Inhaltsverzeichnis für December 2020 in SFX

DEAD ON ITS FEET Robert Graham, email Do we really need any more Walking Dead spin-offs? The original series is up among the all-time great horror shows and Fear The Walking Dead took it in an interesting new direction. Walking Dead: World Beyond seems like the same old, same old, and anything else will only appeal to Walking Dead fans (The Walking Dead and Fear The Walking Dead are even more ruthless with their main characters than Game Of Thrones, though). It might well be time for The Walking Dead to take a rest, at least as a TV franchise. SFX Anyone else agree with Robert? Are we thoroughly zombied-out, or is there life in the old reanimated corpse yet? Let us know. OH MR FRODO SIR! Edward O’Reilly, email…

WHEN THE STEVEN SPIELBERG produced Animaniacs series vamoosed into the sunset in 1998, there were 99 episodes comprising 274 segments, featuring a host of beloved original characters including Slappy Squirrel, the Goodfeathers, Rita and Runt, Pinky and the Brain, and the show’s superstars: the Warner siblings Yakko, Wakko and Dot Twenty-two years later, the series is back with 13 new episodes under Spielberg’s guiding hand and almost all of the original voice cast reprising the Warners and Pinky and the Brain, in new adventures from showrunner Wellesley Wild (Family Guy) and co-producer Gabe Swarr (El Tigre), who is leading the design and animation. The show’s return is the kind of nostalgic resurrection the Warner siblings would have mocked back in the day. Happily, the animated trio meet the moment by…

AFTER SPENDING THE PAST TWO years on creator-owned work, Kieron Gillen has been lured back to Marvel by two new projects, as he not only helms the House of Ideas’ first Warhammer 40,000 mini-series Marneus Calgar, but also becomes the writer of the latest iteration of the Eternals “I’m always looking for something I haven’t done before,” says Gillen, who started out in comics in the late ’90s by contributing to Warhammer Monthly. “In the case of Warhammer, it was setting the tone and direction for Marvel’s new line of books and working out how we can tap into Marvel’s unparalleled resources to make Warhammer comics unlike any that have existed before. It’s a big challenge, and I love it.” Providing an entry point into the future war-ravaged universe from…

How does it feel to be connected to the Star Wars universe through The Mandalorian? I’ve had the time of my life on The Mandalorian. It goes without saying that it is the ultimate privilege to be a part of this storytelling legacy. This is the first live-action Star Wars TV show and there’s this sense of dedication to the origins of Star Wars that is mind-blowing. Bringing that honest vibe to the small screen is really important to me, and I love what’s been done with the show. What’s it like to work with the Child? For me, it’s been fun to work with the Child because I’ve worked with the animatronic team before. I had worked with them on Jurassic World and on Terminator Salvation. Jon Favreau said…

GO FUCK YOURSELF!” You’ll have to trust us on this one: director extraordinaire Christopher Landon is speaking purely hypothetically… and with a riotous laugh. His strong reaction is understandable: SFX has just asked what his message would be to horror genre cynics who jump to conclusions about his new film Freaky and dismiss it as “just another slasher movie”. Because, let’s face it, there have been rather a few since John Carpenter basically invented the subgenre with 1978’s Halloween. I’d say, that’s the whole point of this movie: we’re expecting you to have seen slasher movies,” he elaborates, before citing the film’s crucial sci-fi twist: “We’re expecting you to have seen body-swap movies [too]. But what you haven’t seen – yet – is a body-swap movie that collides with a…

How does it feel knowing that The Walking Dead will likely finish airing in 2022, with season 11? I feel kind of bittersweet about it. Part of me is ready for a spin-off and ready for the excitement of what that will be. And then another part of me is sort of in denial! I’ve been doing this for a while now. It’s become such a big part of my life, so it doesn’t really seem real. And then again, we’re shooting 30 straight episodes, so we might just want to kill each other by the end of it! Did you ever expect to be on the series for this long, or for Daryl to become so integral to the story? Not at all. I thought that I would be on the…

RELEASED OUT NOW! PG | 103 minutes Directors Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart Cast Honor Kneafsey, Eva Whittaker, Sean Bean, Simon McBurney From Cartoon Saloon, makers of the lovely Oscar-nominated fantasy Song Of The Sea, comes this terrific animated period adventure. It’s set in Ireland in 1650, under the heavy hand of Oliver Cromwell. The action is split between the bustling town of Kilkenny and the surrounding woods, where beasts and legends lurk. Cromwell has appointed a wolf-hunter, voiced by Sean Bean. He’s a gentle-hearted father with more than a little resemblance to Ned Stark. His lively daughter is Robin, who soon encounters a wild, magic girl in the woods, called Mebh, who commands a wolf pack. Mebh is hilariously mouthy and joyously feral, especially as her “wolfwalker” powers let her become…

