Table of contents for September 2022 in SFX

OUT OF THE PARK Mike Garner, email Jurassic World Dominion is enjoyable. Just a little thing… the dinos are free-roaming yet they still end up at what is, for want of a better way of describing it, another park. They had enough leads to do most of the film all over the world, showing how different countries were dealing with it. Just seems like a real missed opportunity. SFX: Covid restrictions were possibly an issue… YASSS, QUEEN Roland Robinson, email Congrats on the wonderful SFX issue devoted to queer genre content. This was long overdue – a very wonderful and multicoloured issue. SHORT NEW WORLDS Keith Tudor, email I really enjoyed the first few episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. The optimism for the future is back, the characters are…

LOCKE & KEY’S SECOND SEASON saw the Locke siblings – Tyler (Connor Jessup), Kinsey (Emilia Jones) and Bode (Jackson Robert Scott) – embracing their destinies as keepers of the mystical keys. These objects of power allowed them to vanquish their fiendish foe, Dodge (Laysla De Oliveira), who had taken the form of Kinsey’s love interest, Gabe (Griffin Gluck). Showrunners Carlton Cuse and Meredith Averill wanted the third and final season to be rooted in family, to explore what these supernatural artifacts actually represent and to raise the stakes even higher than ever. “The Lockes always claimed the keys as their own,” Averill tells Red Alert. “The reality is they are made of demons. We enjoyed digging into that complication, this idea that they can be used for good, but they…

COINCIDING WITH small-screen prequel Prey, extraterrestrial hunters the Yautja are returning to comics in a new Marvel series. But while the latest film takes place in the past, writer Ed Brisson and artist Kev Walker are locating their story in the near future. “In the first couple of movies, it was implied that the Predators came to Earth on a schedule, more or less, and I wanted to explore their other hunting grounds and routes,” reasons Brisson. “In order to do that, we needed a setting that allowed for that level of space travel, which meant that we needed to set the book in the future. However, for reasons that will likely become clear as the series progresses, we didn’t want to set it too far in the future.” “It…

IT’S TOUGH TO FIND AN ORIGINAL YET organic backdrop for a modern horror story any more, especially for a slasher film. But for queer writer/director John Logan, there’s a particular scenario that he’s long had his eye on for exploration: gay conversion camps. These controversial enclaves are meant to “turn” homosexual teens towards straight lives through a variety of physical and psychological tactics. Logan tells Red Alert that the experiences of friends who endured these camps inspired his directorial debut for Blumhouse, They/Them. “I was struck by the monstrousness of it,” Logan says of the practice. “Sometimes it was done in a religious setting, and sometimes in a secular setting. But it always seemed to me to be a horror movie, because most of these places are camps. They’re set…

AHEAD OF THE ROCK’S BIG-SCREEN debut as the Destroyer of this World in October, DC Comics is releasing Black Adam: The Justice Society Files, a new four-part miniseries set in the cinematic continuity. Written by Cavan Scott and drawn by a variety of artists including Scott Eaton, Maria Laura Sanapo, Travis Mercer and Jesus Merino, the main feature in each issue focuses on a different member of the historic super-team: Hawkman, Cyclone, Doctor Fate and Atom-Smasher, brought to life respectively by Maxine Hunkell, Pierce Brosnan and Al Rothstein in the movie. “The overarching theme is that we get to see Hawkman reforming the Justice Society, or at least putting out the feelers to heroes new and old,” says Scott, who’s a long-time fan of the super-squad. “The Society is such…

What was it like walking onto the Andor set? My first day on set, I walk on to this world that they’ve built, there’s aliens walking around, and I was given two Death Troopers. There were loads of extras and I thought, “Okay, this is really fucking cool.” When I walked along with these two Death Troopers, I kept going: [sings Imperial march]. And when I started all the extras joined in. It was very, very cool. What can you tell us about your character? Well, she’s an Imperial officer and her name is Dedra, which is the coolest name. The funniest thing about it is that one of the SAS guys who were helping the Death Troopers look really scary thought my name was Deidra, because I’m Irish. He…

