Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2022 i SFX

THE GOOD BOOK Rob Graham, email I’m enjoying The Book Of Boba Fett but The Mandalorian has set the bar very high for all future live-action Star Wars TV series. Once again there are fans moaning that the show isn’t exactly how they pictured it or because none of their fan theories were true or because it hasn’t name-checked every Star Wars novel written in the last 30 years. It’s more of a character study than action show and won’t just blindly copy The Mandalorian. I think it is a fine sci-fi series. BEAR NECESSITIES Ian Lawrie, email Re: this month’s letter [SFX 349] regarding classic SF novels that should be adapted. How about Greg Bear’s epic The Forge Of God and its sequel Anvil Of Stars? Crying out for…

BEING 13 WAS NEVER EASY AT THE BEST OF times, but most of us didn’t have to worry about spontaneous, uncontrollable transformations into a wild animal. Spare a thought, then, for the teen protagonist of Pixar’s latest movie: Mei finds herself turning into an oversized red panda whenever she gets angry or excited. “As I did more research about red pandas, I found a lot of interesting parallels between them and the character in the movie,” Turning Red director Domee Shi tells Red Alert. “They’re native to China, they’re hairy and they’re smelly, and they sleep a lot – as all teenagers do. They’re also very attached to their moms in the beginning of life, but they then become very independent later. Eventually I kind of wove together this story…

LIKE THE GREAT CONJUNCTION IN DARK Crystal, it seems universal forces have come together to create the perfect conditions for the resurrection of another Jim Henson classic: Fraggle Rock. “I think the world needs Fraggles right now,” says Fraggle Rock: Back To The Rock executive producer Halle Stanford. “I feel like the universe conspires to make things happen when they’re supposed to. And it’s been a pretty rough couple of years, so I think there’s a spiritual reason for the Fraggles coming back right now when we need joy, hope.” There’s another less metaphysical force coming into play, too. “Another reason,” Stanford continues, “is that a lot of the Fraggle Rock fans have grown up.” Among which are Stanford herself and coexecutive producer John Tartaglia, a veteran puppeteer who cut…

How do you put your own stamp on an iconic character? We were lucky to have a very strong, clear, fully conceived script to work with. I really think that the foundation is in the words that are coming from this script. Although there were previous iterations – and I think there is a lot of energy that comes from the past, and from the archetype, and I love that and you sort of want to be open to that – there’s something bigger at work here. There’s a reason why Batman, and why Gotham, has resonated for so long and why it can keep being reinterpreted. But it really starts with something that’s not general. And luckily, this script was highly specific. The point of view was really clear…

How do you put your own stamp on an iconic character? What differentiates what I do, I think, is the same as what any other actor who played Gordon before did. I worked with an ensemble, and I worked under the vision of a director – in this case, Matt Reeves. And working alongside Rob Pattinson, these were the primary drivers that informed the choices that I made, the tone that we tried to set together. It’s specific to this Gotham that we’ve built together. And of course, based on Matt’s script, which was a very specific, narrative-driven, mystery-driven, noir-based story. The bells and whistles were all handmade. When I read the description of the Batmobile, it really informed my understanding of what he was trying to achieve: something that…

ASK A PERSON WHAT scares the hell out of them and you’ll get a variety of different answers: vampires, zombies, sharks… There have been reams of movies full of those things that give us all nightmares. Which is why screenwriter John Griffin was looking for something different to send those little hairs on our necks into overdrive. Going as far back as the events of 9/11, Griffin’s brain has been pondering the notion that the scariest thing in life is to have everything you know, and rely on in your existence, suddenly change in a blink. “How would we live, how would we behave, and what kind of people would we become if our day-to-day reality were to be ripped away and replaced by a nightmare?” Griffin explains to SFX,…

THE BOYS IS SERVING UP EVEN MORE delicious, raunchy, hyper-violent, gory fun – but in animated form. The Boys Presents: Diabolical, an anthology spin-off, consists of eight episodes running at 12 to 14 minutes each. And, as you might expect, Diabolical’s writers crapped all over the Hollywood rulebook when telling their stories. “Some of the stuff we were discussing back and forth, in the early development, I was like, ‘Really? We can do that? Okay,‘” showrunner Simon Racioppa tells SFX. “[The Boys creator] Eric Kripke was just into it. All he wanted was for it to be true to character and true to the world. If we did those two things, he was pretty good with everything else.” To bring Diabolical to life, executive producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg…

WHEN THE WALKING DEAD returned to our screens recently with new episodes – as it has in February for the last 10 years – it was, in one sense, routine. In another, it wasn’t, as “No Other Way” marked the post-apocalyptic drama’s last mid-season winter return. Showrunner Angela Kang tells SFX that writing this eleventh and final season has been a series of tiny goodbyes, both in real life and on the page. And despite the fact that the series will close with an impressive 167 episodes, she says they’re still scrambling to fit everything into the dwindling hours left. “It doesn’t feel like it’s enough hours to tell the stories we want to tell, so we’re doing our best to funnel it towards something that we hope will be…