UK Sky Atlantic, finished/streaming now on Now TV US Streaming now on HBO Max Showrunner Misha Green Cast Jonathan Majors, Jurnee Smollett, Wunmi Mosaku, Michael K Williams EPISODES 1.01-1.10 Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel Lovecraft Country seemed tailor-made for TV adaptation. It’s a shame, then, that while HBO’s big-budget adaptation is a gorgeously crafted, superbly cast show, it’s also something of a confused mess. It starts strongly with “Sundown”, which elegantly sets out the show’s stall. A young black man, Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors), returns home to Chicago after serving in the Korean War. His father has vanished, but a mysterious letter points Atticus to a mansion in Massachusetts. Cue a hazardous road trip through Jim Crow-era America, where Tic and his friend Leti (Jurnee Smollett) face racial prejudice and eldritch…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1999 | 15 | Blu-ray Director Shinya Tsukamoto Cast Masahiro Motoki, Ryô, Yasutaka Tsutsui, Masako Motai BLU-RAY DEBUT Sadako wasn’t the only one trapped down a well at the end of the ’90s: the doctor protagonist of this film ends up in one too, pushed in by an apparent doppelganger who proceeds to steal his life – and wife. Turns out there’s a prosaic explanation (the clue’s in the title), but Masahiro Motoki remains impressively demonic as the sneering interloper who embodies the flipside of human nature, especially when lit so that he’s reduced to glinting eyes and teeth. Part fairy tale, part melodrama, Gemini was something of a departure for Shinya Tsukamoto, director of cyberpunk body horror Tetsuo, being a period piece and not an…

EXYRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1988 | 18 | Blu-ray Director Robert Englund Cast Stephen Geoffreys, Patrick O’Bryan, Sandy Dennis, Robert Picardo BLU-RAY DEBUT Plastering the words “Freddy Krueger” next to director Robert Englund’s name on the box of this gleefully camp horror feels a bit unfair: 976-Evil deserves to be judged on its own merits. The tragic tale of Hoax (Stephen Geoffreys), a bullied nerd who succumbs to the temptations of the dark side after calling a creepy “horrorscope” premium line, it’s deeply silly, but has an irresistible energy. Englund throws everything he’s got at the screen: it’s all dry ice, neon, Satanic giggles, and broad, almost John Waters-esque performances. Low budget by ’80s standards, the visuals mostly stand up to the Blu-ray treatment, with the demonic make-up effects looking…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | 13+ | VOD This film may only cover seven hours, but they feel like 70. Aliens crash-land on a school in Tooting, where a bunch of teens – of varying acting ability – are experiencing relationship angst while putting on a production of Romeo And Juliet. Lead Rufiat Awolope shows promise but she’s dragged down by everyone around her, while a faux Stranger Things-style score and hand-held cameras desperately try to add life. Sadly, there is no life on this Earth.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | SVOD SHUDDER Impatient for the next Conjuring film? You may find this Spanish chiller an acceptable stopgap. Set in 1976 Madrid, it sees a family move into a haunted apartment, and has a very similar MO. By arguably casting both disability and transgenderism as monstrous, it’ll offend some, but the more fundamental problem is the familiarity of the scares. Self-rocking chair, flickering light, swiftly passing something… expect a full house on your bingo card.…

EXTRAS RELEASED 9 NOVEMBER 2020 | 15 | Blu-ray From the team behind 2017’s equally candid Life After Flash, this doc mixes a retrospective on the making of Flight Of The Navigator with an account of star Joey Cramer’s trajectory through stardom, self-hatred, drug abuse, crime, incarceration and redemption. It’s a raw, often wrenching story, told with empathy as it reclaims one of the true lost boys of ’80s cinema. Extras Deleted scenes; short film; director/Joey interviews and more.…

Though billed as a folk horror, THE OTHER LAMB (out now, DVD/streaming on MUBI) doesn’t much feel like one. There are shades of The Handmaid’s Tale to this drama about a small cult led by a messianic figure whose dreamboat looks conceal an abusive nature, and whose rules (“Only the Shepherd can tell stories”) work as an analogy for oppressive patriarchal religious structures in general. It’s attractively composed, and Raffey Cassidy simmers nicely as the young worm who eventually turns. Part historical film, part fantasy, part horror, German silent movie WAXWORKS (Blu-ray, 9 November) uses the framework of a writer hired by the owner of a carnival waxworks to write stories to publicise the exhibits. A two-minute sequence where he dreams of Jack the Ripper/Spring-heeled Jack is the “horror” highlight.…

RELEASED 5 NOVEMBER 352 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Kristin Cast Publisher Head Of Zeus “No touching today for a healthy tomorrow”. As well as being a catchy potential Covid-19 safety slogan, that’s the motto of The Key. In Kristen Cast’s dystopian franchise opener, they’re the omnipresent government agency responsible for keeping a deadly virus at bay. Some years before, “Cerberus” decimated the population, so now physical distancing is the law. To keep the species going, babies are grown in labs, while abstinent couples are assigned to one another via algorithm. But a safe world turns out to be a boring world, so when innocent nurse Elodie meets sexy rebel Aiden, well, you can guess what happens to her sterile, passionless life. Narrated by three teenagers, this is a very young-seeming…

RELEASED 5 NOVEMBER 480 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Robert Dinsdale Publisher Del Rey Stories of refugees, of the struggle to find a new home and gain acceptance are, sadly, timeless, but seem more than a little topical right now. The myth of the outsider as threat also seems to be perennial. Paris By Starlight is the tale of the People, with no name or named country, who’ve been driven from their home by the landlocked sea by soldiers and travelled through Europe, via detention camps and border guards and traffickers, to find themselves in Paris. The People are nocturnal, and as they make the city their home the night fills with their colourful – and magical – flora and fauna. At first the Parisians fall in love with the beauty…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 304 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook Author TC Farren Publisher Titan Books Acclaimed South African novelist Tracey Farren has hopped genres with The Book Of Malachi, her first work of SF. It takes place on a distant, disused oil rig, home to a shady organ-farming programme, where extra organs are being grown inside the bodies of convicted murderers for the benefit of the wealthy. The staff are joined by Malachi Dakwaa; his payment for six months’ service will be a new tongue, to replace the one cut out by militants in a civil war. Farren has created an extraordinary narrator in Malachi, who is alienated from the world partly by his disability but mostly by his trauma and feelings of guilt: he was the only survivor of a school…