The award-winning UK effects house BGFX – headed up by Barrie Gower (left) – came to the attention of the Duffer Brothers for their work on Game Of Thrones and Chernobyl. Three years later their effects for Stranger Things season four villain Vecna have been nominated for an Emmy. Barrie Gower opened up his archives and sat down with SFX to talk about creating an iconic monster. CONCEPT TO CREATION The Duffer Brothers already had a blueprint for Vecna; they had the outline of the series written. They had some art already drawn up by an incredible concept artist called Michael Mayer, who is also the VFX supervisor. It was always going to be this humanoid character – they were very keen from the get-go to have somebody who had…

EXTRAS ▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD/download ▶ Director Jeff Wamester ▶ Cast Aldis Hodge, Jimmi Simpson, Nolan North, Brian Bloom Of all the DC characters, Green Lantern is an obvious choice for animation, and the latest DC Universe movie has a decent stab at creating a new jumping-on point. In this case, instead of the protagonist being traditional Justice League member Hal Jordan, it’s ex-soldier John Stewart, whose life is up-ended when a dying alien bequeaths him a green power ring that makes him the only surviving member of the Green Lantern Corps. Teaming up with Green Arrow to discover what happened to the Corps, Stewart sets out on a dangerous journey into space, and the adventure that follows is visually a step above the usual…

▶ RELEASED 16 AUGUST 2022 | TBC | VOD A soul-eating demon pushes a sad former addict to suicide, then switches his attentions to her even sadder anxiety-ridden brother in this low-fi psychological horror. No prizes for teasing out that metaphor, then. But there’s an endearing roughness to the cinematography and a sweet vulnerability performance-wise that makes it less crass than the stacks of other trauma-as-monster movies. It even finds a tiny sliver of light, ending on an optimistic note.…

EXTRAS ▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1966 | U | Blu-ray BLU-RAY DEBUT The Munsters reveal green skin in this Technicolor outing. Mostly it’s business as usual: Fred Gwynne mugging; bad-is-good reversals; Joe Public reacting with horror. When Herman inherits an English manor, Terry-Thomas’s rotter cousin is champing at the bit to eliminate him. The UK setting freshens things up, and a climactic road race has Wacky Races appeal. Like most sitcom movies, it feels over-extended, but it has a corny charm. Extras Trailer.…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | TBC | SVOD ▶ Director Vincent Grashaw ▶ Cast Robert Patrick, Nick Stahl, Scott Haze, Kelli Garner SHUDDER Given the presence of Robert Patrick and Nick Stahl, one presumes the makers of this slice of Southern Gothic are Terminator fans, but we’d also bet on them owning a stack of Nick Cave LPs. The down-at-heel world it paints, with its squalid underclass lifestyles, all-pervading corruption, and talk of Biblical judgement, just has that vibe. A mining company wants to buy the Graham family’s Oklahoma farm. Accounts of the mother’s suicide tease a potential haunting, but what eventually emerges is a tale of buried secrets and delusion. Patrick makes the most of limited screen-time as monstrous patriarch Josiah, cruelly mocking son Tommy (Scott Haze, frustratingly…

EXTRAS ▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1985 | 15 | Blu-ray (4K/standard)/DVD ▶ Director Richard Fleischer ▶ Cast Brigitte Nielsen, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sandahl Bergman, Paul L Smith This is a weak entry in the ’80s swords-and-sorcery canon, despite the input of talents such as director Richard Fleischer (Soylent Green), composer Ennio Morricone (The Good, The Bad And The Ugly) and designer Danilo Donati (Flash Gordon). It’s set in the Conan universe. Brigitte Nielsen’s rape survivor Sonja reluctantly partners with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Kalidor in a quest to overthrow evil Queen Gedren. This is the film’s first 4K restoration, scanned from the original 35mm print, with dust and scratches manually removed, and it looks glorious. The rolling Italian countryside pings brightly off the screen, and those Donati costumes are an ostentatious treat. “The…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 304 pages | Paperback/ebook ▶ Author David Quantick ▶ Publisher Titan Books Imagine waking up one day with a new hand. It’d definitely make you question your sanity, if not all of reality, right? In David Quantick’s latest (named after the 1980 Fad Gadget single – New Wave Ed) that’s the existential quandary facing paparazzo Ricky Smart. One day, he finds that his hand has been replaced: he can move and feel the new one, there’s no pain and no visible scarring, but it’s not his hand. He’s not alone. A small and nervous support group forms in Miami Beach as people find their body parts – feet, arms, ears, even eyes – are being swapped around. Something deeply sinister is going on, and the only…

