Table of contents for January 2022 in SFX

LONG LIVE ETERNALS Paul Baker, email Eternals was such a pleasant surprise. I went in knowing very little about the story or characters. I had read a couple of reviews which were pretty negative and I find that puzzling. Ten immortal beings may seem too many characters for a film to handle but it does so adroitly and without sacrificing any character development. Together they make an eclectic mix of personalities and their familial bickering is interesting and fun to watch amid the huge decisions they have to make. Overall a sumptuous feast of entertainment that feels very different from the rest of the Marvel canon. Director and co-writer Chloé Zhao shows an astonishing understanding of the source material and with the stunning cinematography of Ben Davis this long movie never…

SUPERMAN & LOIS spent its first year cementing the titular characters as the ultimate power couple. Together, Superman (Tyler Hoechlin) and Lois (Bitsie Tulloch) not only save the day on a regular basis, but parent their twin teenage sons, Jonathan (Jordan Elsass) and Jordan (Alex Garfin) – with the latter manifesting Kryptonian superabilities of his own. When the series returns in the US this month, the family drama remains front and centre, with new obstacles and foes added to the mix. However, showrunner Todd Helbing teases that the second season’s major theme – buried secrets – will test everyone like never before. “We wanted to get into a lot of things that pop up from their past, that we hadn’t had time to explore,” Helbing tells Red Alert. “A lot…

TEN YEARS AFTER a boy went missing, he hands himself in to the police… except “he” is really a female killer on the lam who’s broken her nose and bound her breasts with bandages. This ill-advised scheme isn’t the strangest plot point in Titane (meaning titanium), French writer/director Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or-winning follow-up to Raw, her thinking person’s cannibal horror. That comes when the murderous anti-heroine impossibly conceives a child by having sex with a car – causing us to speculate, as her belly swells at unnatural speed, on what she might give birth to… “The more extravagant the scene is, the funnier it is to shoot” If you’ve seen the 2012 documentary The Imposter, you may wonder if serial impersonator Frédéric Bourdin was an inspiration. Not the case, says…

GABRIELLE-SUZANNE BARBOT DE Villeneuve’s 18th-century fable Beauty And The Beast gets an update for the social media age in Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle. The story follows Suzu, a shy teenager who finds freedom and confidence in a virtual reality world called U, where her avatar Belle encounters a brooding, tormented loner named the Dragon. Transformation has been a recurring theme in Hosoda’s work, from the shapeshifting lycanthropes of Wolf Children to the online avatars of Summer Wars. Similarly, his stories regularly feature teenagers, from The Girl Who Leaped Through Time to The Boy And The Beast – but then what is adolescence if not a process of transformation? “I’m interested in how people change, whether it’s their feelings that are changing or their way of thinking,” says Hosoda. “I’m interested in…

HOW DOES THE “biggest douchebag in the universe” get his own TV series? That might sound like a trick question, but the particular douchebag being referenced is the one specifically labelled as such by writer/director James Gunn: Christopher Smith, aka Peacemaker. Known simply as The Peacemaker when created in 1966 by writer Joe Gill and artist Pat Boyette, the Chris Smith iteration didn’t appear until DC Comics bought the character in the ’80s and turned him into a zealot vigilante for peace. After being used as a member of the Suicide Squad in some comic runs, it was Gunn who plucked him from the pages to join the ensemble of miscreants in his theatrical redo The Suicide Squad. As embodied by professional wrestler/actor John Cena in the film, Peacemaker is…

When SFX takes a trip into the North Carolina hotel rooms of the cast and crew of Scream, it’s dark outside, there’s a glowing pumpkin and candles are lit. It’s Halloween 2020 and there’s a chill in the air. A chill isn’t the only thing in the air, of course, so it’s little surprise that all those rooms are separate and we’re joining them from London, via Zoom. No stalking Woodsboro for us, sadly. Or maybe that’s a good thing considering there’s a certain masked killer back in town. Yes, again – you can’t keep a good, sorry bad, movie monster down as the fifth instalment hits screams, sorry, screens this month……

JASON REITMAN’S SEQUEL TO THE ORIGINAL Ghostbusters movies may be keeping things in the family, but it takes an army to bring the dead to life. Ozzy Inguanzo’s new hardback book Ghostbusters: Afterlife: The Art And Making Of The Movie is a film fan’s fever dream – with hundreds of photos of props, models, costumes, concept art and more. It’s also packed with information from key creatives across the production. Over the next six pages we present some of the tricks and treats in store… Ghostbusters: Afterlife: The Art And Making Of The Movie is available from Titan Books now.…