RELEASED 12 NOVEMBER 400 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Kate Mascarenhas Publisher Head Of Zeus Good ideas don’t, unfortunately, automatically make good books. Kate Mascarenhas’s follow-up to The Psychology Of Time Travel is great in prospect. For two centuries, the Kendrick family has lived and worked on its own private river island in Oxford. Trammelled by tradition and riven with rivalries, the Kendricks make magical dolls for high-end collectors, guarding trade secrets jealously from most of their own members. Enter a charismatic outsider, claiming to be a long-lost relative and soon romancing a disaffected daughter of the business; exit a valuable heirloom doll at the hands of a thief who may be the titular fairy. If you’re thinking this sounds like Gormenghast in a doll workshop: yes it does, but (sadly)…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 128 pages | Hardback Author Philip W Errington Publisher Darton, Longman & Todd For those who religiously watch the BBC’s 1984 adaptation of John Masefield’s The Box Of Delights every Christmas, a behind-the-scenes book is long overdue. This isn’t quite that, but instead a magical dive into the past, celebrating all aspects of Masefield’s 1935 novel. It whizzes through Masefield’s early life and career – going swiftly because after all we’re here, Abner-like, for The Box – before arriving at the Kay Harker books. It’s subtitled as “A stunning visual celebration of John Masefield’s Christmas classic”, and each spread includes illustrations and other images. These brief snippets of press releases, albums or original publications are a joy. The sight of something like the opening page of the…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Marvel Writer Skottie Young Artist Humberto Ramos ISSUES 1-3 “Superpowered high-school drama” is a subgenre that both Marvel and DC revisit on a semi-regular basis, so it’s no surprise that another example has turned up in the shape of the latest Marvel ongoing series. The story centres around the first pupils to arrive at a New Orleans-based school for sorcerers set up by Doctor Strange. The trainee magic users come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and are soon experiencing the trials of teenage life, alongside the added dangers of realityaltering threats and the secrets that lurk behind the school’s friendly façade. There’s no shortage of colourful incidents and bizarre action in Skottie Young’s scripts, which pack plenty of invention into these first three issues,…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Dark Horse Comics Writers Dan O’Bannon, Cristiano Seixas Artist Guilherme Balbi ISSUES 1-3 With the licence for Alien spin-off comics moving to Marvel in 2021, Dark Horse is ending its 32-year run on the franchise with a follow-up to its recent interpretation of William Gibson’s unmade Alien 3 script. This new five-issue mini-series adapts the original draft of Alien by writer Dan O’Bannon, back when it was called Star Beast, and way before Ridley Scott or any of the film’s pioneering designers were involved. The resulting comic ties its visuals purely to O’Bannon’s descriptions in his screenplay, which means a very different look for the classic alien. While there are some narrative differences – most notably, the Facehugger eggs are found in an ancient pyramid, rather than…

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EVER SINCE RALPH MACCHIO and Bill Sienkiewicz turned David Lynch’s 1984 film of Frank Herbert’s acclaimed novel into a Marvel mini-series, Dune has been absent from the comic book page. But with Denis Villeneuve’s new big-screen adaptation due next year, Frank’s son Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson have not only scripted a 12-issue mini-series of their 1999 prequel novel House Atreides for Boom! Studios, but have transformed Dune itself into a graphic novel for Abrams Books. “Comics and the Dune canon went in different directions for decades after the 1984 film,” says Herbert. “To me, it always felt like something was missing. I wanted to see how the stories in the Dune universe – especially my father’s great classic – would look in comic book form. Since Frank Herbert…

WHEREVER YOU LAND ON THE STAR WARS scale of love or hate, there’s at least one thing just about everyone can agree on: the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special remains the worst in-canon production of the franchise. A cheesy one-hour special meant to bridge Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, the 20th Century Fox Television-produced tie-in boasted the entire original cast, plus actresses Bea Arthur and Diahann Carroll for some weird reason. Even with that star power it was bad beyond belief, so much so that actor Anthony Daniels referred to it as a “turd” in his autobiography I Am C-3PO. Although never broadcast again, bootlegs have still made it legendary in pop culture history. Forty-three years later, Lucasfilm clearly hopes there’s been time enough for the stink to…

All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dune. Transuranic, heavy elements may not be used where there is sea. Medium atomic weights are not advisable. Sapphire and Steel have been as-sand. (That’s quite enough of that – Ed) ART BY @ANDYDREWZ SCI-FACT! Harryhausen’s ancestors were Germans who emigrated to the USA. The name’s an anglicisation of Herrenhausen or “manor house”.…

What can you tease about season two of The Mandalorian? The whole experience was great. It was a real kick, because Jon Favreau is a joy to be around. I love the way he works. There were days where I was sitting around certain creatures that I remember seeing on the big screen when I was a young kid, and that was really fun. On days like that, you sit back and think, “Wow. This is one of those unreal moments in life.” I didn’t see it coming for sure. You just sit back and enjoy it. What are your earliest memories of Star Wars? I remember going to the Briggsmore 7 Theatre in Modesto and watching the first movie. I grew up in Modesto, California. That’s where George Lucas…