▶ RELEASED 18 AUGUST 295 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Sunyi Dean ▶ Publisher Harper Voyager If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you love a good book – maybe you even feel like books are as essential as food and air. Well how about a world in which, to some people, that really is the case? Devon Fairweather is a “Book Eater”, part of a group of families who literally feed on books. But sometimes – rarely – an Eater child is born who feeds on minds, not words, needing to consume other people to survive. Devon’s son Cai is a Mind Eater, and rather than give him up to slavery or death, she goes on the run, trying to find sources of the drug Redemption, which will enable…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▶ 335 minutes | Download ▶ Publisher Audible AUDIO DRAMA For All Mankind meets Futurama in this 10-part, full-cast sci-fi series. Written and directed by former Simpsons showrunner Bill Oakley, it’s set in an alternate history where Kennedy survived his assassination attempt in 1963 and stepped up the USA’s space programme. By 1969 the Americans have a permanent space station in orbit and are one step away from establishing a lunar base. But things are going far from smoothly, with the President showing increasingly bizarre, megalomaniacal behaviour. When Nancy Kranich (Russian Doll’s Natasha Lyonne), a grouchy nurse with a Hulk-like temper, finds the body of Jerry Lewis while on a fag break, she’s drawn into a massive conspiracy that includes patsies, multiple universes, time being rewritten…

“All of the characters, in one way or another, are being pulled into the alien nature of the show” THE MID-SEASON CLIFFHANGER FOR Resident Alien’s second season had alien Harry Vanderspeigle (Alan Tudyk) in the woods with Asta (Sara Tomko), who had just saved him from the bullet of some mystery bad guy. D’Arcy (Alice Wetterlund) arrived to see the aftermath of Asta’s expert marksmanship, with Sheriff Mike (Corey Reynolds) soon to arrive. The return of the series on Syfy in the US for eight new episodes will have the secrets of Patience, Colorado getting more complex and layered, including Harry tracking a baby alien that’s on the loose. Executive producer/showrunner Chris Sheridan tells Red Alert that the action picks right up where they left off. “It did create a…

WHAT BETTER WAY TO END THE summer than with a galactic road trip for the heroes and villains of Star Wars? Lego Star Wars Summer Vacation, the third original special set after the events of Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker, offers just that. For this adventure, Finn collects Rey, Poe, Rose, Chewie, BB-8, R2-D2 and C-3PO for a much-needed hoiday aboard Galactic Starcruiser the Halcyon. When the gang leaves him to do their own things, Finn gets counselled by a trio of familiar Force Ghosts who have some wisdom, and hilarious stories, to share. Back to craft this adventure is executive producer/screenwriter David Shayne, who tells Red Alert that this special came about right after they completed 2021’s Lego Star Wars Terrifying Tales. “We just started talking about what…

NOSFERATU, THE QUINTESSENTIAL vampire movie, was released a century ago. Ever since, audiences can’t seem to quench their thirst for the supernatural beings. But with the big-screen tales of these bloodsuckers getting long in the tooth creatively, first-time director JJ Perry is taking a unique stab at the genre with Day Shift. “The movies I loved when I was growing up were Big Trouble In Little China, The Lost Boys, the first Fright Night and all the Evil Deads,” says Perry, who’s making his directorial debut following stints as a second unit director and stunt coordinator. “Sam Raimi is a master. That spoke to me immediately. That type of movie is a horror-actioncomedy. My movie is an action-comedy-horror. Now the order might have been changed a little bit, but those…