Blackadder Back And Forth (1999) Ten years after Edmund Blackadder met his maker in no-man’s-land, the Blackadder team reconvened for this 33-minute special made specially for screening in the then-brand new Millennium Dome. Curtis described the film, which had a 1999-era Lord Blackadder travelling through time in a specially-built time machine, as “an irreverent trek through British history – a time travel adventure story consisting entirely of people who are either rude or stupid.” Doctor Who: “Vincent And The Doctor”(2010) Richard Curtis was Steven Moffat’s big signing for his first season as Doctor Who showrunner. Curtis previously exec-produced Moffat’s Comic Relief Doctor Who skit “The Curse Of Fatal Death”. His script for Matt Smith’s Doctor is an unflinching but ultimately uplifting examination of depression – in this case, Vincent van…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 131 minutes ▸ Director Matthew Vaughn ▸ Cast Ralph Fiennes, Harris Dickinson, Gemma Arterton, Rhys Ifans Matthew Vaughn’s plans for extending the Kingsman universe had to take somewhat of a long break due to the pandemic, but he’s finally back on track with this latest entry, a prequel set during the time that Europe and elsewhere plunged into the bloody conflict of the First World War. Aiming to show how the boutique spy outfit got its start, Vaughn’s focus here (in collaboration with co-writer Karl Gajdusek) is Ralph Fiennes as Orlando Oxford, aka the Duke Of Oxford, a noble with a soldier’s heart – and history – who ostensibly turned his back on warfare to concentrate on helping people via the Red Cross. He’s…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 18 | 108 minutes ▸ Director Julia Ducournau ▸ Cast Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier, Laïs Salameh You accept a lift from a stranger. They drive off at dangerously high speed. As the scenery flashes past, brakes screeching on tight corners, it dawns on you that you have no idea where you’re being taken. Watching Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to Raw is similarly, adrenalisingly unpredictable. After on-the-lam serial killer Alexia disguises herself as a boy missing for a decade, his fireman father improbably takes her in. That’s the least of her problems. After developing a fetish for cars in a childhood smash, her grinding on gear sticks (presumably – it’s left to our imaginations) has left her impossibly pregnant, breasts leaking black oil… The logline suggests…

UK/US Netflix, streaming now ▸ Director Zack Estrin ▸ Cast Molly Parker, Toby Stephens, Maxwell Jenkins, Taylor Russell, Mina Sundwall EPISODES 1.01-1.08 After three seasons, Netflix’s Lost In Space remake comes to an end, and we still haven’t seen any talking carrots. There is a war of the robots, but sadly no cameo from Forbidden Planet’s Robby. Having said that, this final season does feel more like the original show than the first two. The Robinson family (plus robot and comedy smuggler) do finally feel lost in space (for the first few episodes, at least), and when the Jupiter 2 starts getting swallowed by a giant alien bug, this really does feel like an Irwin Allen show with a modern spin. It’s not exactly great science fiction (or even particularly…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1979 | PG | Blu-ray ▸ Producer Graham Williams ▸ Cast Tom Baker, Lalla Ward, David Brierley BLU-RAY DEBUT In the early ’80s, Tom Baker’s penultimate season was widely viewed as – to quote the Doctor – “more of a table wine”, a threadbare affair whose undergrad silliness, amplified by script editor Douglas Adams, was thankfully swept away by new broom producer John Nathan-Turner. For those of us who appreciate wit and whimsy, it’s a questionable characterisation. For one thing, it glides over the average-raiser here: Adams’s “City Of Death”. This tale of multiple Mona Lisas and an alien splintered across Earth history glitters with bons mots. It’s the apogee of the classic series. Then there’s “The Creature From The Pit” – for this writer’s…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED 10 JANUARY 1995 | 18 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Tobe Hooper ▸ Cast Robert Englund, Ted Levine, Daniel Matmor, Jeremy Crutchley BLU-RAY DEBUT The premise of The Mangler feels like the punchline of a joke about Stephen King. An evil laundryfolding machine chowing down on virgin fingers? Silly. But, at least at the beginning, it’s actually kind of creepy. Through Tobe Hooper’s lens, the industrial laundry is a proper dark Satanic mill, all steam, sparks, and churning metal. Bill Gartley (Robert Englund, sporting leg braces and awful facial prosthetics) feels almost like a Dickensian villain, happily feeding his poor workers to the mangle. Unfortunately, King’s original story was pretty short, so Hooper and his co-writers Stephen Brooks and Harry Alan Towers had to add extra plotlines (and…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | 18 | Blu-ray/DVD/download ▸ Director James Wan ▸ Cast Annabelle Wallis, Maddie Hasson, George Young, Michole Briana White Director James Wan has helped kickstart at least two major horror trends so far this century, but Malignant probably won’t herald another. Sad nurse Madison (an unflatteringly be-wigged Annabelle Wallis) just wants to feel connected to someone after her abusive husband and unborn child are both killed by a terrifying shadowy figure. Her sister Sydney (Maddie Hasson) tries to help, but Madison instead connects to the killer, receiving visions of his crimes that she dutifully reports to the police. They soon clock, though, that Madison is more involved than she knows… Contortionists Troy James and Marina Mazepa are the stars here, making the villain properly scary.…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | TBC | SVOD SHUDDER Psycho Goreman writer/director Matthew Ninaber’s latest sees him donning a monster suit again. Nowt to do with the desert, it sends two suspiciously surf-bro mercenaries into a bunker after a scientist locked in when a test subject escaped. Cue crawling through ventilation shafts. The gooey, blind monster is decent, but a Resident Evil knock-off. If you like looking at old PlayStation games even more than playing them you may get something out of it, but it’s all so familiar as to feel utterly redundant.…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED 17 JANUARY 1977 | 15 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Mario Bava ▸ Cast Daria Nicolodi, John Steiner, David Colin Jr, Ivan Rassimov BLU-RAY DEBUT Mario Bava’s final film is an overlooked entry in his filmography – understandably so. It has none of the gothic trappings associated with his work. His son Lamberto took charge of large sections. And the presence of Dario Argento’s then-partner Daria Nicolodi as the lead, operatic prog from Goblin-off-shoot Libra and the recurrence of a trope from Deep Red mean it feels more Dario than Mario. It’s also, well, rather silly. Nicolodi plays a woman who moves back into the home she formerly shared with a husband who committed suicide. Her anxiety soon proves justified, as she experiences hallucinations and her son Marco…

