Table of contents for September 2021 in SFX

BROKEN WATCH Rob Graham, email As a fan of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels I was very disappointed with The Watch. The cast did their best with what they had with impressive visual effects, but it’s a poor shadow of the books and a very mediocre fantasy series, like a wannabe Game Of Thrones with laughs. The Sky One adaptations were better and I’d much rather have more of those, as at least they were more faithful to the books. A shame, as there is a missed opportunity for a fantastic Discworld comedy fantasy series out there if done right. Dave Roberts, email This is the first time since 1997 I’ve felt the need to register my feelings with you about a genre presentation of something I love so much. I’ve…

SCI-FACT Peter Filardi wrote the screenplay for the now cult favourite witchcraft tale The Craft. →GIVEN THE PANOPLY of film and TV adaptations of Stephen King books, it’s a little surprising that the “King of horror” hasn’t given us a lot of gothic tales to choose from. The fact that most of his stories are contemporary explains the dearth, and is exactly why Chapelwaite, a 10-episode series based on his 1978 short story “Jerusalem’s Lot”, is so intriguing. Set in 1817, it stars Adrian Brody as Captain Charles Boone. He was born in Maine but left his deeply dysfunctional family for a new life as a whaling captain. In Japan, he marries happily, but tragedy leaves him a widower with three children. Willed a sawmill back in Maine, Boone brings his…

SCI-FACT!The “hologrammatic” memories featured in the film were projected for real on set, using special reflective porous glass. →SET IN A NEAR-FUTURE world where memories can be relived like old VHS tapes, Reminiscence is one of those rarities in modern-day Hollywood: a wholly original movie that hasn’t come from pre-existing IP. “It’s hard to get those things made,” reflects writer/director Lisa Joy. “I’m not going to get Marvel or DC funds to make something like this, because it’s too big a risk for a studio.” Fortunately, Joy is no newbie, despite making her feature directorial debut here. Co-creator of the TV series Westworld, she wisely surrounded herself on Reminiscence with some of her key crew from the HBO show, including production designer Howard Cummings and cinematographer Paul Cameron. Given their…

SCI-FACT Golding’s mother, Margaret Likan, is a native-born Sarawakian of Iban Dayak ancestry, while his father Clive is British. “You have to put in the time, you have to put in that sweat” →THERE ARE FEW BRANDS THAT ARE AS quintessentially American as GI Joe. Which is why it’s somewhat surprising to find a well-spoken, impeccably polite British-Asian actor headlining the latest movie in the series, Snake Eyes. There’s nothing else like Snake Eyes on Henry Golding’s film CV. Normally the suave, good-hearted leading man in movies such as Crazy Rich Asians, A Simple Favour and Last Christmas, the action-heavy GI Joe franchise was a universe he definitely wanted to be a part of. “I wanted to do something in this world,” he tells Red Alert. “I want to be…

ACROSS MARVEL Studios’s previous 24 theatrical films and three streaming series, the narrative and characters have been everywhere, from Knowhere to Madripoor, the Quantum Realm and the farthest reaches of the universe. And all of those stories have been told in live action. However, with the arrival of What If…? – the fourth Marvel Disney+ series – the MCU enters the realm of animation. In case you’re not familiar with the concept of What If…?, in 1977 Marvel Comics introduced the anthology series to explore storylines not taken in the regular books. The TV series is a riff on that, with season one consisting of 10 standalone episodes which present a myriad of paths not taken in the MCU, from Tony Stark getting saved by Erik Killmonger in the opening…

WHEN MARVEL Studios’ Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings arrives, there’s a large sector of the MCU-loving fandom that will be flying blind when it comes to knowing anything about the title character. Much like Ant-Man and the Guardians of the Galaxy in their pre-movie days, he’s not exactly a household name. If you’re a Marvel Comics diehard, however, you’ll know that Shang-Chi, the Chinese-American master of kung fu, has existed in the comics pantheon since 1973, when he was created by writer Steve Englehart and artist Jim Starlin. Since then, he’s existed almost entirely on the printed page. Interestingly enough, back in the early 2000s when Marvel Studios decided to finance its own movies, Shang-Chi was one of 10 Marvel characters used as collateral to finance the…

What was it about the script that first attracted you? It was uniquely challenging, and definitely compelling to one’s more crazy actor ego, because it’s essentially just me in a house. There’s two scenes that really hooked me in: the scene where you find out what’s happened to her when she tells the parent at school, then the scene where she brings out the suicide note at the bar. When I got to those in the scripts, I thought, “This is an interesting character. Darkly funny and weird.” How did you approach blending grief and the supernatural? I always thought that it was very interesting that it had a sort of parallel track – there’s a read of the movie that is supernatural, and there’s also a read that’s entirely…

RELEASED OUT NOW! U | 115 minutes Director Malcolm D Lee Cast LeBron James, Don Cheadle, Zendaya, Sonequa Martin-Green The inherent cynicism of the original Space Jam, a film born out of an attempt to sell Nike trainers, was at the very least offset by a playful self-awareness. Space Jam: A New Legacy, however – a sequel/reboot directed by Girls Trip’s Malcolm D Lee, and the work of six credited screenwriters – is one of the most artistically bankrupt films ever made. The meta Michael Jordan role passes to the likeable LeBron James, a superstar basketball player who finds himself sucked into the Warner 3000 Server-Verse, a digital domain containing all of Warner Bros’ intellectual property. The Server-Verse is ruled over by a madcap AI called Al-G Rhythm (Don Cheadle),…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 108 minutes Director M Night Shyamalan Cast Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Thomasin McKenzie From the masterful Unbreakable to the careercrashing low of The Last Airbender, M Night Shyamalan may have the most capricious mojo in Hollywood. Old, his latest, inches closer to his golden age, furthering the rehabilitation that was underway with 2016’s Split. Technically it’s an adaptation of Sandcastle, a graphic novel by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, but at its core it’s deeply, unmistakably Shyamalan: earnest, twist-loaded, riddled with dread. As ever, the premise is the bait. Tourists are lured to a private beach, pitched as “our version of paradise” by the sinister minions of a vacation resort. Soon the secret cove reveals its bizarre properties. Time itself is…