WHAT IF A POWERFUL WICCAN hooked up with Satan and their union produced the Antichrist, in the form of a 13-year-old girl? That’s basically the twisted premise behind FX’s new animated comedy Little Demon, which has Aubrey Plaza and Danny DeVito voicing the diametrically opposed parents, and Lucy DeVito voicing their puberty-achieving hellspawn, Chrissy. Created by comedy writers Darcy Fowler, Seth Kirschner and Kieran Valla, the story came out of them riffing around the idea of a young woman with a cursed womb giving birth to the Antichrist. “Then we thought it would be really exciting if we just fast-forwarded this story,” Valla tells Red Alert. “As we kept developing it together, we kept ageing her up and we found that 13 was a perfect age because it was so…

WE ALL KNOW THAT SMARTPHONES ARE THE BANE OF a teenager’s life and that certain apps are, well, not exactly good for us, but what if there was an application which really was dangerous, and exposed its users to an evil supernatural entity? That’s the mouthwatering concept behind Red Rose, a new eight-part series due to air on BBC Three and iPlayer in the UK and on Netflix worldwide. Created by twins Michael and Paul Clarkson (The Haunting Of Bly Manor, See, The Wheel Of Time), it was actually during a meeting for soap opera Hollyoaks in which they were asked if they had any ideas for a TV show. “We said yeah, we’ve got this horror – it’s like Scream and The Ring set in Bolton, which is our…

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What can you tell us about Syril Karn? Syril’s kind of a lone wolf, and he has an intense desire for order, for standards to be upheld, and to transcend his own station – he thinks he’s destined for great things. He’s incredibly intuitive, very smart, very driven, very hungry, but his drive comes from a place of shame, and that shame and frustration and lonerism have turned into anger, and an obsession to dominate. That obsession then finds Cassian and I think Syril knows that Cassian is different – special. The fixation that Cyril has with Cassian is almost possessive. There’s a quality about this character who doesn’t live by the rules, who is mysterious and who is incredibly adept at surviving, and Syril wants a bit of that.…

CHANCES ARE YOU’VE got a version of this story on your bookshelf, though you may not have read it. When The Return Of The King, the final instalment of JRR Tolkien’s now-legendary The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, was published in 1955, it came with extensive appendices. These colossal footnotes provided a crash-course in Middle-earth history to complement the story, and now they provide the inspiration for Amazon’s mega-budget fantasy TV series The Rings Of Power. “The appendix that comes after The Lord Of The Rings is basically like a historical chronicle,” producer Belén Atienza tells SFX. “It’s like reading a history book where a king here did this, or this is where the battle of that happened. We weren’t really worried about people knowing the broad strokes of the…

▶ RELEASED 9 SEPTEMBER 15 | 95 minutes ▶ Director Halina Reijn Cast Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, Pete Davidson, Lee Pace While so many horror-comedies manage to be neither funny or scary, Halina Reijn’s first English-language feature manages plenty of laughs, punctuated by solid jump-scares. Putting a spin on the classic trope of teens stuck in a cabin in the woods, Bodies Bodies Bodies traps the shy working-class Bee (Maria Bakalova) in a gaudy mansion with her girlfriend Sophie’s (Amandla Stenberg) group of obnoxious privileged friends, during a hurricane that cuts the electricity and the Wi-Fi. The gang decide to play a cruel childhood game called “Bodies Bodies Bodies” which, combined with plenty of booze, illicit substances and paranoia, kickstarts an evening of ruined relationships, cruel revelations and bloody madness.…

UK/US Paramount+, streaming now ▶ Showrunners Akiva Goldsman, Henry Alonso Myers ▶ Cast Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, Rebecca Romijn, Christina Chong, Babs Olusanmokun, Jess Bush EPISODES 1.01-1.10 Strange New Worlds is the best first season of live-action Star Trek since the original run in 1965. A bold claim, but all of the previous spin-offs have taken a while – usually three years – to find their feet. Strange New Worlds arrives with a remarkable sense of its own identity. Like the show’s lead, Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), it has a swagger and a reassuring charm that immediately lets you know that you’re in safe hands. Pike is having a hard time following the end of Discovery’s second season (you can tell he’s depressed because he’s grown a big beard). Thanks to a…