Two animated comedies to clue you in on first. A family on a cross-country road trip must contend with a robot uprising in THE MITCHELLS VS THE MACHINES (Blu-ray/DVD, out now). We said: “Every second is drenched in so much visual information you’ll still be spotting jokes on your 20th viewing.” Yes, you could stream it on Netflix, but the Blu-ray version is an extended cut (40 minutes longer!), and comes with a decent spread of bonuses, including a commentary track, a short, eight deleted scenes, and kid-friendly featurettes on making cupcakes and sock puppets. A nerdy kid from a poor family is given an eccentric, malfunctioning robot in RON’S GONE WRONG (Blu-ray/DVD, out now), co-written by The Day Today veteran Peter Baynham. We said: “While not as visually interesting…

▸ RELEASED 11 JANUARY 288 pages | Paperback/ebook ▸ Author Ron Walters ▸ Publisher Angry Robot Books It’s a shame one of the main takeaways from the success of Ready Player One was that sci-fi fans like geeky references. This virtual reality thriller rarely passes up the opportunity to show off its protagonist’s pop culture literacy, but all the nods to the likes of The Matrix, Doctor Who and The X-Files feel like a distraction from the main plot. Deep Dive is, however, built around a brilliant premise, as videogame developer Peter Banuk accepts a friend’s invitation to try out a totally immersive new VR system. When he returns to the real world, nobody (not even his wife) has any recollection of their two children, and he ends up on…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 304 pages | Hardback ▸ Author James Cameron ▸ Publisher Titan Books “The important thing was just to put the dream down on paper,” says James Cameron, and that’s very much a statement of intent for this book. Tech Noir – a term Cameron coined to nail the aesthetic of The Terminator – raids his personal archives, from self-made eighth-grade comic books to blockbuster concept art. The child is unquestionably father to the man: early work reveals a teen prodigy whose imagination is soaked in SF and horror, with the clear talent to claim his own place in those genres. You might almost mourn the comic artist he could have been. “A glorious exploration of Cameron’s dreaming” Chapters are themed according to Cameron’s lifelong preoccupations: other worlds,…

▸ RELEASED 6 JANUARY 272 pages | Paperback/ebook ▸ Author Katherine Webber ▸ Publisher Walker Books Forget prom: in Ember Grove, the only high school event worth worrying about is the Revelry. Each year, the graduating class gets a secret party in the woods – no-one ever talks about the details, but it’s meant to be the best night ever. Which is why BFFs Bitsy and Amy decide to gatecrash, a year early. Afterwards, neither of them can remember what happened… except that whatever it was, it seems to have driven something of a wedge between them. All the standard teen tropes are here, from ill-fated make-overs to dramatic storming-outs and assorted huggings and cryings; there’s no real mystery over how things will shake out. And while there are some…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 200 pages | Hardback ▸ Author Simon Beecroft ▸ Publisher DK Publishing He-Man’s had a great 2021, with two Netflix shows, each for a different generation of fans. Now an epic book promises to bring audiences together for a complete history of a character that started as a toy, before becoming a household name bellowed by your dad as he held a rake above his head. Yes, the little plastic dude created to recoup the Star Wars cash Mattel lost when they let Kenner snatch George Lucas’s licence has become a decadesspanning icon. This book tracks that journey, from conception, to creation, to collection. It’s a hoarder’s dream, full of glossy shots of your favourite toys, vehicles and castles, with an antique dealer’s eye for detail.…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Publisher Marvel Comics ▸ Writers Zeb Wells, Kelly Thompson, Cody Ziglar ▸ Artists Patrick Gleason, Sara Pichelli, Michael Dowling ISSUES 77-80 Comprising an ambitious 19-part story, The Amazing Spider-Man’s latest reboot is being orchestrated by five different scripters. With the original Webhead comatose after an encounter with the U-Foes, the focus is on his clone Ben Reilly, now on the payroll of the mysterious Beyond Corporation, who have cleverly purchased the Spider-Man trademark. But while he possesses all of Peter Parker’s memories and abilities, and even boasts his own redhead girlfriend in Janine, Ben doesn’t have much of a personality of his own. Despite the writer and artist changing every two issues, a consistently boisterous tone is maintained, with Zeb Wells setting the scene in #75…

Ducournau was keen for composer Jim Williams’s work to have a “big evolution”, in keeping with the film’s theme of transformation. “It was clear to me from the get-go that we needed bells, because I wanted to keep that metallic aspect in the score. And I wanted to have a progression, as well. Something that’s very animalistic, very organic at the start – all the drums that we have – and then that evolves throughout the film towards something more sacred. With the sacredness aspect, we added organs, and we added voices that start by being atonal and then become tonal, throughout the course of the film, in order to try to reach the Bach piece at the end.”…

IN 2019, DIRECTOR DEAN DeBlois’s How to Train Your Dragon trilogy came to a close in cinemas. But you might not be aware that the mythology continues to expand on the small screen, with animated short films and television series. The latest, Dragons: The Nine Realms, is the first time the storytelling is set in contemporary times, with a younger hero named Tom (Jeremy Shada) who meets and becomes BFFs with a dragon called Thunder. The new voice guiding this series is writer John Tellegen, a veteran of Dragons: Race To The Edge and Dragons: Rescue Riders. Being asked to join the series by Dreamworks Animation was, he tells Red Alert, both a “dream come true” and a way to really change up expectations for the mythology. “Moving ahead 1,300…

