to babysit a man’s niece, in a run-down house on an island. Psychologically disturbed, she spends much of her time sitting, near-catatonic, in a “see no evil” pose. The catch: as she fears being attacked at night, he must be padlocked into a harness on a long chain… The film operates very much on dream logic. There are various unexplained occurrences: a sinister painting which keeps turning itself…

EXTRAS ⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | 15 | DVD/download Here’s a hook that feels as much fairy tale as SF: a secret attic conceals a gateway to parallel worlds. This quantum portal – or magic mirror – empowers a bunch of cocky young tech-heads to try and game reality, with the inevitable moral reckoning. There’s admirable energy and ingenuity, but the story pinballs between too many ideas, from the Mandela Effect to pan-dimensional kidnapping. Ironic that a movie about the multiverse should be undone by an overload of possibilities. Extras None.…

In troubled YA adap CHAOS WALKING (4K/Blu-ray/DVD/download, out now) Tom Holland’s lad lives on a world without women, where the blokes have a condition that makes thoughts visible – not a safe place for Daisy Ridley’s lass to crash-land. We said: “Blandly efficient… Holland and Ridley are watchable leads, and it has things to say about the links between misogyny, religion and brutality.” Doug Liman’s commentary is candid about the problems created by going into production without a locked script. You also get 45 minutes of deleted/alternative scenes and five featurettes (49 minutes – the 4K adds a sixth). You don’t need us to tell you if the Indy movies are good, do you? Okay: definitely, mostly, yes, nope. INDIANA JONES 4-MOVIE COLLECTION (4K/download, out now) has no new bonuses…

⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! 432 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ⏵ Author Ava Reid ⏵ Publisher Del Rey The idea that fairy tales aren’t all sweetness and light won’t be a revelation to anyone reading this. Still, when we say this debut is red in tooth and claw, rest assured: we mean it. As the only woman in her village without magic, and the daughter of a dead mother and a long-vanished Yehuli stranger, Évike is an outsider. When the dreaded Woodsmen turn up to seize a girl for the king’s service, Évike isn’t surprised to be handed over, a sacrifice to save someone more worthwhile. But on the journey to the capital, things get violent, complicated and romantic. The unstable kingdom of Régország – all taiga forest, ethnic tension and monsters…

⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! 412 pages | Paperback/audiobook ⏵ Author Stephen Aryan ⏵ Publisher Angry Robot Books The most popular stories in the fantasy oeuvre are quests. The Coward follows this trope, from sleepy Honaje homesteads to the Ice Lich’s fortress. World-weary champion Kell Kressia, however, is unlike your Bilbo or Frodo: he’s a celebrity, having endured this journey before, 10 years ago, and he knows what happens to fellowships up north. There’s little to subvert the genre here. There’s a dark threat, intrigue between Church and Crown to keep Game Of Thrones fans grinning, assassins lurking in taverns, campfires, giant wolves… you get the idea. The prose feels functional rather than lyrical; it has a wonderful pace but rarely edifies. Yet as expedition narratives go, it’s magnificent. The familiarity…

⏵ RELEASED 24 JUNE 368 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ⏵ Author Susannah Wise ⏵ Publisher Gollancz Part John Wyndham-esque cosy post-apocalypse, part Greta Thunberg sermon, part WALL-E, This Fragile Earth could easily be dismissed as some overly idealised, new age hippy nonsense – a Silent Running for the AI age. That is, if you concentrate purely on the plot – because this is one of those rare SF novels where style wins out over substance. So, at the risk of doing the book an injustice, here’s the plot. A family is forced to evacuate a near-future London when technology fails. Utility robots and swarms of AI bees start behaving with their own agenda. Soon, the family begin to suspect that a recent upgrade to the unifying software that controls their world…

⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! ⏵ Publisher BOOM! Studios ⏵ Writers Alex Child, Grant Morrison ⏵ Artist Naomi Franquiz ISSUES 1-3 Based on a real-life road near San Diego that’s known for its “ghostly” happenings, this ongoing series explores familiar spooky territory that’s been welltrodden by the likes of Stranger Things and Stephen King. It’s neatly described by co-writer Grant Morrison as “Nancy Drew on shrooms”. He and Alex Child infuse a tale of four teenage girls who become embroiled in the mysterious disappearance of a group of schoolboys with plenty of energy and intrigue, chucking in feral canines, a Minotauresque monster and a sinister spectre called the Landlady. It’s set in the early ’70s, and the period is atmospherically evoked; there are references to Janis Joplin songs, while the divisive…

⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! ⏵ Publisher BOOM! Studios ⏵ Writer Josh Lee Gordon ⏵ Artist Fabiana Mascolo ISSUES 1-3 The more things change, the more they stay the same… This ongoing series is set some 20 years after the events of the Serenity movie, but the plot is very much business as usual. Zoe is now captain of the Serenity, running with a new crew that includes her daughter Emma. When a job puts them in possession of a strange cargo – a young woman with ties to ancient Earth-That-Was – they’re forced on the run once more, with the Blue Sun Corporation in hot pursuit. While it’s a bold choice to leap forward so far into the future, the results are mixed. The series is consciously riffing on past…

⏵ RELEASED OUT NOW! ⏵ Reviewed on PlayStation 4 ⏵ Also on PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One ⏵ Publisher Focus Home Interactive VIDEOGAME While Storm Ground is certainly a turn-based strategy game, it has more in common with XCOM than the likes of Civilization VI: the focus is on combat rather than empire-building. You’ve got a limited number of units, but all of them come with customisable equipment, which gives them new abilities, along with a host of passive abilities. The campaigns are endlessly repeatable, lasting about an hour, and are filled with wonderfully cheesy B-movie voice acting. There are three different factions to choose from, too, and also multiplayer. You’re going to die a lot, because the game is as hard as a Stormcast’s oversized shoulder plates. Thankfully, you’ll earn…