EXTRAS ▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1971 | 18 | Blu-ray ▶ Director Don Chaffey ▶ Cast Julie Ege, Brian O’Shaughnessy, Tony Bonner, Rosalie Crutchley BLU-RAY DEBUT Creatures The Film Forgot is the easy gag: following such monster-loaded Hammer epics as One Million Years BC and When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth, the lack of prehistoric beasts in a movie whose title explicitly trades on their marquee value feels cheeky to say the least. But that’s unfair on this Stone Age quest tale, a true outlier in the studio’s output and one that feels, five decades on, courageously experimental. Entirely wordless – do paleolithic grunts count as dialogue? – it strives for realism in place of pulpy, history-twisting thrills, substituting porcupines, pythons and cave bears for Dynamation behemoths. If it misses the magic of…

EXTRAS ▶ RELEASED 15 AUGUST 1991 | 18 | Blu-ray ▶ Director Barry J Gillis ▶ Cast Eddie Platt, Barry J Gillis, Maria Delgado, Kelly Felhaber BLU-RAY DEBUT How to even begin to describe the experience of watching this latest entry in the American Genre Film Archive range? It’s a work so truly bizarre that it transcends all conventional notions of good or bad filmmaking and leaves you feeling instead like you’ve just witnessed a particularly unhinged piece of outsider performance art. There’s no real plot – a man (Eddie Platt) walks about killing people–yet it somehow manages to be wildly convoluted. The dialogue (seemingly entirely overdubbed) rarely matches up with the on-screen action, and the editing is liable to bring on a seizure. Don’t believe us? Watch the trailer and…

EXTRAS ▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1989 | 18 | Blu-ray In this witless Porky’s Last House On The Left mash-up, high school kids terrorise a teacher by slinging swamp mud at her house. This triggers memories of trauma, with murderous results… The fact that the prank slips into sexual assault seems doubly crass given the film’s fondness for crowd-pleasing flashes of tit. Lacking tension, logic, or decent gore, its one draw is a young Christopher Cousins, later of Breaking Bad. Extras Three commentaries, five interviews; location tour; deleted scene; more.…

EXTRAS ▶ RELEASED 29 AUGUST 1997 | 18 | Blu-ray ▶ Director Steve Wang ▶ Cast Mark Dacascos, Kadeem Hardison, John Pyper-Ferguson, Brittany Murphy BLU-RAY DEBUT This direct-tovideo actioner feels like a Hong Kong martial arts flick scripted by Shane Black. Former Chinese agent Toby Wong (Mark Dacascos) has a “bio-engine” boosting his abilities. Now he wants out – and to sell the tech for millions. Goons are out to stop him. After saving the life of barfly Malik (Kadeem Hardison), Wong makes him act as his driver. Presented here in the longer director’s cut; it’s essentially one long chase, with a mismatched duo bantering and bonding. Their interplay is clearly largely improvised, with plenty of Eddie Murphy-esque quips. “Essentially one long chase, with a mismatched duo bonding” Fights tend…

Sega’s spikey speedster returns in SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2 (out now, 4K/Blu-ray/DVD/download). This time Jim Carrey’s Dr Robotnik has teamed-up with Knuckles (Idris Elba), a red echidna with fists the size of hams, to find the Master Emerald, a relic that allows people to bend reality to their will. We said: “Twenty minutes longer and about 50% louder than its predecessor… Struggles to reprise the winning formula.” Extras include director’s commentary, deleted scenes and a six-minute short. Stephen King’s 1980 novel about a lass with pyrokinetic powers gets adapted again in FIRESTARTER (15 August, Blu-ray/DVD), the work of Keith Thomas, director of excellent Jewish-themed horror The Vigil. We said: “Finds nothing new to do, besides throw in a load of dodgy CG flames… Ryan Kiera Armstrong brings a subtle edge…

▶ RELEASED 18 AUGUST 480 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author Kirsten Miller ▶ Publisher HQ There’s no doubt about it, this is one angry book. It’s the story of three middle-aged women – Nessa, a black widow who can see the spirits of the unquiet dead; Jo, a married Jewish gym owner whose hot flushes can literally melt metal; and Harriett, a white woman who around menopause lost her husband and her advertising job and went the whole way into free-loving, poison-growing wild woman territory. They’re investigating various cases of missing girls whom no one else seems interested in finding or identifying. Kirsten Miller has no hesitation in pointing out the misogyny that held the characters back in their lives, from being passed over for promotion or mistaken for a…