RELEASED 13 AUGUST 15 | 103 minutes Director Maria Schrader Cast Maren Eggert, Dan Stevens, Sandra Hüller, Hans Löw Imagine going on the perfect date. Your would-be lover likes everything you like; catches every reference you make; laughs at all your jokes. Plus they’re gorgeous – exactly your type, in every possible way. Perfect, right? But what if that “person” was a robot? Alma (Maren Eggert) is a single and cynical scientist who’s enlisted to help test a new kind of artificial intelligence. These androids are indistinguishable from humans, but, well, obviously, they’re not. Each of them is programmed to be the ideal partner for their owner. Her digital dreamboat, Tom (Legion’s Dan Stevens), is intellectual, romantic and sexy, and though she’s initially reluctant, she inevitably finds herself softening towards…

We’ve seen Ryan Reynolds in FREE GUY (13 August), but an embargo sitch means we can only say: full review next ish. Stephen Lang reprises his role as ruthless blind man Norman Nordstrom in DON’T BREATHE 2 (13 August). Set in a near future where you can relive memories, REMINISCENCE (18 August) sees Hugh Jackman investigating a woman’s dark past. Jordan Peele and co revive the hook-handed African-American killer in CANDYMAN (27 August). Finally, a couple find their kid has uncanny powers in Sparks-penned musical ANNETTE (3 September).…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | TBC | SVOD Director Noel David Taylor Cast Noel David Taylor, Ben Babbitt, Katy Fullan, Frank Perry ARROW One can only imagine the hellish meetings that actor-writer-director Noel David Taylor had to endure to spur him to make Man Under Table. An aggressively artsy comic fantasy about an unnamed scriptwriter’s attempts, in a future Los Angeles, to get his film made, it’s a sometimes successful, but more often frustratingly cryptic satire that ultimately has as much to say about the relationship between art and commerce as a late-night Twitter rant. At just 81 minutes, it’s hardly The Return Of The King, but that’s still a long time when your film is as repetitive as Man Under Table. There’s little plot as such; it’s more a…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1978 | 15 | Blu-ray Director Juraj Herz Cast Zdena Studenková, Vlastimil Harapes, Václav Voska BLU-RAY DEBUT There’s no singing teapot in this Czechoslovak take on the 18th century fairy tale; although not as adult-orientated as, say, Walerian Borowczyk’s La Bête, it’s definitely not for wee ’uns. It follows the classic story pretty closely. A merchant takes shelter in a run-down palace, availing himself of a fire, meat and drink. When he leaves, he picks a rose. This theft angers the palace’s bestial owner, who threatens to kill the merchant unless one of his daughters becomes his companion. There are nods to Jean Cocteau’s 1946 La Belle Et La Bête – like a hallway full of billowing curtains – but this is very much the distinct…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | PG | SVOD Directors Johane Matte, Francisco Ruiz-Velasco, Andrew L Schmidt Cast Emile Hirsch, Lexi Medrano, Charlie Saxton, Colin O’Donoghue NETFLIX Trollhunters assemble! Rise Of The Titans is animated TV’s Avengers: Endgame. Seriously. It’s a hugely ambitious, actionpacked, spectacle-crammed movie that combines characters and storylines from the three different Tales Of Arcadia series – Trollhunters, 3Below and Wizards – for a massive, apocalyptic finale. For faithful fans, it’s a satisfying swansong. It looks stunning, with plenty of inventive and tense action scenes. There’s clearly been a lot of money lavished on it, and it’s all there on screen as three ginormous Titans stalk the Earth like monsters from some bizarre Pacific Rim/HP Lovecraft crossover. One of them even battles a giant robot at one point,…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | TBC | SVOD SHUDDER Your tolerance for using paedophilia as a genre movie threat (and seeing kids hurt) will inform your response to this taut, efficient indie. After two 12-year-old boys are kidnapped, one escapes, but goes back to rescue his buddy. Certain plot points raise an eyebrow. So does copying the Shining door-axing. But this cat and mouse game has tension in spades, and a twist regarding the initially unseen abductor’s identity lands effectively.…