Do You See What I See Why hasn’t the Gremlins franchise had a Lego playset? That’s the question Ivan Guerrero asked before deciding to come up with his own solution. His designs are now available on the Lego Ideas program website – where he previously created the Sesame Street set that was produced and is now available in stores. Let’s get more Lego horror sets out there – go and give him a vote at bit.ly/SFXGremlins. The Quest Is The Quest The classic 1989 board game Heroquest returns following a crowdfunding campaign. Never underestimate the power of nostalgia! This version contains 65 miniatures, 14 quests and endless replay opportunities because you can build your own quests and stories. And yes, a Crossbows And Catapults reboot is next! £99.99, amazon.co.uk Plastic…

What was your first reaction to James Gunn pitching you a Peacemaker series? I didn’t know what the hell to think when he said he wanted to do a series with a character that seemed to suffer a horrible fate in The Suicide Squad. I didn’t know how the hell we were going to do that. I didn’t know if it was a prelude. I didn’t know how he was gonna handle it. I just knew he was gonna handle it. And I, like James, really thought that we didn’t even scratch the surface of Peacemaker. You have a co-executive producer credit on the series. What has that meant for you? From a professional standpoint, I get to learn from unbelievable minds like Peter Safran and James. I get an…

How do you make Scream relevant to this generation? Tyler Gillett: One of the things that’s been exciting to us about all of the Scream movies, the franchise in its entirety, is how it does seem to not only comment on the current state of media and pop culture, but it’s also always wildly prophetic in the way that it does that. For us, the goal first and foremost is to just make something that’s really scary, and really fun. There is a lot, thematically, happening in this movie, but for us it was really about not wanting to make something that was super heavy-handed in terms of the kind of thematics that it was dealing with, but really just a fun, scary popcorn movie. That transcends any specific time…

UK BBC One, finished US BBC America, finished ▸ Showrunner Chris Chibnall ▸ Cast Jodie Whittaker, Mandip Gill, John Bishop, Jacob Anderson, Thaddea Graham, Craig Els EPISODES 13.01-13.06 Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor could easily have seemed like a dead woman walking in this series. The news of Russell T Davies’s return to the showrunner’s throne in 2023 cast such a huge, anticipatory shadow that it threatened to eclipse the actual ongoing business of Doctor Who. Fitting, in a way – a time travel show whose fans, for once, were living in the future. These six episodes certainly fight to wrest our attention back to the present. They also cock a sizeable snook at filming constraints imposed by the pandemic. This truncated run of adventures reaches for epic mode, summoning the kind…

UK/US Netflix, streaming now ▸ Director Motonobu Hori ▸ Cast Kenjiro Tsuda, Maaya Sakamoto, Hiroshi Yanaka, Yasuji Kimura EPISODES 1.01-1.13 Mark Millar and Leinil Yu’s four-issue comic miniseries gets an anime make-over from Netflix and animation studio Bones, the folks behind My Hero Academia and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. The comics concern a team of superpowered petty crooks who leave the US, with its abundance of costumed heroes, to try their luck in Spain. Dai Sato’s screenplay – a prequel for most of its duration – loses the Iberian angle, focusing on the hapless Johnny Bolt and his attempts to get rich through a life of crime. Bolt is the series’ greatest weakness, a lightweight character with no redeeming qualities, who’s also very passive in plot terms. The final, climactic heist…

▸ RELEASED 3 JANUARY 2021 | TBC | SVOD ▸ Director Stefan Lernous ▸ Cast Tom Vermeir, Ruth Becquart, Anneke Sluiters, Tania Van der Sanden ARROW Credit where credit is due: Hotel Poseidon is a unique kettle of fish. This unsettling, surreal and occasionally blackly funny Dutch film concerns a man trapped in a nightmarish hotel. Dave (Tom Vermeir), a grey skinned and greasy-haired figure, lives in the equally repulsively decorated building. He spends his days wandering through it, deeply depressed and grieving for various dead and decaying family members. All the performances and the settings are heightened, creating an air of vaudevillian grotesque. While Hotel Poseidon does seem to succeed on its own terms, and director Stefan Lernous undoubtedly has a singular vision, it is also wholly unenjoyable to…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1970 | 15 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Mario Bava ▸ Cast Stephen Forsyth, Dagmar Lassander, Laura Betti, Jesús Puente BLU-RAY DEBUT This outré, supernatural-tinged giallo is a lesser-known effort by Italian maestro Mario Bava, but one still well worth investigating. Nostril-flaring Adonis Stephen Forsyth is protagonist John Harrington, a serial killer with method to his madness: every time he cleavers a woman in a bridal dress to death, the fog clears a little more on a repressed childhood trauma. And since he happens to be a bridalwear designer, he’s racking up the kills… Sequences set in an ornate hall full of bridal mannequins are faintly surreal, and there’s some amusingly bitchy sparring between Harrington and his doomed wife (Laura Betti). But the stand-out element is…