BACK IN 2020, PROJECT POWER’S gritty take on the superhero genre captured the attention of Jerry Bruckheimer. The uber-producer consequently offered co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman Secret Headquarters, a fun, fantastical and kid-friendly superhero romp. In other words, it’s the complete antithesis of the duo’s previous dark endeavour. “We always had it on our bucket list to make the kind of movie that we really loved as kids, like a Goonies, an ET, an Adventures In Babysitting or a Labyrinth… One of those movies that really tapped into our imaginations as kids,” Joost tells Red Alert. “With the original script by Chris Yost, who is a great comic book writer, we were just like ‘This idea is so great’. We pitched some changes to the script and Jerry was…

WE’VE SEEN SEVERAL growth stages of Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel) across the Marvel Cinematic Universe, from Guardians Of The Galaxy through to Thor: Love And Thunder. But let’s be real: the Baby Groot iteration is the one that delights audiences most. Since we didn’t get much quality time with the whippersnapper, Marvel Studios is giving us five unseen adventures in the Disney+ original shorts series I Am Groot. The series is executive-produced by James Gunn, and written and directed by Kirsten Lepore, known for her indie animated shorts. Lepore tells Red Alert that Marvel Studios asked her to come in for a general meeting, where she was asked to pitch her take on a Baby Groot shorts series. Her ideas impressed the executives and together they crafted I Am…

FABLES HAVE ALWAYS been part of director George Miller’s life. When he was a child in the 1950s, growing up in Queensland, he and his twin brother listened to a recorded version of Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince”. “It was produced by Orson Welles. He narrated it. And it’s wonderful. My brother and I, we didn’t have DVDs or anything else – we played it a thousand times, over a year, two years.” So perhaps it’s no surprise that the Australian filmmaker behind the Mad Max films should be so entranced by AS Byatt’s novella The Djinn In The Nightingale’s Eye. It’s the story of an academic specialising in narratology who visits Turkey for a conference, buys a trinket and – after cleaning it – releases a wish-granting djinn that’s…

OVER THE COURSE OF 12 YEARS, THE WALKING DEAD universe has given fans three separate series charting how small enclaves of humans around the United States have survived the post-apocalyptic aftermath of the Walker infestation. Now the franchise is trying something altogether new with its first anthology series, Tales Of The Walking Dead. Created by Scott M Gimple and long-time franchise writer Channing Powell, the six-episode series isn’t bound by existing, ongoing storylines or the fixed locations of each show. Tales Of The Walking Dead will consist of standalone stories that can take place anywhere within the fall of society. “I don’t honestly know why we didn’t do it earlier, because I’ve loved this idea from the beginning,” Powell enthuses to Red Alert about the anthology format. “Because I’ve been…

ASSIAN ANDOR IS dead. Even by the standards of Rogue One – aka the Star Wars movie where everybody dies – the Rebel Alliance operative’s demise by Death Star was pretty definitive. If he was a parrot, he’d be bereft of life, pushing up daisies and joining the choir invisible – an ex-Rebel. But as Obi-Wan Kenobi proved earlier this year, being canonically dead is no barrier to having your own TV show. “We’re not bringing him back from the dead, not at all,” laughs Diego Luna, who reprises his Rogue One role in new Disney+ prequel series Andor. “He sacrificed everything for the cause and that hasn’t changed, but I think what is beautiful is to say, ‘Okay, now that you care about him, now that you know what…

IF GAME OF THRONES TAUGHT US anything, it’s that finding a successor to the king is a big deal – such a big deal, in fact, that an entire continent will happily go to war to get their preferred candidate on the throne. HBO faced a similar power vacuum when its smash hit fantasy series called it a day back in 2019, but thankfully the US cable giant’s solution to the problem seems to involve rather less actual bloodshed, and a considerably larger budget. Set around 200 years before the Lannisters, Starks, Baratheons, Greyjoys and Martells began their monumental tussle for the Iron Throne, prequel series House Of The Dragon is based on author George RR Martin’s Fire & Blood. This “fake history” book – jokingly described by the Tolkien-loving…