Previously available via VOD, darkly comic, arthouse-appropriate anthology UNDERGODS (out now, Blu-ray) gets a physical release. We said: “All three stories are initially intriguing, but short on closure… The main thing it has going for it is its look: a bleakly rendered dystopian world, all ash, rubble and fog.” Extras include an effects reel, deleted scene and concept art. Jean-Claude Van Damme stars in post-apocalyptic cyberpunk cheese CYBORG (16 August, Blu-ray). When a cyborg carrying data needed to develop a plague vaccine is kidnapped by pirates, only mercenary Gibson Rickenbacker (!) can rescue her. Hurriedly written to make use of sets and costumes for canned Masters Of The Universe and Spider-Man movies, it’s a cheapo affair, but if you just want to see people being kicked in the face while…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 528 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Chuck Wendig Publisher Del Rey Author, scriptwriter, comic book scribe and blogger Chuck Wendig’s rep moved up a gear from “geek favourite” to “mainstream success” with 2019’s Wanderers. Many compared that to Stephen King’s The Stand; judging by this new book, Wendig had no qualms with that. At times it feels like a cheery homage to King classics such as It, Carrie and The Shining. There’s even a chapter called “We All Float Down Here” (though to be fair, many of the chapter titles are pop culture references). Oliver Graves is a teenage boy who can literally see other people’s pain. So when Oliver’s granddad dies, he, artist mum Maggie and cop dad Nate move to the family home in rural Philadelphia…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Cameron Johnston Publisher Angry Robot The title would fit something by Tom Holt. The prose feels like Joe Abercrombie was persuaded to write a Warhammer novel. It’s dark and often brutal, but with a vein of intelligent playfulness running through it. A tale of intrigue and warfare, it somehow includes: zombie ants, the Kraken, and “screaming pigs of death”. It also juggles an ensemble cast of unlikeable characters with confidence and empathy. The plot is your classic Seven Samurai set-up. A remote town is threatened, and the call goes out for a party of renegades to defend it. The aggressors are the zealous Lucent Empire, deliciously pompous in their gleaming armour. The defenders are all murderous bastards: an orc chieftain, a necromancer,…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Jadie Jang Publisher Solaris Books Unless you have an encyclopaedic knowledge of shapeshifter mythology from around the world, you’re going to need to keep Wikipedia open while reading this urban fantasy romp. Within the first few pages, you’ve got a bajang, an aswang, and… well, unfortunately Wikipedia probably won’t help with Maya, since even she doesn’t quite know what she is. She can shapeshift from human to monkey, but she can also turn into other animals, shadows, pieces of furniture or really anything she feels like. She can turn invisible, summon clouds to fly on, and she’s super strong. She’s basically got every magical ability you can think of, bar telepathy. She’s also in danger. As political unrest in the Bay Area…

RELEASED 24 AUGUST 336 | Paperback/ebook Author RWW Greene Best known for 2011’s Publisher Angry Robot After the intergalactic sci-fi of The Light Years, RWW Greene comes down to Earth with a bump in Twenty-Five To Life. In the near future, mankind has failed to curb climate change. As what remains of the US becomes inexorably uninhabitable, most people spend their lives in tiny dwellings called cubes, where they fritter away the years logged into virtual reality. Determined to avoid that fate, a rebellious young woman called Julie runs away from home, seeking out the people who have rejected the cubes to live nomadic lifestyles in travelling caravans. It’s an interesting premise, and Greene’s evocative writing paints a gritty portrait of the decaying American heartland that Julie explores in the…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Image Comics Writers Declan Shalvey, Rory McConville Artist Joe Palmer ISSUES 1-3 With poignant parallels to modern-day people trafficking, this ongoing time travel thriller centres around a criminal network who smuggle people back to the past to what they presume will be a better life. However, that’s often not the case – as a horrified kid discovers in #1’s opening pages, after relocating to 1987 then learning that Wi-Fi won’t exist for another 10 years. With the narrative frequently shifting around the decades as well as the centuries, it takes a while to get up to speed with Declan Shalvey and Rory McConville’s fast-moving script, which deftly plays tricks with the passing of time as the co-writers constantly throw in unexpected twists and turns. It’s established…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Reviewed on PC Also on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch Publisher Annapurna Interactive VIDEOGAME Set on the streets of modern day London, this story-heavy adventure game is about incredible things happening to ordinary people. There’s John, a middle-aged single parent with a bad heart, whose body gets swapped with Jack, a twentysomething Mancunian videogame developer. Donna is a lovelorn schoolgirl who secretly follows a mysterious stranger and discovers he has magical powers. Meanwhile, Meena is an adulterous worker for a military contractor that’s unearthed something hidden under the city. It’s a mix of mundane, everyday British life and the supernatural. The human drama is wonderfully understated, which gives the moments when something magical happens extra impact. One minute you’re with John at his civil…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Format Vinyl/CD Label Silva Screen SOUNDTRACK Gerry Anderson’s ’70s show which sent the Moon hurtling across the universe had a radical revamp between its two seasons, which the music – now remastered on “lunar white” vinyl – reflects. Initially at the helm: regular Anderson collaborator Barry Gray. With their languorous strings and dreamy harp glissandos, these are cues designed to inspire a sense of off-kilter eeriness. They succeed, but cumulatively the result is soporific. You’ll welcome the odd outlier: “The Entity”, with its echoey percussion, has a more avant garde flavour. Kubrickian excursions into classical – like accompanying a space probe in flight with Remo Giazotto’s mournful Adagio in G Minor – also work well. Top fact: session bassist John McCoy (later of Gillan) kept the others…

JED MERCURIO’S latest police procedural is set in space. But it’s not for TV, at least not yet – the acclaimed screenwriter behind Line Of Duty and Bodyguard has switched to the medium of comics to bring us Sleeper, co-written with Prasanna Puwanarajah and drawn by Coke Navarro. “I’d wanted to develop something in this kind of subject area,” Mercurio tells Red Alert in a four-way Zoom chat with his collaborators. “I knew that Prasanna was a fan of the sci-fi genre and I thought we’d probably come at it in the same way – we both come from scientific backgrounds, we’re both interested in the how as much as the why of things.” “I’m a child of the ’80s,” adds Puwanarajah, “so I was thinking about cartoons and that…

→“WE WANTED TO FIND this incredibly magical story in the real world,” writer-director Benh Zeitlin tells Red Alert about his new film, Wendy. “We wanted to go and literally find Peter Pan. We wanted to find the Lost Boys. We wanted to find Neverland. We didn’t want them synthesised in a computer; we wanted them to be real, to experience them in the most visceral possible way.” He laughs. “And the film needed an engagement with nature that was completely impractical!” PAN’S PEOPLE Indeed, if you’re looking for a premise that would make your average filmmaker run a mile, Wendy has it in spades. The movie was not only filmed with a cast of children who’d never acted before (the horror!), it was also shot largely on the Caribbean island…