▸ RELEASED LATE JANUARY 2021 | TBC | Download ▸ Director Kelsey Egan ▸ Cast Jessica Alexander, Adrienne Pearce, Hilton Pelser, Anja Taljaard This slow-burn psychosexual thriller distinguishes itself by being far more depraved than its initially austere air suggests. In a post-apocalyptic hellscape, the air is contaminated with “the shred”, a toxin that strips people of their memories. A family of five survives living in an airtight glasshouse, with enough vegetation inside to create a closed ecosystem. They stick to strict rules dictated by Mother (Adrienne Pearce), venture outside only in gas masks, and shoot intruders on sight. A stranger (Hilton Pelser) arrives claiming to be prodigal son Lucas, but in a world of disintegrating memories no one can be sure of who anyone, including themselves, truly is. Trapped in…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1988 | 15 | Blu-ray BLU-RAY DEBUT Kim Basinger plays an underprepared but sexy alien tasked with seducing Dan Aykroyd’s hapless scientist in this daft sci-fi comedy. More risqué than you remember it being, it has some gleeful slapstick and despite some very of-the-time humour, the overall tone is syrupy sweet, a triumph of love over adversity. The handbag alien still looks great on Blu-ray, too. Extras Commentary; director interview; gallery; trailer; booklet.…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1971 | 18 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Ray Austin ▸ Cast Ann Michelle, Vicki Michelle, Patricia Haines, Neil Hallett BLU-RAY DEBUT “I can sell any product with a nude,” declares modelling agent/coven leader Sybil Waite. It’s an attitude that informs this underdressed clash of sexploitation and sorcery, which baited the British censors in the early ’70s. Pseudonymously written – and essentially secretly produced – by Hazel Adair, co-creator of long-running ITV soap Crossroads, it finds two sisters seeking fame and fortune in the fashion world, only to tumble into the louche clutches of occultists. Despite the ever-leering camera it’s notable that one of the sisters at least is granted a certain amount of agency, hinting at a feminist take on witchcraft that’s never quite explored.…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1987 | 18 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Michele Soavi ▸ Cast David Brandon, Barbara Cupisti, Domenico Fiore, Robert Gligorov BLU-RAY DEBUT A dash of ironic meta – real blood dripping onto the fake variety; a rape scene rehearsal that turns into a murder – helps to make this tightly enclosed horror a cut above the average slasher. After an escapee from a psychiatric hospital murders the wardrobe mistress on a musical about a real killer, the director has a brainwave: why not lock the cast in all night for rehearsals, and hide the keys? Although you’ll have questions – like why it takes these dunderheads so long to think of the axe in their workshop – Stagefright’s combination of bitchy arguments, booming thunder and power…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | TBC | VOD ▸ Director Julian Kemp ▸ Cast Michael Sheen, Cary Elwes, Nathalie Emmanuel, Robin Askwith NOW If it wasn’t for the sight of a fiftysomething Michael Sheen, it’d be easy to mistake the opening minutes of Sky Cinema’s latest festive-themed film for a mid-’80s episode of Tales Of The Unexpected. Apparently recorded on the garish videotape of the time, and presented in 4:3 ratio, it introduces us to Tony Towers, a brash, mullet-haired club owner and his ginger-mopped brother (an unrecognisable Cary Elwes), who’s sitting pretty in 1985. But when Tony walks to the next carriage he finds himself 10 years in the future (and now on film and in 1.33:1), where he discovers his nightclubs have closed and his life is…

▸ RELEASED ​6 JANUARY 608 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Theo Clare ▸ Publisher Century To read The Book Of Sand is to wonder what might have been. Clearly intended to be the start of a series, it’s the first foray into fantasy from Theo Clare, a new nom de plume for Clare Dunkel, a writer known for her ferocious crime fiction under the name Mo Hayder. Sadly, the novel arrives as a posthumous coda to the author’s career, as she died in July 2021 from motor neurone disease. The Book Of Sand begins with a story sliced into two distinct strands. The first concerns Spider and the 10 members of his “family”, as they refer to themselves, who inhabit an unwelcoming desert where they’ve been tasked with locating something…

▸ RELEASED 20 JANUARY 328 pages | Hardback/ebook ▸ Author Hervé Le Tellier ▸ Publisher Michael Joseph L’Anomalie received great praise on publication in France in 2020 and won that year’s Prix Goncourt, and so an English translation (by Adriana Hunter) follows – mirroring a book that features in the story, also called The Anomaly, written by a frustrated novelist who commits suicide after finishing it. This is one of many ordinary and not-so-ordinary people presented to us by Hervé Le Tellier, ranging from a spiky film editor to a professional assassin. All they have in common is that they took the same flight from Paris to New York in March 2021. The book takes almost half its length to arrive at its premise, which is that an unexplained phenomenon…

▸ RELEASED 20 JANUARY 384 pages | Paperback/ebook ▸ Author James Breakwell ▸ Publisher Solaris It’s the end of the human race. Only a few children survive. Named in sequence from Alpha to Zeta, they live on a crumbling base resting on a moon. They’re supposed to colonise a nearby planet to restart humanity, but unfortunately, said planet is swarming with killer kangaroos and sea monsters. Many machines on the base have gone homicidally insane; the ones that haven’t are even more dangerous. And the kids are pretty much all useless, from the boy whose only interest is painting his nails to another who thinks the most important part of being a doctor is having bad handwriting. Humanity’s future is not in good hands… So begins this bizarre novel from…