Both Galadriel and Elrond are familiar to us from the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. How do the younger versions you play compare to their older selves? Robert Aramayo (Elrond): Well, The Rings Of Power takes place thousands of years before the original book trilogy, and I think you would say my guy is at the beginning of his career, if you’d like to put it that way. The half-Elven element of him [Elrond has both Elf and Human ancestors] is so important, and was really intriguing to explore. I think it eventually becomes his greatest gift – this ability to bring people together, and an understanding of mortality which is really unique to him – though I don’t think he’s fully figured out how to use it yet. Morfydd…

IN THE EARLY 1990S, MTV HAD unparalleled cultural currency. As well as showcasing the frontline of music, it explored other media, including experimental, edgy animation via its series Liquid Television. One of the jewels in its crown was Aeon Flux. Created by Peter Chung, it challenged audiences not only with its heavily stylised action, featuring bloody massacres, but also by confronting ethical and existential quandaries. Aeon faced off against Trevor Goodchild: she an agent from the anarchic Monica, he the benign dictator of the ordered but oppressive Bregna – though to simplify the motives at play would underserve its rich complexity. Chung devised Aeon Flux in part to explore the ambiguity behind what could easily have been labelled as a simple utopia vs dystopia narrative. But his background was in…

▶ RELEASED 19 AUGUST 2022 | 18 | 93 minutes ▶ Director Lee Haven Jones ▶ Cast Annes Elwy, Nia Roberts, Julian Lewis Jones, Steffan Cennydd This Welsh-language art horror – the debut feature from television director Lee Haven Jones – mixes the slow burn scares of Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation with folklore and social satire, to fairly impressive effect. Young Cadi (Annes Elwy) has been hired to help serve at a dinner party in rural Wales. It’s a swanky do hosted by wealthy – and sleazy – politician Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones) and his wife Glenda (Nia Roberts). The couple are hoping to charm a neighbour into a lucrative business proposition, but they’re so preoccupied with themselves that they fail to notice just how quiet and distant Cadi is…

UK/US Netflix, streaming now ▶ Showrunners The Duffer Brothers ▶ Cast Millie Bobby Brown, Winona Ryder, Gaten Matarazzo, Sadie Sink EPISODES 4.08-4.09 One of the enduring clichés of genre TV coverage is showrunners boasting, “Every episode is like a mini-movie!” Usually that’s a bit a stretch. Until now the epic battle episodes of Game Of Thrones have come closest. But the last two episodes of Stranger Things season four truly feel cinematic. It’s not just the intense action, the effects and the emotional stakes involved. Look at those running times: 85 minutes and 150 minutes. In total, that’s longer than Titanic. The danger, of course, is self-indulgence, especially as there’s not actually much in the way of plot. These episodes are 75% final confrontation, and 25% set-up for season five. There…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | 9+ | SVOD ▶ Director Dan Trachtenberg ▶ Cast Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Stormee Kipp, Dane DiLiegro DISNEY+ “This is as far as you go. No more. This is it!” That, according to young Comanche warrior Taabe (Dakota Beavers), is what should be declared proudly whenever one is confronted by a seemingly unbeatable foe. It is a sentiment hunter Naru (Amber Midthunder) takes to heart when she realises that the Northern Great Plains she and her tribe call home have been invaded by more than one sinister interloper. Yet it is also one that speaks for Predator fans who, after one sequel, two reboots and a pair of Alien crossovers, may have given up hope of any successor living up to John McTiernan’s 1987…