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The tragic death of Chadwick Boseman in 2020 meant that his performance in the recording booth was the last time the actor worked on a Marvel Studios project. The series afforded executive producer Brad Winderbaum his first opportunity to work closely with the actor. “We obviously had no clue about [Chadwick’s illness] at the time. We reached out to him about T’Challa Star-Lord and he was really excited about the concept, and really liked the pages. He came in, recorded, and had such a good time that we kept writing him [episodes], so he’s in four episodes as three different versions of T’Challa. It’s so humbling to think that he devoted any time to this show in his last year with us. “It was so devastating when we heard the…

WHENSFXOPENS A CHANNEL to communicate with Star Trek: Lower Decks showrunner Mike McMahan, he’s just seen a first pass at the season two finale and he’s a happy man. Words like “exciting” and “awesome” are being fired across the bow. It means he’s now seen the entire season and he’s evidently very pleased indeed. He’s also been loving getting to do live recordings with an orchestra for the score, something world events prevented last year. He promises it brings a “grand, theatrical, cinematic feeling” to the show. On top of all that, season three is coming together already, with scripts and dialogue in the can. He beams a delighted smile, his eyes sparkling: “We’re having a blast.” SHIP LIFE Following the success of the first animated Trek comedy, two further…

THE URBAN LEGEND STATES THAT he can only be summoned by saying his name five times while looking into a mirror. After the fifth and final vocalisation, Candyman appears behind the foolish chanter, who’s then killed by a hook attached to the bloody stump of his right arm. It’s not a real urban legend of course: Clive Barker created Candyman for his 1985 short story “The Forbidden”, and it was then brought to the screen in 1992’s Candyman. That starred Tony Todd as the title character, who haunts the residents of Chicago’s notorious Cabrini-Green housing project, shedding innocent blood for the purpose of perpetuating his gruesome legend. Nearly 30 years later, the once crime-infested area has become a model of gentrification, and the hook-handed killer has receded into the fog…

RELEASED 13 AUGUST 12A | 112 minutes Director Benh Zeitlin Cast Devin France, Yashua Mack, Gage Naquin, Gavin Naquin In 2012 Benh Zeitlin wowed critics (if not audiences) with his debut movie Beasts Of The Southern Wild, a gritty yet heartwarming tale of a little girl living in a flooded Louisiana. This second film, co-written with his sister Eliza, shares ostensibly the same theme: that of children running wild through the countryside as dark forces loom. As a loose retelling of Peter Pan, the evil here is “growing old”. Zeitlin coaxes fine performances from his young cast, with Devin France in particular making a convincing, empathetic Wendy; it makes perfect sense for her to abandon a humdrum life with her mum and sail off to Neverland alongside a puckish Peter…

RELEASED 27 AUGUST (also VOD) 18 | 105 minutes Director Neill Blomkamp Cast Carly Pope, Chris William Martin, Michael J Rogers, Nathalie Boltt It’s been six years since we last heard from District 9 director Neill Blomkamp – six years since Chappie’s underwhelming box office. With sci-fi thriller Inferno delayed, he did a Ben Wheatley and knocked out a small-scale project under Covid protocols. The film has some wearyingly familiar elements. Carly Pope (TV reporter Susan Williams in Arrow) plays, er, Carly, who discovers that her long-estranged mother was possessed by a demon when she committed her murderous crimes. Now the demon sets its sights on her as its next host… We could have done without yet another visit to an abandoned hospital, and the creepiest sequence is a pinch…

RELEASED 18 AUGUST TBC | 121 minutes Director Robert Schwentke Cast Henry Golding, Andrew Koji, Samara Weaving, Iko Uwais Franchise prequels with “Origins” in the title don’t have a great record, and sadly (if not completely surprisingly) Snake Eyes: GI Joe Origins (to give the film its full title) lives down to that expectation. Attempting to fill in the backstory of a character who was probably best left silent, deadly and mysterious, director Robert Schwentke here largely wastes the charismatic appeal of Henry Golding, who has clearly spent time training but is rarely given anything substantial to do in terms of acting beyond some very predictable beats. One or two visuals pop – a truck cab run through with numerous swords like a giant game of KerPlunk, for example, works…

UK/US Disney+, streaming now Showrunners Michael Waldron Cast Tom Hiddleston, Sophia Di Martino, Owen Wilson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Wunmi Mosaku, Tara Strong EPISODES 1.01-1.06 The MCU goes full-throttle into Moffat-era Doctor Who territory for its third TV venture. Sure, there’s been time travel in the franchise before, but of the Back To The Futurestyle jolly temporal high jinks variety. With Loki we’re into hardcore chronological contortions, with Nexus events, branching timelines, variants, time loops, temporal police forces and vast swathes of technobabble. And the fact that we get multiple Lokis interacting over the six episodes means the series sometimes feels like a multi-Doctor episode. Or maybe multi-Master – he is a supervillain, after all. The set-up is immediately enticing. After thieving the Tesseract during the Battle Of New York, Loki is…

UK/US Netflix, streaming now Showrunner Kevin Smith Cast Chris Wood, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Lena Headey, Henry Rollins, Dennis Haysbert, Justin Long EPISODES 1.01-1.05 A red-haired woman, an athletic black woman, a comic-relief magician whose spells go wrong, a barbarian, a team member whose name begins with “E” working against the gang’s common interests, all sent on a side-quest by a sorcerer supreme… For all the talk of modern “woke politics” ruining Masters Of The Universe: Revelation, we don’t remember those accusations being levelled at Dungeons & Dragons, this series’ clear template, when it aired from 1983-1985. It’s a great influence, especially as the original He-Man cartoon broadcast at exactly the same time. Teela, Andra, Orko, Beast Man and Evil-Lyn fill those D&D character sheets, in a series that feels faithful…