▸ RELEASED 18 JANUARY 400 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author TR Napper ▸ Publisher Titan Books War is hell, but it also sells. In the Chinese-occupied future Hanoi of 36 Streets, many of the population are addicted to an immersive videogame about the war between Vietnam and the United States. Gangster Lin Vu has never played it – but she’s hired to find one of its programmers, who’s gone missing in the city. At times the narrative can feel a bit too diffuse. We get a lot of flashbacks to Lin’s past and her training, but it’s arguable whether we really know her any better as a result, or understand why she chooses this life. This is part of the point – Lin’s traumatic life and outsider status has caused…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Publisher DC Comics ▸ Writer Robert Venditti ▸ Artist Wilfredo Torres ISSUES 1-4 Forty-four years on, there still hasn’t been an on-screen version of the Man of Steel that’s equalled Christopher Reeve’s wonderfully earnest portrayal in 1978’s Superman: The Movie. Now DC is giving us a nostalgic trip back in time with a six-issue miniseries that picks up the action from the first two classic Superman movies (wisely ignoring the two that followed). When a mysterious robot crashlands in Metropolis, Superman soon discovers it’s just the harbinger of Brainiac, a superintelligent alien out to catalogue and control all life. Kal-El’s presence as a Kryptonian on Earth means Brainiac views him as a threat, and with the whole planet in danger, Superman’s only hope may lie with…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Format Two players ▸ Publisher Games Workshop BOARDGAME This arena skirmish game revisits The Fellowship Of The Ring’s subterranean scramble through Balin’s tomb. Two players (the box suggests that it can be played by more, but two is clearly optimal) control either Frodo and pals or the teeming goblin hordes. The Fellowship’s goal is to minimise losses and keep the ring bearer alive until the end of the 12th round. The goblins, naturally, just want to slaughter everything in sight. At first, it seems that the Fellowship has the advantage, with their skills making them far more powerful than the average goblin. But the tide can soon turn. Not only do the forces of darkness have the numbers, they have some heavyweight help in the…

SCREENWRITER Mattson Tomlin has been on a roll of late, hired to adapt the comic book series Fear Agent, penning a Mega Man film for Netflix and working with director Matt Reeves to develop The Batman’s script. But Tomlin has also been quietly polishing a passion project that is now a Hulu Original movie, Mother/Android. An adopted child, Tomlin knew only the sketchy details of his own “origin story” as the unexpected child of Romanian parents. Intrigued by their circumstances during the tumultuous overthrow of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, he crafted an original story that combined his love of genre with a cataclysmic backdrop. “I wanted to express these feelings and write this love letter to my biological parents,” Tomlin tells Red Alert. “I wanted to do it in a very…

FREE GIFTS RRP £31.96† SUBSCRIBE AND RECEIVE YOUR FOUR DOCTOR WHO TARGET COLLECTION BOOKS ⋆ Resurrection Of The Daleks ⋆ Revelation Of The Daleks⋆ Dalek⋆ The Crimson Horror Generations of Doctor Who fans grew up with Target’s paperback novelisations, recently revived to great acclaim by BBC Books. Script editor Eric Saward’s adaptations of his ’80s Dalek stories finally completed the classic series range, while Robert Shearman and Mark Gatiss have tackled their new series adventures for the Ninth and Eleventh Doctors. Subscribing is simple Visit magazinesdirect.com/novel21 or call 0330 333 1113 and quote BL33 Subscriber Benefits In addition to this amazing gift, you’ll also receive: ⋆ Incredible value – save up to 60% off the shop price ⋆ Exclusive subscriber-only magazine covers ⋆ SFX delivered directly to your door! £21…

ICHAEL MORBIUS has waited an eternity for the big screen – and not just because the pandemic shunted the new, Jared Leto-starring movie from its July 2020 release. Marvel’s Living Vampire was set to be teased at the end of 1998’s Blade, foreshadowing his original role as a key player in Blade II (director Stephen Norrington even assumed the role for the briefest of fan-baiting glimpses). This scene was ultimately deleted and plans for the sequel changed. Now Morbius arrives as part of the SSU – Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, the studio’s attempt to build a shared franchise around the web-slinger’s gallery of rogues. The director is Daniel Espinosa, who helmed 2017’s Life, ironically once rumoured to be a stealth Venom movie (it wasn’t). Leto exchanges the Joker’s greasepaint for Morbius’s…

CINEMA 70 TV 74 HOME ENTERTAINMENT 78 BOOKS 86 COMICS 92 GAMES & STUFF 94 70 THE KING’S First World War problems Highlights 72 TITANE → Director Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to Raw might make your monocle pop out. 78 DOCTOR WHO: SEASON 17 → Movellans, Mandrels, a big green knob: Tom Baker’s penultimate run. 86 THE BOOK OF SAND → Djinni lurk in the desert in this posthumously released novel. → RATINGS EXPLAINED SUPERB GOOD AVERAGE POOR TERRIBLE…

UK Netflix, streaming now US HBO Max, streaming now ▸ Showrunner Greg Walker ▸ Cast Anna Diop, Brenton Thwaites, Curran Walters, Ryan Potter EPISODES 3.01-3.13 Back at the arse-end of the last millennium all the best genre TV shows only came really good with season three: Buffy, The Next Generation, The X-Files… Titans has resurrected that grand tradition. After two perfectly watchable but rarely remarkable seasons of meandering Arrowverse noir, the series finally hits its stride with this impressive, and focused, third outing. With Jason Todd (Robin Mark II) turning to the Dark Side and Batman having a midlife crisis, the Titans relocate to Gotham to try to succeed where the Dark Knight failed. Lots of bickering, gut-wrenching shocks and wonderfully physical fight scenes ensue. Dick/Nightwing gets to rekindle his…