EXTRAS ▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 1972 | 15 | Blu-ray ▶ Director Robert Hartford-Davis ▶ Cast Ann Todd, Tony Beckley, Patrick Magee, Suzanna Leigh BLU-RAY DEBUT Released as The Fiend in the UK, the Stateside title of this British horror better captures its spirit of happy-clappy, tambourine-shaking terror. Tony Beckley is the disturbed young man balancing a misogynistic killing spree with dutiful attendance at an evangelical church. There are shades of Psycho in the quasi-incestuous relationship with his overbearing mother – a chilly, off-kilter Ann Todd – and more than a touch of Peeping Tom in his habit of taping the frenzied murders. It’s a seedy watch, set in what feels like the ashtray of the early ’70s, but some impressively edited sequences crank up the intensity, while a gloriously funky score…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | G | SVOD ▶ Director Peggy Holmes ▶ Cast Eva Noblezada, Simon Pegg, Jane Fonda, Flula Borg APPLE TV+ Teenager Sam (Eva Noblezada) has horrifically bad luck. This finally changes when she finds a lucky penny… but after promptly losing it (of course), she embarks on a desperate mission to find it again so that she can help a friend. This involves teaming up with the penny’s owner – a talking black cat named Bob (Simon Pegg) – and searching his magical world. This will be tricky, as Sam is human and her bad luck isn’t welcome there. There’s a big problem with Skydance Studios’ debut movie, and we’re not just talking about the involvement of disgraced former Disney bigwig John Lasseter (whose presence…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | TBC | SVOD SHUDDER Expect numerous ominous shots of tumbling laundry and boiling water in this slow-burn, Xhosa-language horror, shot in Cape Town. It’s textbook “elevated” fare. Tsidi takes her daughter to stay with grandma – long-time faithful servant to a bedridden white woman. Is she under a spell, or is Tsidi just paranoid? Xhosa singing and the way the film engages with the legacy of apartheid hold some interest. But one brief gruesome vision is scant reward for enduring all the non-diegetic wind howl and creeping camera.…

Fourth-billed Dwayne Johnson’s been shunted to the front to flog the HD release of DOOM (out now). He’s one of a team of Marines sent to a research facility on Mars to battle mutant creatures in this 2005 take on the videogame series. No new bonuses here, just six old featurettes. Warner’s Ultimate Collector’s Edition steelbook of EDGE OF TOMORROW (out now) just has a bunch of old DVD extras too. Tom Cruise’s mash-up of alien invasion, Groundhog Day and Saving Private Ryan does come with two posters (the United Defense Force recruitment ad may not get framed everywhere, given the acronym…), six art cards, and a booklet. Still seems a weak offer, given the eye-watering £40 price. You can also expect to fork out 40 smackers for EVENT HORIZON…

▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | TBC | SVOD ▶ Director Lawrence Kasdan DISNEY+ Lawrence Kasdan’s six-part Industrial Light & Magic doc is a spectacular celebration of the most famous visual effects house in the business. While, unsurprisingly, the original Star Wars trilogy dominates the first three episodes, the series deftly negotiates the company’s evolution from master modelmakers to CG pioneers – ILM founder and early digital evangelist George Lucas emerges as something of a visionary in that regard. Director Kasdan (writer of The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders Of The Lost Ark) shows off the impressive names in his contacts book, as the likes of Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Robert Zemeckis recall how ILM have repeatedly made the impossible possible. Crucially, however, Kasdan never forgets that the company’s…

▶ RELEASED 1 SEPTEMBER 560 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▶ Author RF Kuang ▶ Publisher HarperVoyager To generalise wildly for a moment, genre fiction puts a premium on plot. Lit-fic concerns, such as the internal life of characters or taking time to describe the flowers, are frowned upon. It follows that RF Kuang’s decision to riff on the classic Victorian novel with Babel is at the very least brave. That’s because while the fiction of Dickens, Eliot or Thackeray doesn’t want for incident, it moves at a pace that can seem slow to modern readers. Similarly, Babel, certainly in its early chapters, doesn’t see the need to hurry. Set in the middle of the 1830s, it invites readers into a world of sea voyages, dons talking sagely, and afternoon tea. All…

▶ RELEASED 25 AUGUST 336 pages | Paperback/ebook ▶ Author Megan Bannen ▶ Publisher Orbit Books What do you get if you take a grab-bag of the most popular YA fantasy tropes and use them to write a story about a couple of lonely thirtysomethings instead? Well, if you’re lucky, you might just get something like The Undertaking Of Hart And Mercy. Ralston Hart is a marshal, tasked with making sure the shambling undead “drudges” don’t cross the boundaries of the netherworld to wreak havoc in the real world. Mercy Birdsall is an undertaker, whose job includes elaborate rituals that ensure the dead who pass through her morgue won’t rise again. The two of them hate one another on sight, but when they accidentally begin an anonymous correspondence, they’re drawn…