EXTRAS RELEASED 16 AUGUST 1979 | 15 | Blu-ray Director John Frankenheimer Cast Robert Foxworth, Talia Shire, Armand Assante, Victoria Racimo BLU-RAY DEBUT Hollywood thriller master John Frankenheimer dreamed of making a monster movie. The 1970s horror boom allowed him his wish, though he doesn’t bring his A-game to this environmentally minded creature-fest, written by The Omen’s David Seltzer. Prophecy draws on American Indian mysticism for added portentousness – the rampaging beast is said to be the incarnation of an ancient spirit – but really belongs to the Nature’s Revenge subset of exploitation cinema as a giant bear, mutated by toxins, slashes its way through an eco-system poisoned by mankind. The staging sometimes tips into outright schlock: we’re looking at you, frenzied raccoon attack. But the mutant bear, all slavering…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1977 | 18 | Blu-ray/VOD Director Lucio Fulci Cast Jennifer O’Neill, Gabriele Ferzetti, Gianni Garko, Marc Porel BLU-RAY DEBUT Shockingly, this Lucio Fulci film is almost tasteful – even classy. Okay, a suicide has unnecessarily meaty close-ups of a woman’s bonce bouncing off a cliff. Otherwise, it’s rather restrained for the director of Zombie Flesh Eaters. Don’t Look Now and Dario Argento’s oeuvre are the obvious touchstones for this supernatural-tinged giallo, whose dual concerns are predestination and the decoding of images. Jennifer O’Neill is Virginia, whose puzzling visions – flashes of a magazine, an old woman’s bloodied face, a shattered mirror – lead to the discovery of a body bricked up in a house owned by her husband. Virginia’s investigation, as she seeks to exonerate him,…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | 18 | Blu-ray (4K/standard)/DVD/download Director Darren Lynn Bousman Cast Chris Rock, Max Minghella, Marisol Nichols, Samuel L Jackson Chris Rock gives his all in this spectacularly gory Saw reboot. Playing a maverick cop, he brings his usual motormouthed wit to a franchise that’s been searching for a direction for over a decade. But is he able to lift Saw out of the horror doldrums? Almost. This ninth entry sees a Jigsaw copycat targeting dirty cops, entrapping them in grisly games. Meanwhile, Rock grapples with daddy issues (Samuel L Jackson puts in a decent turn as Pops), has a rookie foisted upon him, and is up against a whole precinct of colleagues who hate his guts. If grim body-horror, cop conspiracies and shouty bloke fights…

RELEASED 20 AUGUST 2021 | U | SVOD SKY MOVIES This colourful kids’ adventure somehow juggles time travel, alternate universes and creatures shaped like doughnuts without talking down to younger viewers or confusing them. It stars a colony of fluffy cuties named “flummells”, who are on the verge of extinction unless two of their number can do some timeline jiggery-pokery. The slapstick’s impeccable, and the cast are a hoot. Only some relatively unsophisticated character design lets it down.…

EXTRAS RELEASED 23 AUGUST (download out now) 2021 | 18 | Blu-ray/download Director Juan Diego Escobar Alzate Cast Yuri Vargas, Jim Muñoz, Conrado Osorio, Andrea Esquivel This crowdfunded debut has been compared to Alejandro Jodorowsky. While it shares the maverick Chilean director’s love of extremity and symbolism, it’s not on that level. The colour correction may be the most fantastical thing here. Colombian vistas are rendered in lysergic hues; skies are turquoise, earth almost red. Conrado Osorio makes a powerful impression as “El Señor”, a blood-and-thunder preacher who kidnaps a young boy, declaring him Jesus. Due to him, the script is brimming with gnomic pronouncements. A headscratcher, it prompts questions like, “Is that goat really whispering?” and “Why all the scattered animal bones?” The main theme comes across, though: anti-authoritarian…

RELEASED 26 AUGUST 480 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Alastair Reynolds Publisher Gollancz As has been much-trailed, Inhibitor Phase is a return to Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space timeline, a widescreen, baroque galactic future-history that spans thousands of years. More specifically, it’s the fourth volume in the Inhibitor Sequence, a book that arrives 18 years after its predecessor, Absolution Gap. Which in its way is worrying. Why has Reynolds, a writer who’s never been afraid to experiment and to create new fictional timelines, returned to the books that made his name? Whisper it, but could he have given in to the temptation to revisit past glories? One answer to these questions, as laid out in Reynolds’s foreword and after-notes, is that he genuinely had a story he wanted to tell. The strength of…

RELEASED 19 AUGUST 416 pages | Paperback/ebook Author P Djèlí Clark Publisher Orbit For all that 21st century SFF is so often about mashing together different timelines and traditions, there are still times when you find yourself wondering why something hasn’t been done before. P Djèlí Clark’s Dead Djinn universe falls into this category. Here are stories set in an early 20th century steampunk Egypt where the magical world has, for half a century, intruded into everyday reality. Djinn mingle with humans in Cairo. This poses policing and security problems, as Fatma el-Sha’arawi, an agent with the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, knows only too well. It’s Fatma who’s often called in when things get a little eldritch. And they don’t get much weirder or more dangerous than…