UK/US Netflix, streaming now ▸ Showrunners Christian Linke, Alex Yee ▸ Cast Hailee Steinfeld, Ella Purnell, Kevin Alejandro, Harry Lloyd EPISODES 1.01-1.09 Riot Games, developer of videogame phenomenon League Of Legends, has spent a decade piecing together a fantasy multiverse through short stories and animated trailers. Rather than tackle that world in its entirety, its debut long-form entry focuses on one small but explosive corner of it. That’s key to Arcane’s accessibility. Its origin-story take on a divided city state and the lives of just a few of the established characters makes for a first season stripped of its notorious complexity. Bold videogame caricatures are replaced by detailed explorations of characters, with the occasional knowing nod to keep long-time fans enthralled. After an excellent first act, Arcane sometimes struggles to contain…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | TBC | VOD ▸ Director Mark Gatiss ▸ Cast Simon Callow, Tsion Habte, Jason Rennie, Tamsin Greig NOW Writer/director Mark Gatiss continues his quest to make Christmas spooky again with this Sky Original movie, an updated remake of Lionel Jeffries’s 1972 film The Amazing Mr Blunden. That’s a time-travelling ghost story about two poor teenagers in Victorian London who must save the lives of two orphans in 1818. Both films are, technically, adaptations of Antonia Barber’s 1969 children’s book The Ghosts, but Gatiss’s version is more obviously a homage to Jeffries’s British family classic. Set in the modern day, it follows siblings Lucy (Tsion Habte) and Jamie (Jason Rennie) as their mother is approached by Mr Blunden (Simon Callow), a mysterious old man who…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1998 | 15 | Blu-ray ▸ Directors Stefan Avalos, Lance Weiler ▸ Cast Stefan Avalos, Lance Weiler, David Beard, Jim Seward BLU-RAY DEBUT This fascinating snapshot from the dawn of the World Wide Web is one of the earliest examples of found footage horror as we know it today. In 1995, a group of filmmakers headed into the Pine Barrens in search of the mythical Jersey Devil, but met with a gruesome end. Documentarian David Leigh (David Beard) sifts through the recovered footage and attempts to piece together the truth of what really happened… The Last Broadcast is obsessed with the possibilities – for good and ill – of the online world. Where many found footage films are regular horror movies with a shaky cam,…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | TBC | Download Olivia loves vampires. She watches vampire movies, reads vampire stories… and writes vampire novels. So when she finds herself with a real vampire locked in her garage, she seizes the opportunity to do some hands-on research. This horror-comedy is also a secret Christmas film (Olivia has fangs hanging from her tree!), which seems like a lot to pack in, but it works. Writer/director Sean Nichols Lynch keeps the action and the laughs coming – and caps it all with a perfectly creepy ending.…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED 10 JANUARY 2021 | 18 | DVD/download Another feminist redo of a slasher movie? Yes, but it’s a lot more fun than Black Christmas. In the ’90s, driller killer Russ Thorn left only one survivor, Trish. Now her daughter Dana is planning a weekend getaway with her friends, and it seems history might repeat itself… except Dana came prepared. Post-post-modern, Slumber Party Massacre works best if you’ve seen the 1982 original – but if not, it’s original enough to stand on its own two feet. Extras None.…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED 10 JANUARY 1980 | 15 | Blu-ray/download ▸ Director Dusty Nelson ▸ Cast Joseph Pilato, Susan Chapek, John Harrison, Bernard McKenna BLU-RAY DEBUT This product of a new team-up between 101 Films and the American Genre Film Archive slate should fascinate fans of George Romero. Shot in Pittsburgh, it features Romero associates like Joe Pilato (later Rhodes in Day Of The Dead) and make-up genius Tom Savini. Pilato’s cameraman gets a job on a film about a razor-wielding killer. Unbeknownst to him, it’s actually a snuff movie (one whose hidden cameras rather prefigure reality TV). The film-within-a-film conceit is highly effective. Even after you’re primed to expect the camera to pull back to reveal the crew, it feels faintly surreal; you half-expect another pull back to the…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! (also in selected cinemas) 2021 | 15 | SVOD ▸ Director Adam McKay ▸ Cast Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett NETFLIX Covid-19 asked some uncomfortable questions about how humanity would act at the end of times. Would we rise to the occasion Armageddon-style, or collapse into Melancholia-like depression? Or, as Anchorman creator Adam McKay’s pitch-black satire suggests, would the answer be far more embarrassing? In Don’t Look Up, astronomers Randall (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Kate (Jennifer Lawrence) discover a comet heading straight to Earth, due to cause an extinction-level event in six months’ time. They raise the alarm with Dr “Teddy” Oglethorpe (an excellent Rob Morgan) and it isn’t long until they’re explaining the “planet killer” to the unhinged President (Meryl Streep) and her…

EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1986 | 15 | Blu-ray ▸ Director Jackie Chan ▸ Cast Jackie Chan, Alan Tam, Lola Forner BLU-RAY DEBUT Playing like a goofy Hong Kong variation of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, this action bonanza sees Jackie Chan’s gum-chewing musician-turned-treasure-hunter attempting to rescue his kidnapped bandmate alongside best bud Alan Tam. Oh and there’s some bumph about a holy suit of armour, which is wanted by an evil religious cult. None of that really matters, though, because the focus is resolutely on Jackie Chan’s high kicks and death drops. Cars rocket over highways, and Chan leaps off just about every surface he can find. Tonally it’s all over the place, with even the odd bit of Bond thrown in for good measure. “Whip-cracks along at…

▸ RELEASED 18 JANUARY 304 pages | Hardback/ebook ▸ Author Sequoia Nagamatsu ▸ Publisher Bloomsbury There are surprisingly few SF stories about death. Sure, many books and films kill off characters. But only a handful – like Tarkovsky’s Solaris, or Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” – have explored what death might feel like in an SFnal future, and how technology could change the way we mourn. Combining as it does climate change, a global pandemic and space exploration, Sequoia Nagamatsu’s first novel (following years of short fiction publications) certainly isn’t short on scope. But he keeps the emotional focus at a human scale, with a small group of core characters, and most of the action set over a few years in the late 2030s. The book is structured…

▸ RELEASED 4 JANUARY 384 pages | Paperback/ebook ▸ Author Akshaya Raman ▸ Publisher Hot Key Books There are many tired tropes in fantasy – a medieval Europe-type setting, anyone? – and it’s refreshing when authors manage to expand or subvert them. It’s even more refreshing when they move away from them entirely. That’s just what Akshaya Raman has done here, with a YA tale of royal siblings struggling in an Indian-inspired world of magic. Vira is the maharani, the ruler of Ashoka since her mother’s death less than a year ago. Ronak is her twin brother, desperate to escape the confines and expectations of palace life. Riya is the younger sister, who’s fled from home and joined the Ravens, a Robin Hood-style set of outlaws determined to help the…

▸ RELEASED 15 JANUARY 264 pages | Paperback/ebook ▸ Author Sean Egan ▸ Publisher Applause Apemania was the unlikeliest of phenomena: born of a satirical novel by French intellectual Pierre Boulle, it saw an onslaught of screen adaptations and merchandising that played like a hairier rehearsal for Star Wars. Not bad for a book the author himself declared “unfilmable”. In this engaging overview Sean Egan covers the full sweep of the Apes story, from that 1963 novel to War For The Planet Of The Apes. There are astute takes on the old movies: plot flaws and creative deficiencies are acknowledged, such as the disappointing simian make-up in Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes (“Some faces are barely superior to a joke shop mask” – ouch). Mixing new interviews with…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Publisher Marvel Comics ▸ Writer Tom Taylor ▸ Artist Iban Coello ISSUES 1-3 Writer Tom Taylor has regularly done What If…?-style versions of superhero sagas in comics like Injustice and DCeased. He’s now applying this approach to the Marvel Universe in a new out-of-continuity six-issue miniseries. What starts as a typical tale of Marvel heroes uniting to defeat an alien machine at the Earth’s core takes a dramatic turn when the only solution is to unleash a massive, non-stop electromagnetic pulse. This also permanently switches off all electricity across the planet. Seven years later a new, more peaceful world has been established – but a cabal of villains is out to destroy this peace by any means necessary… Dark Ages has the rare advantage of being…

▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Publisher VIZ Media ▸ Writer/artist Junji Ito COLLECTION Horror manga aficionados will need no introduction to the grotesque world of Junji Ito, the man behind the skin-crawling weirdness of Uzumaki, Gyo and Tomie. This hardback anthology brings together 12 tales first published between 1987 and 1997. You can expect, as the parental advisory coyly puts it, “graphic violence and mature themes”. While it gets pretty dark at times (see, for example, “Where The Sandman Lives”, in which a man’s body turns inside out like a glove), with suicide a recurring theme, on the whole it’s less gruellingly perverse than his flagship works. Some of the more effective pieces – like “Bullied”, in which a girl who mistreated a little boy finds herself revisiting the same…

▸ RELEASED 6 JANUARY ▸ Running time 71 minutes ▸ Format CD/download ▸ Publisher BBC Audio AUDIOBOOK What happened to First Doctor companions Ian and Barbara after they returned home to Earth, courtesy of a Dalek time machine, at the end of 1965 adventure “The Chase”? That’s the hook of the latest in the Beyond The Doctor series. If, like us, you were hoping for wedding bells, this audiobook may be rather disheartening. Writer Paul Magrs suggests that after being “a wanderer in the fourth dimension”, the appeal of cheese and pickle sandwiches in smoky pubs would quickly fade, and the two teachers’ differing emotional responses soon send them on divergent paths. Barbara gets tangled up with an occult group, while Ian draws on his experiences to script a TV…

▸ RELEASED Running until 26 FEBRUARY ▸ Director Nicholas Hytner ▸ Location Bridge Theatre, London PLAY Like the three Dark Materials instalments before it, this first volume in Philip Pullman’s companion trilogy makes an exhilarating transition to the stage. Set over a decade before the opening of Northern Lights, with Lyra a mere baby, the focus is on innkeeper’s son Malcolm Polstead, who takes a shine to her as she’s cared for by the nuns that live across the river from his family’s pub. Although the ensuing events occur when Polstead is only 12, you quickly forget that Samuel Creasey – making an impressive theatrical debut here – is in his twenties as you get swept up by his boundless, James Cordenesque exuberance. He forms a fractious partnership with spiky pot girl…