The first spin-off TV series of The Walking Dead, Fear The Walking Dead (2015), is still ambling along like a Walker that’s latched onto the fresh scent of blood. Six seasons into its narrative, Fear, like its parent series, now looks very different from the way it started. Character-wise, only three members of the original cast – Alycia Debnam-Carey (Alicia), Colman Domingo (Strand) and Rubén Blades (Daniel) – are still fighting for their lives. The landscape has changed from Los Angeles to the dusty wilds of Texas. And two Walking Dead characters, Morgan (Lennie James) and Dwight (Austin Amelio), have migrated into core storylines Reinvention is something showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg have embraced since they took over the creative reins of the series in season four, and they…

FESTIVAL REPORT SCREENED 7-18 OCTOBER It was a case of swings and roundabouts for this year’s London Film Festival, with “the new normal” deterring in-person attendance but online streams democratising the event. Screening alongside Possessor (see right) and Wolfwalkers (page 70) were six films of interest to SFX. Now set to debut on Disney+ at Christmas, Pixar’s Soul is a jazz-influenced fable about finding your place in the world. Riffing on the company’s usual formula, it then freeforms off in unexpected directions to create something extraordinary, emotionally rich and very funny. What other company would make a familyfriendly cartoon about a world-weary music teacher having a midlife crisis? From the photorealistic streets of New York (scored by jazz musician Jon Batiste) to the abstract world of The Great Before, where…

RELEASED 6 NOVEMBER (Blu-ray/DVD/download 30 November) 15 | 116 minutes Director Yeon Sang-ho Cast Dong-Won Gang, Jung-hyun Lee, Re Lee Tense Korean horror Train To Busan (2016) followed a group of passengers struggling to survive after an outbreak of speedster zombies. This follow-up is set in the same world, but works on its own. Four years on, the Korean peninsula has been quarantined, but four refugees who found safe haven in Hong Kong are lured back by a job to recover $20 million in cash from an abandoned truck. The premise is pure John Carpenter, and that’s not all that feels familiar. On discovering a rogue army unit holed up in a mall, our heroes must contend with a gladiatorial arena where the living are pitted against the infected. George Romero…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1955 | 12 | Blu-ray & DVD (dual format) Director John Parker Cast Adrienne Barrett, Bruno Ve Sota, Ben Roseman, Richard Barron BLU-RAY DEBUT This directorial one-off deserves to be bracketed with the similarly off-kilter Carnival Of Souls as a salvo from the cinematic margins. It’s remarkable that it was shot in 1953, six years before filming began on Psycho – and a good 14 years before a young David Lynch first picked up a 16mm camera. Clocking in at under an hour and featuring zero dialogue and nameless characters, it’s a deeply Freudian noir nightmare whose heroine walks through a seedy world bristling with misogynist threat. We follow the switchbladepacking “Gamine” (played by the director’s secretary, Adrienne Barrett) as she’s latched onto by a pimp,…

EXTRAS RELEASED 9 NOVEMBER 1982 | 18 | Blu-ray Director Sogo Ishii Cast Takanori Jinnai, Shinya Ohe, Tsui Tobu, Ko Machida BLU-RAY DEBUT This energetic, chaotic Japanese dystopia may be the most authentically punk of all punk films. Watching it is not unlike being helplessly jammed into a mosh pit, jostled as people scream incoherently in your earhole. You’ll need to look up the plot on Wikipedia afterwards – and probably remain unconvinced. This much is clear: there are gangs hanging out in derelict factories. There are performances by leather-clad bands who yell “It’s a toilet of a world!” There is sleazy, abusive bondage sex. There is endless messy, unchoreographed scrapping between punks, bikers, yakuza and riot cops. The penny drops once you learn that the shoot wrapped with up…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | 15 | SVOD Director Remi Weekes Cast Sope? Dirisu, Wunmi Mosaku, Matt Smith NETFLIX Even in the best haunted house movies, you can’t help but ask why our beleaguered heroes don’t just get the hell out of there. But what if they’re asylum seekers, and to cause any fuss would be to risk deportation? This is just one of the many clever things about Remi Weekes’s suspenseful and moving debut, in which married couple Bol and Rial (Sopé Dìrísù and Wunmi Mosaku) wind up in England on an unwelcoming estate after fleeing war-torn Sudan. En route, they lost their young daughter to the perilous ocean crossing. Now, placed in a shabby, barely habitable house by case worker Mark (Matt Smith), they find themselves assaulted by…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | 15 | DVD/download “We sent two into orbit, yet three returned to Earth,” a grim-faced Russian official tells Oksana Akinshina’s equally grim-faced neurophysiologist, in a line that neatly sums up this impressive Russian sci-fi horror. Part Alien, part The Quatermass Experiment, part Chenobyl, Sputnik’s Soviet-era setting and brutalist milieu give what might have been a fairly familiar SF horror a bracing visual twist. Modest use of CG and clean, simple storytelling make this an impressive debut for director Egor Abramenko. Extras None.…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | 15 | Blu-ray Director Ryland Brickson Cole Tews Cast Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Erick West, Beulah Peters, There’s a certain irony in a Daniel Long No budget? No worries: just spoof a bad horror movie. The irony being, it’s actually really difficult to make a good bad movie. And Lake Michigan Monster, for the most part, is a pretty terrible movie. Cult connoisseurs should stick with it though, because there are some unexpected treasures in its depths. Shot in black and white, this rum tale of salty sea dogs, fish monsters and revenge is a one-note gag for too much of its running time, relying on a mixture of high-camp acting, deadpan reaction shots and cheesy puns, all delivered with breathtakingly little understanding of…