RELEASED 19 AUGUST 368 | Paperback/ebook/audiobook Author Femi Fadugba Publisher Penguin The intricacies of quantum physics and the violent teenage street gangs of Peckham don’t seem like natural bedfellows. Yet somehow Femi Fadugba has managed to whip up a grounded and original YA novel about them both, one that’s already being made into a Netflix film produced by (and set to star) Daniel Kaluuya. Jumping between two points in time – today and the near-future – this is the story of two teenagers, Esso and Rhia, each struggling to survive in a gritty, prickly world; think Kidulthood, only with a sci-fi edge. Life’s pretty grim for Esso as he accidentally pisses off a very dangerous gang, who want revenge. Life is not much better for foster kid Rhia, living 15…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 404 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Adam Simcox Publisher Gollancz The Dying Squad is being promoted as “Line Of Duty meets Rivers Of London”, but there’s a big chunk of Christopher Nolan’s Memento in here as well. The concept is solid: a dead policeman is sent back to Earth to investigate his own murder, but unfortunately he can remember very little about his old life, and every minute he spends in the land of the living erodes his memory further, making it difficult to retain the facts of the case. Unfortunately our Detective Inspector protagonist, who has the rather on-the-nose name of Joe Lazarus, is such a blank that it’s rather hard to care about him, especially given that he spends most of his time between chasing evidence…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 479 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Rob Young Publisher Faber Best known for 2011’s Publisher Angry Robot Electric Eden, his history of folk rock, Rob Young now turns his analytical gaze on British TV and cinema, arguing that the TV in the living room “replaced the village storyteller”. The mid-’50s to mid-’80s are the focus, and unsurprisingly, Young’s interests tend towards the hauntological. Early on, as he deconstructs The Wicker Man, Quatermass and Threads, the book feels like a more high-flown, beard-stroking version of Scarred For Life. But he also casts an eye over things like period drama, British Transport Films and Kes. Young has a knack for a clever turn of phrase, a good eye for detail and a droll sense of humour. However, he’s a little prone…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Simon & Schuster Writers Jed Mercurio, Prasanna Puwanarajah Artist Coke Navarro GRAPHIC NOVEL Any SFX readers who watch Line Of Duty will probably be thrilled by the prospect of a police procedural set in space and written by Jed Mercurio. Well, here it is. It follows DS-5, an ageing cyborg copper in the 24th century who’s been in deep space and is due to be decommissioned. But when a mass murder occurs, DS-5 investigates its connection with a miraculous energy source on Titan. Sleeper actually started life as a TV script, but shows full respect for, and understanding of, its medium; Mercurio and co-writer Prasanna Puwanarajah have crafted a well-paced, exciting, atmospheric piece of graphic storytelling. Coke Navarro’s artwork has strong echoes of grimy ’70s/’80s SF,…

RELEASED 19 AUGUST Publisher Rebellion Writer Kelvin Gosnell Artist Carlos Ezquerra COLLECTION 2000 AD isn’t known for adapting properties (a Shaun Of The Dead prequel and adaptation of A Life Less Ordinary aside). But in the case of The Stainless Steel Rat, the comic found a literary character so suited to their tone and style that Judge Dredd could have easily popped in for a crossover. This space opera anti-hero – aka criminal-turned-spacecop “Slippery” Jim diGriz – was created in the early ’60s by Harry Harrison for a series of irreverent, sometimes satirical novels. 2000 AD turned three books (the first, third and fifth novels: The Stainless Steel Rat, The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The Universe and The Stainless Steel Rat For President) into series between 1979 and 1985. 2000…

IT’S THE DAWN OF A NEW ERA for the Titans. The show’s season two finale culminated in the young superheroes defeating the mercenary Deathstroke and breaking Cadmus’s mental hold over Conner/Superboy. Those victories, however, have cost them dearly. Jason Todd/Robin abandoned the team, and Donna Troy/Wonder Girl perished saving lives. When the dust settled, Rachel/Raven left to accompany Donna’s body back to Themyscira, and the Titans – now consisting of Dick Grayson/Nightwing, Hank/Hawk, Dawn/Dove, Kory/Starfire, Garfield/Beast Boy and Conner – seemed more committed than ever to waging a war against evil. But a trip to the seedy streets of Gotham City and an unexpected family reunion in the third season may permanently tear them apart… both personally and professionally. “Many dark Titans secrets died in Gotham, especially for Bruce, Dick,…

MODERN-DAY MASTER of horror David Bruckner – responsible for The Signal, V/H/S and The Ritual – is about to cause sleepless nights with his latest movie The Night House. But really, he’s just paying forward his own experiences. “I was just terrified of horror films as a kid,” he admits. “I don’t think that I could really handle them. My father would watch them, my mother worked nights as a nurse, so I would try to hide from the TV. I couldn’t escape the sound of the film – the ideas of whatever he was exploring were still in my head in some ways or another.” EAR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW Bruckner has at least two that stayed with him for different reasons. “Poltergeist did a number on me when I…

WHEN TONY TODD recalls the making of Candyman, nearly 30 years ago, the first image that comes to mind is that of bees, hundreds of them, swarming over his body and crawling into his mouth. “The bee wrangler on the first film, Norman Gary, told me not to worry because the stingers on the bees had been removed,” says Todd. “I wore a dental dam to prevent the bees from crawling down my throat. Despite all that, I was stung over 20 times. The bees broke through the dental dam, and I felt them in my mouth. On the good side, I received a payment for each bee sting that I sustained, and the bee sequences looked great in the film. Being stung that many times helped my performance, because…