EXTRAS RELEASED 16 NOVEMBER 2020 | 15 | DVD/download This handsomely shot folk horror fuses the isolated setting of The Village with The Witch’s paranoid hysteria. It’s 1973, and in a devoutly religious community, rumours abound that Agatha and her daughter Audrey are witches – rumours that turn out to be entirely correct. It’s a well made, atmospheric film, but it’s a shame that the contrast between the village’s 1800s aesthetic and attitudes and the ’70s setting is never explored, and that it fails to match the chills of its forebears. Extras None.…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1995/2018 | 18 | Blu-ray Director Rusty Cundieff Cast Clarence Williams III, Keith David, Wings Hauser, Rosalind Cash BLU-RAY DEBUT These creepy horror anthologies put a black social commentary twist on the format. In the 1995 film, three gangbangers turn up at a house to pick up some drugs – or “the shit!” as the owner, Mr Simms (Clarence Williams III) gleefully says. He relates four tales of supernatural vengeance, voodoo dolls and more. The themes – institutional racism, domestic violence, the normalisation of the KKK – are all clear and depressingly still relevant, but director Rusty Cundieff approaches the material with a wry sense of humour. This is schlocky fun with a serious intent. The belated 2018 sequel is more of the same, albeit less…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 528 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Alix E Harrow Publisher Orbit Having seen her debut The Ten Thousand Doors of January nominated for virtually every genre award going, Alix E Harrow could be forgiven for resting on her laurels for a while. Instead, a year later, she’s back with a 500-page victory lap of a follow-up that is richer, stranger and angrier than January, if not quite so smoothly polished. When 17-year-old wild child Juniper Eastwood washes up 200 miles from home in the city of New Salem, Massachusetts, she finds that the Wanted posters accusing her of witchcraft and murder have beaten her there. Her sisters Bella and Agnes are in town too, but that’s not much comfort, given that the three of them have been estranged for…

RELEASED OUT NOW 192 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Steve Cole Publisher BBC Books Previously, the various strands of the multimedia Time Lord Victorious initiative only skirted around the edges of what the arc is actually about. This novel finally lays the cards on the table. The Tenth Doctor arrives in the Dark Times (the prehistory of the universe, before the Time Lords took control), where he encounters the Kotturuh – a god-like race that determine the lifespans of other species. Allied once more with Brian the Ood, the Doctor tries to rescue a young girl from the Kotturuh. The scope of Steve Cole’s novel is vast despite its slim page count. The strangeness of the Dark Times, an all-powerful enemy and a Doctor pushed to his wits’ end… there’s a…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Tom Shone Publisher Faber & Faber From the labyrinthine logo of his production company Syncopy to the synapse-frying plot machinations of his latest, Tenet, Christopher Nolan remains one of our most elusive mainstream filmmakers – half Hitchcock, half Rubik’s Cube. This smart, insightful book attempts to pierce that oh-socryptic carapace, tease out the man and the mind behind the cool blue IMAX glaze and time-haunted storytelling of his movies. It’s not a biography – Nolan blanched at the idea – and it’s striking that while we see pictures of the films that influenced him, and even the inspirationally regimented spaces of his old boarding school, there are no images of Nolan before he emerged as a public figure. Keeping to a film…

RELEASED 12 NOVEMBER 285 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Sally Gardner Publisher HQ Once upon a time, there was a teller of fairy tales… Many writers have created updated versions of classic stories, but few can create entirely new books with the disarming directness and mythical truth of those original tales. Sally Gardner happens to be one such talented author. Set in a remote village, cut off from the world and ruled by superstition enforced by the male elders, The Snow Song is the story of Edith, a young woman who falls in love with an outsider. As winter approaches and her lover fails to return, dooming her to marriage with the most powerful – and hateful – man in the village, Edith loses the power of speech. Packed with characters…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 452 pages | Hardback/ebook Author James Hibberd Publisher Bantam Press Disillusioned at seeing his TV scripts watered down by constraints on budget, violence and language, George RR Martin set out to make his A Song Of Ice And Fire novels unfilmable. HBO eventually decided otherwise, of course, but the quest to bring the epic fantasy to the small screen was nearly as eventful as the Battle for the Seven Kingdoms. Entertainment Weekly journalist James Hibberd covered Game Of Thrones from its inception all the way through to its final San Diego Comic-Con panel. That put him in the ideal position to assemble this extensive oral history, featuring over 50 new interviews with cast and crew. The book covers as much ground as an army of White Walkers,…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Vault Comics Writer Cavan Scott Artist Corin M Howell ISSUES 1-3 Bringing to mind urban fantasy novels like Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers Of London, this intriguing mini-series about a clandestine government organisation battling supernatural threats explores some familiar territory, but has enough engagingly offbeat characters, twists and gross-out moments to draw you in. Three issues into its 10-part run, Cavan Scott is still slowly setting out his stall, as main protagonist Gina Mayers still hasn’t properly joined the ranks of Section 26, aka MI666. Resembling a mystical Jessica Jones, the incorrigible private detective doesn’t have many friends beyond her talking pet rat Eddie. With flashbacks revealing how the sudden appearance of her supernatural abilities led to her being abandoned as a child, this incorrigible loner would be…

EVER SINCE THE Phantom Menace landed in 1999, prophecies about a chosen one destined to bring balance to the Force have been the Star Wars galaxy’s equivalent of watercooler chat. But little did we know that said chosen one would be a TV show about a lone gunslinger and his implausibly cute puppet sidekick. When The Mandalorian made its Disney+ debut in November 2019, all was not well in that galaxy far, far away. While the studio/corporate megalith had made a promising start to its custodianship of George Lucas’s empire with The Force Awakens and Rogue One, The Last Jedi and Solo: A Star Wars Story were somewhat divisive – a trend continued by The Rise Of Skywalker. Star Wars’ first-ever live-action TV series was the best thing the franchise…

EVERYONE THINKS HIS DARK MATERIALS IS A LOCATION AND VFX-based show. And that’s just a presumption: oh, they’ve got money! But it’s not. There are VFX in it, and there are a few locations, in equal measure, but we built this enormous amount of stuff to make a flavour and a tone. It’s funny – you look at Cittàgazze, people aren’t going to think we built that in Wales! But we did. People were sitting there having coffees. You get lost around it. It was a huge, huge space – and fun. I was also well aware that we had young actors who are really talented. We wanted to give them something to physically engage with. I know that Dafne [Keen] and Amir [Wilson] ended up sneakily writing my name…

ONCE UPON A TIME, THE DALEKS had empires. The children of Skaro conquered whole galaxies from their fleets of saucers, all led by the mighty, golden-domed Dalek Emperor. They battled Monstrons and Mechonoids, conquered the Archives of Phryne and finally set their eyestalks on invading Earth… Of course, none of that happened on screen. While Doctor Who has filled out the backstory of its first and best monster (most notably in 1975’s bleakly brilliant “Genesis Of The Daleks”), it hasn’t spent too much time on what they get up to when the Time Lord isn’t around. Instead, much of the lore surrounding them came from the printed page, in Terry Nation’s Dalek Special and in the TV Century 21 comic strips. All of that changes with Daleks! – a new…

NORMAN REEDUS I think the series of events that happened with Andy [Lincoln]’s departure [in season nine]. There was a time when Rick was so blinded by rage that he was making all these crazy decisions. But I think when we get trapped in the hole, and Daryl’s saying, “You’re not listening to me, you’re putting yourself before everybody else,” we’re forced to have that conversation. From that moment on to the moment on the bridge, those series of events were the most collaborative experiences on the show. ANGELA KANG My son playing Maggie and Glenn’s dream child during Steven [Yeun]’s last episode [7.01]. He was born during the [lifespan of the] show, so many of my warmest memories really are tied up with the show. SCOTT GIMPLE I think…

IF IT’S POSSIBLE TO WIN AT Hollywood, Disney is doing it right now. With all the Star Wars and the Marvels and the Pixars, however, it’s easy to forget that the company hasn’t always been top mouse. In the mid-’80s, even the studio’s animated movies were struggling to make a mark – though Disney did have a decent line in the kind of mid-budget family films that would, these days, find their natural home on Netflix. Flight Of The Navigator, the story of a 12-year-old kid from 1978 who suddenly finds himself transported to 1986, is arguably one of the most fondly remembered of those. By the time Grease director Randal Kleiser came on board – Rocky’s John G Avildsen was attached at one point – the movie was already…

A FORMATIVE INFLUENCE FOR generations of British sci-fi fans, Gerry Anderson’s string-bound perennial featured five fantastic, futuristic rescue craft bankrolled by millionaire exastronaut Jeff Tracy and crewed by his square-jawed sons Scott, Virgil, Alan, Gordon and John, working from their secret Pacific base, Tracy Island. Keeper of the Anderson legacy is son Jamie Anderson. Would he agree that Thunderbirds is his dad’s most enduring creation? He laughs at the question. “If I said anything other than that, people would think I was taking the piss! No, it absolutely is, certainly in the UK. If you say Thunderbirds, people know Gerry Anderson. If you say Gerry Anderson, people know Thunderbirds.” When Thunderbirds came along in 1965, Gerry’s team – including second wife Sylvia – had already produced futuristic children’s series Supercar,…

RELEASED 27 NOVEMBER 18 | 103 minutes Director Brandon Cronenberg Cast Christopher Abbott, Andrea Riseborough, Rossif Sutherland, Tuppence Middleton Brandon Cronenberg’s debut Antiviral suggested it; his belated second writer/director credit confirms it. Fans of his father’s early work can quit carping about Cronenberg Senior leaving provocative genre movies behind, because Junior is more than capable of filling the gap. Okay, this Philip K Dick-ian hitman tale isn’t quite as perverse as peak David, but it’s still a heady brew. Andrea Riseborough plays Tasya Vos (a Cronenberg character name if ever we heard one), an assassin who uses brain-implant tech to inhabit the body of someone close to the mark and first establish a plausible narrative. Unfortunately, the identity of her latest unwitting host ends up fighting back… It’s not an entirely…