ANYONE WHO’S looking for a dark, nihilistic, cynical time at the movies, Free Guy ain’t for you!” says director Shawn Levy, clearly unafraid to scare away the hardcore Joker demographic while promoting his latest film. “If you’re looking for joy, if you’re looking for hope and just a belief in human connection and the possibilities of stepping up and living bigger and having more of a footprint in your world, that’s where we came from when we made this movie.” And if you’re looking for a high concept – the kind of instant, genius hook that’s the eternal grail quest of Hollywood – then Free Guy delivers on that, too. Welcome to Free City, an open-world videogame in the carnage-stacked tradition of Grand Theft Auto. In this unreal arena of…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 88 minutes Director Adam Robitel Cast Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Indya Moore, Holland Roden 2019’s Escape Roomfeatured a group of terrified players trying to survive a lethal series of puzzles and traps, picked off one by one by the machinations of a criminal conspiracy or a giant corporation or… someone. For the follow-up, director Adam Robitel throws a group of terrified players into a series of… Look, if you’ve seen the first film, you know exactly where this is going. The story this time, however, starts with Zoey (Taylor Russell), Ben (Logan Miller) and the other dragooned players knowing what’s up, and suspicious when they think they might have finally gotten out. Tournament Of Champions is a “more of the same” film, so if this…

RELEASED 20 AUGUST TBC | 108 minutes Director David Bruckner Cast Rebecca Hall, Stacy Martin, Evan Jonigkeit, Sarah Goldberg The premise is pure crime thriller: after Beth’s (Rebecca Hall) husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) unexpectedly takes his own life, she discovers he had secrets when she finds a series of pictures on his phone of women who look like her. David Bruckner’s film veers quickly into the supernatural though, as Beth begins to believe some sort of entity is visiting her at night. The Night House shares DNA with 2020’s The Invisible Man in that it features an incredibly committed central performance from its lead, who is often playing against an invisible force, as well as creepy and effective visual tricks using shadows and silhouettes. Bruckner is one to watch after…

RELEASED 13 AUGUST 18 | 86 minutes Director Michel Franco Cast Naian González Norvind, Diego Boneta, Mónica Del Carmen, Fernando Cuautle A “one day in the future” affair, this Mexican film depicts both a violent revolution and the dystopian clampdown which follows. Director Michel Franco’s view of humanity seems pretty unremittingly bleak. After a tense opening stretch, the revolt finally erupts at a posh wedding, with shocking ferocity and rapidity. The recurring use of green paint, tossed onto the rich’s cars, creates a vague sense that the violence is some variety of alien infection. Grim tableaux of death and destruction bring to mind Goya’s The Disasters Of War. The one wealthy character who actively tries to help those less fortunate is doomed to the worst fate of all. The film…

RELEASED 20 AUGUST TBC | 84 minutes The good news about this tale of an Amazonian girl trying to stop her jungle being bulldozed, aided by two forest spirits, is that it doesn’t ram its eco-messaging down the audience’s throats. Its lead characters are decently realised, too, but the rest of the CGI exposes its small budget. The jungles want to evoke a Princess Mononoke-style wonder, but end up more like the backgrounds in the old Care Bears ’toons. Thankfully, Ainbo is still sweet and fluffy enough to delight undemanding juniors.…

EXTRAS RELEASED 26 JULY 2020 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD/download Directors Gerard Bush, Christopher Renz Cast Janelle Monáe, Eric Lange, Jena Malone, Jack Huston You’d be best off going into Antebellum completely cold – but then who does that? And its very presence in these pages is a spoiler. So we’ll let the cat at least peek out of the bag. It initially presents as an unflinching look at the cruelties, abuses and outright atrocities suffered by slaves on a Louisiana cotton plantation. Something is off – Confederate soldiers didn’t march with torches chanting “Blood and soil”. Isn’t that a bit Charlottesville? But it’s only 38 minutes in, when Janelle Monáe’s slave wakes in the modern day, that our suspicions are confirmed. To a degree, the film’s structure works against it. A…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD/download Director Chris Palmer Cast Jensen Ackles, Josh Duhamel, Naya Rivera, Troy Baker “Is there even such a thing as a normal family in this city?” asks Selina Kyle, as Gotham does Gotham around her. You can almost hear the rhetorical purr. It takes two animated features – almost three hours – for this adaptation of Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s sprawling ’90s comic book saga to play out. It’s an epic tale with a Coppola vibe, mixing familial sins, mob rivalry, a holiday-themed killer and the creation of Two-Face, one of the foundation myths of Batman lore. Part Two may lack the energy of the first instalment but this is an immersive, elegantly rendered world, brought to the screen with mood,…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | 18 | SVOD NETFLIX “Maybe I was born wicked and strange… maybe it is the Devil in me,” says Sarah Fier (Kiana Madeira) as the Fear Street trilogy comes to a suitably creepy and compelling close. Set largely in 1666, the film follows Sarah as her relationship with another woman (Olivia Scott Welch) incites a witch hunt in their puritanical town. Unveiling surprise twists with gory, emotional aplomb, this is a devilishly funny, queer-positive treat.…

EXTRAS RELEASED 23 AUGUST 1969 | 18 | Blu-ray Director Yasuzo Masumura Cast Eiji Funakoshi, Mako Midori, Noriko Sengoku BLU-RAY DEBUT This provocative film is art horror in a very literal sense. Model Aki (Mako Midori) is kidnapped by blind sculptor Michio (Eiji Funakoshi), who desires a new muse to spark his imagination. Imprisoned in his cavernous studio – a terrifying place full of stone eyes, lips and breasts, and dominated by two enormous fallen statues – Aki sets out to escape, but must contend with both Michio and his complicit mother. Blind Beast is undeniably disturbing, with Michio’s constant groping of Aki truly repellant, but the film has a heightened sense of artificiality which makes it more fascinating than frightening – the bananas set design wouldn’t feel out of…