EXTRA RELEASED OUT NOW! 1965-1969 | 15 | Blu-ray Directors Don Sharp, Jeremy Summers, Jess Franco Cast Christopher Lee, Tsai Chin, Nigel Green, Howard Marion-Crawford BLU-RAY DEBUT Fu Manchu: always the most contentious of globethreatening masterminds. Created by pulp novelist Sax Rohmer in 1913, his original escapades are riddled with British imperial paranoia – some argue outright racism – distilling the perceived threat of Asian expansionism into a single, malevolent mandarin, “the yellow peril incarnate in one man.” He’s a character not exactly designed for 21st century identity politics and Twitter-storms. This lavish new Blu-ray box set gathers the five Fu Manchu films made in the ’60s by notorious budget-scraping mogul Harry Alan Towers. A proto Dr No, Rohmer’s creation fits the times, plugged into newfound paranoia over the rise…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1992 | 18 | Blu-ray Director Mick Garris Cast Brian Krause, Alice Krige, Mädchen Amick, Dan Martin BLU-RAY DEBUT One of many collaborations between writer Stephen King and director Mick Garris, Sleepwalkers has a reputation for being slightly rubbish – and it deserves it. Written as a screenplay without ever first being a novel, it’s essentially a feline take on vampire mythology: Mary (Alice Krige) and Charles (Brian Krause) are the titular Sleepwalkers, an incestuous mother/son duo who shapeshift into hideous bipedal cat monsters to feed on virgins. Super-strong and theoretically immortal, they’re only vulnerable to cat scratches. Shame, then, that they didn’t do their research before moving to a town where the deputy sheriff (Dan Martin) patrols with his cat Clovis in the passenger seat.…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1971 | 12 | Blu-ray Director Stephen Weeks Cast Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Mike Raven, Susan Jameson BLU-RAY DEBUT Why aim for the screen’s most faithful take on Jekyll and Hyde while simultaneously scraping off the serial numbers of Robert Louis Stevenson’s original story? Christopher Lee plays the splintered protagonists here, inexplicably renamed Marlowe and Blake. Strong on Edwardian ambience, with an intriguing Freudian spin, the film ultimately drags. Lee is good value, though, shattering the sombre scowl of his screen persona as the dissolute dark side – even if you can’t quite shake the feeling you’re watching horror royalty on a gin-soaked bender. Extras Choose between an extended version (81 minutes) and the original theatrical cut (75 minutes). There’s a choice of commentaries by Weeks:…

RELEASED 9 NOVEMBER 2018 | 15 | Download Thought we’d left tedious grindhouse homage back in the 2000s? Think again. In an attempt to mash together poliziotteschi, kung fu and zombie movies, this Spanish horror-comedy pits useless detectives White Chocolate and Charlie Vargas against the guitar-toting demon Papa Voodoo. But it’s so witless and uninspiring that the final result is more existentially depressing than entertaining. There’s little more painful than unfunny comedy.…

EXTRAS RELEASED 16 NOVEMBER 2020 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD/download Tremors was a classic, but the law of diminishing returns means this sixth sequel shouldn’t have a lot going for it. And yes, this tale of Graboids going wild after transportation to a private island by a rich game hunter is little more than ho-hum. However, it does boast lush Thai scenery, energetic flamethrower action and a gleeful performance from Michael Gross, returning as the irrepressible Burt Gummer. Extras Three featurettes.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | U | SVOD Also in cinemas Directors Glen Keane, John Kahrs Cast Phillipa Soo, Cathy Ang, Ken Jeong, Sandra Oh NETFLIX It seems almost all kids’ films these days follow the same theme: a youngster loses a parent – whether to death or divorce – and then a replacement arrives, much to the child’s anguish. So here we go again in US/Chinese animated musical Over The Moon. After losing her mum, Fei Fei (Cathy Ang) doesn’t want dad to marry his new girlfriend, so to remind him that love should be eternal, she builds a rocket ship to the moon to prove that an actual love goddess lives there. Said goddess, however, voiced by Hamilton’s impressively-lunged Phillipa Soo, isn’t quite what she bargained for – and…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | 15 | Download It’s best you know about this film’s USP going in, as its first 40 minutes may well stretch your patience to breaking point. If you can make it through that dreary first act, to when Sam (Drew Fonteiro) is killed by the boyfriend of his latest squeeze, then wakes up in the body of mutual friend Jay (Marc Menchaca), it’s worth the wait. Beautifully shot and snazzily edited, albeit clumsily structured, this thoughtful SF thriller suggests great things ahead for co-writer/director Robi Michael.…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2019 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD Developed by Simon Kinberg, Jordan Peele, Marco Ramirez The omens were good. This fourth incarnation of the spooky, satirical anthology series boasts Get Out/Us director Jordan Peele as its new narrator and guiding creative force. There’s also a new social landscape of Trump bluster, social media excess and fake news for inspiration. But the twist in this tale is that it’s the worst version of the show so far. While the premiere, “The Comedian”, is a decent enough parable about the lengths a stand-up will go to for laughs, the show soon descends into clunky and embarrassingly unsubtle allegories about police racism, immigration, reality-star politicians and other Twitterfuelling issues. Honestly, it makes Doctor Who season 12 look like The Handmaid’s Tale.…

RELEASED 12 NOVEMBER 320 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Jonathan Lethem Publisher Atlantic Books A lot of us wonder what use we’d be in a post-apocalypse scenario, and in The Arrest Jonathan Lethem appears to address his own such concerns directly by making his protagonist a writer. The main character refers to himself as Journeyman, and is a screenwriter who worked almost entirely as a script doctor – a skill no longer in great demand. Lethem has drifted in and out of SF since his 1995 debut Gun, With Occasional Music, and his work interacts with the genre in a low-key way. The Arrest is vague about exactly what the catastrophe of the title involved, but it was evidently unspectacular – electronic devices and cars have simply stopped working. Journeyman now…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 700 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Thilde Kold Holdt Publisher Rebellion This is, in many ways, a classic genre fantasy. There are several characters, mostly very young, several with touches of non-human ancestry, whose points of view you dart between. There’s an immediate, worldly threat – southerners attacking the village of Ash-hill, followed by the villagers and their allies’ revenge mission – plus a greater supernatural threat building elsewhere. Where Northern Wrath differs from classic genre fantasy is in its solid grounding in real-world history and myth. Ash-hill is a Jute village in what is now Denmark; runes have power and our world is just one of nine, now all at risk. Often in novels with this sort of setting the characters feel anachronistic, like modern people stuffed…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 528 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Peter F Hamilton Publisher Macmillan One of the recurring ideas in Peter F Hamilton’s novels is that if and when humanity begins to travel into the stars, it’ll be dangerous out there. Well, he does write space operas. More specifically, Hamilton is fascinated with the idea that we’ll inevitably encounter species that have agendas far different to our own. In the case of the Salvation trilogy, here reaching its conclusion in a hard SF novel that builds to a dazzlingly realised, thumpingly exciting more-is-more space battle, that means humanity in the 23rd century encountering the Olyix. Initially friendly, they’re actually technologically superadvanced zealots obsessed with the idea of taking entire races to meet their species’ god at the end of time. This…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 526 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Andrzej Sapkowski Publisher Gollancz Andrzej Sapkowski, creator of The Witcher, launches a new series here, set against the backdrop of the clash between the Catholic church and the reformist Hussites in 15th century Bohemia. His protagonist is Reynevan, a young scholar on the run after he’s caught bedding someone else’s wife. Attempting to evade his paramour’s vengeful in-laws, Reynevan encounters everything from witches to robber knights and the Inquisition, in whose hands he winds up in an asylum, the titular Tower Of Fools. Sapkowski’s overwritten prose is hard going. He describes everyone with considerable detail, making it impossible to know which characters are worth remembering. The dialogue is burdened with turgid theological debates and untranslated Latin. He’s clearly done considerable research into…

RELEASED 10 NOVEMBER 358 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Ginger Smith Publisher Angry Robot This space opera debut is an easy read, one where the briskness of the prose helps to offset the familiarity of the story being told. The protagonists are genetically-modified supersoldier Hal, who has a hair-trigger temper and PTSD; little lost girl Vivi, who’s attracted to violent men (see where that’s going?); and retired officer/ship’s captain Tyce, who is firm but kind. There’s a fourth crew member, ship’s doctor Bryce, but as an older, sexually undesirable woman she’s strictly there to stitch the others back together after their latest scrap, and has no agency or character arc to speak of. The plot includes alien AI, a looming interplanetary war, and the nascent struggle for rights for the GM…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher DC Comics Writer G Willow Wilson Artist Nick Robles ISSUES 1-3 The Sandman spinoff enters its next phase. It was always going to be hard following Si Spurrier and Bilquis Evely’s 20-issue run on the title, but going by the first three issues of Waking Hours, G Willow Wilson and Nick Robles have nailed it. Lindy is a single mother and a student writing her dissertation on Shakespeare. Most nights, when she dreams, she travels to a house. It’s the same every time – until the night she meets Ruin, an errant nightmare. When the pair switch places, Lindy is trapped in the Dreaming and Ruin finds himself in the waking world, literally holding the baby. Wilson’s script subverts expectations at every stage. We’ve met nightmares…

RELEASED NOVEMBER 55 minutes | CD/download Publisher Big Finish AUDIO DRAMA The Eighth Doctor’s strand of the Time Lord Victorious event continues apace. The Dalek Time Squad (also featured in the Daleks! animation) are tracking a wave of temporal anomalies that are rewriting the history of the universe. Afraid of what this might mean for Dalek history, they capture the Doctor and force him to cooperate with them in an investigation. The uneasy alliance leads to the planet Wrax and an alien race which simply shouldn’t exist… The danger with Dalek-heavy stories, especially on audio, is how monotonous long passages of Skarosian dialogue can be. Kudos, then, to long-term “voice of the Daleks” Nicholas Briggs, who brings a real range of personalities to the individuals of the Time Squad, from…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 154 minutes (10 episodes) | Podcast Publisher BBC Sounds AUDIO DRAMA Modernising a much-loved children’s classic is a tricky business, but Bafflegab Productions make a decent fist of this new take on the spooky ’70s TV series, set in a village whose standing stones have a malign influence on the locals. Dialling up the Wicker Man vibes, Guy Adams and AK Benedict’s script has some good ideas when it comes to updating the tale. The central parent/child relationship, now between Mia (India Brown) and her dad (Sightseers’ Steve Oram) is much more fractious, and making Mia a Fortean podcaster is a reasonable solution to the eternal problem of justifying lots of describe-what-you-see. By leaning into the tale’s more gruesome aspects (human sacrifice), this version is also more…