EXTRAS RELEASED 16 AUGUST 2003 | 15 | Blu-ray Director Kim Jee-woon Cast Im Soo-jung, Moon Geun-young, Yum Jung-ah, Kim Kap-soo BLU-RAY DEBUT This ghost story remains the highest-grossing Korean horror film ever made. It’s easy to see why. Beautifully shot, it’s a classic tale of familial anxiety, growing pains and gothic chills. Su-mi (Im Soo-jung) returns home from a period of treatment in an institution, with her father and younger sister Su-yeon (Moon Geun-young) in tow. It is not a pleasant homecoming, however, with tensions growing between the girls and their stepmother, Eun-joo (Yum Jung-ah) and Su-mi beset by terrifying visions of her deceased biological mother. What is real and what is fantasy? Jee-woon’s smart script keeps you wrong-footed and disorientated until a brilliant and thoroughly satisfying finale. Beguiling…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 294 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Eli Lee Publisher Jo Fletcher Books A 2013 study by a pair of economists calculated that half of all jobs in the US – everything from warehouse labour to accountancy – are highly susceptible to automation in the near future. Eli Lee’s quiet, measured debut novel uses an invented country to explore this next industrial revolution. If robots eat our jobs, will it just mean more cash for corporations, or are other futures possible? And what if the robots decide to eat us, too, while they’re at it? (This is SF, after all, albeit at the literary end of the spectrum.) PhD student Janetta teaches emotion to “auts” (robots), while experiencing her own first love (and first heartbreak). Jay’s striving younger sister…

RELEASED 12 AUGUST 464 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Jas Treadwell Publisher Hodder & Stoughton “Who is Thomas Peach?” That’s the question at the heart of this darkly witty historical fantasy. Perhaps instead the question should be, “Who is Jas Treadwell?” for the name is, in fact, a (not especially cunning) pseudonym for an already established author with the same initials. It’s 1785, and Peach and his wife Eliza move to a small village in Somerset. Peach is a strange fellow, with an interest in the dark arts. The locals’ curiosity is piqued by his arrival, and even more so by the nature of the never-seen Eliza. When he’s called to an appointment in Bristol, however, Peach stumbles upon a mystery of his own: a young woman with a terrible secret.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 416 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author JT Greathouse Publisher Gollancz JT Greathouse shows no first-time jitters with his impressive and compelling debut novel, taking the gutsy decision to build his story around a prickly protagonist. The backdrop is the Sienese Empire, which seems modelled on imperial China, not the Italian city. Wen Alder is the son of a Sienese father and a mother from the Nayeni, one of the peoples forcibly absorbed into the empire, which handily sets up one of the major themes about divided loyalties. Raised from birth to sit the entrance exams for imperial service, Alder hopes to study sorcery, but his fascination with the banned witchcraft of the Nayeni threatens his position. Greathouse builds an expansive, vibrant world, one ripe with conflicting religious doctrines…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 200 pages | Hardback Author Matt McAllister Publisher Eaglemoss Publications This exhaustive look back at the Star Trek-spoofing 1999 movie is a textbook example of how to do a Making Of book. The number of interviewees is impressive: there are over 60, more than you generally get in a contemporary authorised Making Of – and the historical distance means they say more interesting things. A happy shoot means there’s little drama to recount, but there are still amusing anecdotes: the clashing processes of Tim Allen and Alan Rickman; a two-hour drive to find some Dr Scholl’s; Sigourney Weaver turning on Sam Rockwell to PG Tips. Good trivia too. Did you know the NTE in the Protector’s registry number stands for Not The Enterprise? (An earlier version began…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Fantagraphics Writer Manuele Fior/Jamie Richards (translator) Artist Manuele Fior GRAPHIC NOVEL Italian writer/artist Manuele Fior’s latest is a haunting and evocative fever dream of weird architecture and weirder people. Pierrot and Dora are two young telepaths living on the island of Celestia, isolated since the bridge connecting it to the mainland was destroyed. The few people that remain seem to spend their days living lives of decadent idleness, or running with masked gangs. When hot-tempered poet Pierrot angers one of the gangs, he flees to the mainland with Dora in tow. But how long can they outrun their pasts and family? Although it has a fairly conventional narrative structure, you feel Celestia rather than fully understand it. The details of how and why this post-apocalyptic world…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 79 minutes | CD/download Publisher BBC Audio AUDIOBOOK Among hundreds of Doctor Who audios, this second entry in the Beyond The Doctor series is surely a strong contender for most whimsical premise: it’s told by the Third Doctor’s car, Bessie. Writer Paul Magrs provides a rationale: the old girl was once hooked up to the TARDIS, becoming conscious as a result. Now in a junkyard in the Kent countryside, she reminisces about her adventures, psychically beaming thoughts into her latest owner’s mind. Meanwhile, a mysterious fedora-wearing man is sniffing about, eager to acquire the vintage vehicle… Essentially the memoirs of a lady of advancing years as she briefly savours a new lease of life, it’s probably as close as Who will ever get to one of Alan…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 293 minutes | CD/download Producer Big Finish AUDIO DRAMA Well, this is quite lovely. The BBC adaptation of John Masefield’s beloved novel remains a festive favourite for many an ’80s child. Big Finish’s new audio dramatisation incorporates unused elements from the book, but feels very much like a companion piece to the TV show – right down to using its fabulously eerie theme music, an electronically treated take on “The First Nowell”. Kay Harker (Mack Keith-Roach) is a young boy travelling home for Christmas in the 1930s. After a strange encounter with two sinister clergymen, he meets curious Punch and Judy man Cole Hawlings (Derek Jacobi). Hawlings has many secrets and carries with him a magical “box of delights” that enables him to fly, shrink in size…