RELEASED 11 MARCH 15 | 97 minutes Director Ruth Paxton Cast Sienna Guillory, Jessica Alexander, Ruby Stokes, Kaine Zajaz This eerie, female-centric British horror transforms a not uncommon scenario – a young woman starting to have issues around eating – into something beguilingly inexplicable. One night at a house party, the teenage Betsey (Jessica Alexander) is transfixed by a blood-red moon, then collapses. Afterwards, she is physically fine, but has lost her appetite. As the months fly by without a morsel passing her lips, she never loses any weight. Director Ruth Paxton’s debut feature is a chilly affair, which excels in estrangement. Extreme close-ups of chicken being chewed or frying vegetables spitting oil make you ponder how bizarre our wet machinery is. As the family unit fractures, with mum (Sienna…

UK Starzplay, Sundays US HBO Max, streaming now Showrunner Patrick Somerville Cast Mackenzie Davis, Himesh Patel, Matilda Lawler, David Wilmot, Daniel Zavatto, Gael Garcia Bernal EPISODES 1.01-1.10 “So pretentious!” snaps someone towards the end of this miniseries. He’s referring to the titular graphic novel about a spaceman – we see the characters reading the comic endlessly, treating it like the Bible – but he could just as easily be talking about Station Eleven, the series we’re watching. Because this show sometimes disappears so far up its own bum it can see its tonsils. Adapted from the critically acclaimed novel by Emily St John Mandel, it’s set around a postapocalyptic Chicago and follows a troupe of touring actors. Their credo is an admirable one: that Art (the kind with a capital…

UK/US Netflix, streaming now Creators Jannik Tai Mosholt, Kaspar Munk, Christian Potalivo Cast Malaika Mosendane, Andrea Heick Gadeberg, Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt, Anders Heinrichsen EPISODES 1.01-1.06 Fancy some more YA Scandi noir sci-fi from the creators of The Rain, the post-apocalyptic survivalist drama that ran on Netflix for three seasons? You’re in luck. Well, we say luck… Chosen starts out promisingly, for roughly one scene, which suggests the show is going to take a blackly comic approach to alien invasion. At the site of a historic meteorite crater in a run-down Danish shipbuilding town, a bored tour guide is blackmailed by a snotty school kid into letting him touch the actual meteorite… which promptly shatters into glass. It’s a fake! It’s an amusing opening to a series that rapidly becomes far…

UK/US Netflix, streaming now Showrunner Mitsuo Iso Cast Natsumi Fujiwara, Azumi Waki, Kensho Ono, Mariya Ise EPISODES 1.01-1.06 Released in Japanese cinemas as two movies, Mitsuo Iso’s The Orbital Children comes to the rest of the world as a six-part series. Iso has worked as an animator on everything from Neon Genesis Evangelion and Porco Rosso to Ghost In The Shell, and the new studio Production +h was established specifically to make The Orbital Children, so expectations are understandably high. The story’s set on an orbiting space station that is struck by debris from a passing comet, forcing a group of kids to scramble for safety. The characters and production design are attractive, although the children fit familiar anime archetypes: protagonist Touya is the feisty rebel with a heart of…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | PG | Blu-ray (4K/standard)/DVD/download Director Denis Villeneuve Cast Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Zendaya There’s something quietly surprising about the success of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune. Perhaps we’ve all grown so accustomed to how blockbusters look and feel in the Marvel era – colourful, knowingly funny, broadly optimistic – that Dune’s stark self-seriousness feels genuinely fresh and exciting. There’s no comfort here, just an enormous sense of scale and the weight of the universe pressing down on the shoulders of young Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), future messiah. But Dune is never dry or boring. The film loses some of the Frank Herbert novel’s focus on Paul’s terror at his “terrible purpose”, but does a skilful job of conveying an undeniably complex story…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1990/2016 | 15 | Blu-ray Director James Bryan Cast Renee Harmon, Heidi Ahn, Frank Neuhaus, Tim de Haas BLU-RAY DEBUT Don’t Go In TheWoods director James Bryan filmed Jungle Trap in 1990. When the cash ran out, the footage languished unseen for more than 20 years, until the team at B-movie specialists Bleeding Skull! finished it off and added a periodappropriate, synth-heavy score. Frankly, you may wonder why they bothered… It’s a creaky tale of a hotel in South America that’s haunted by ghosts fond of beheading interlopers. It’s badly acted, makes virtually no sense, and looks like it was shot through a tea towel. Of course, for fans of shot-on-video stuff, that’s the appeal. This is next-level bad, the sort of thing you turn to…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | TBC | SVOD Director Igor Legarreta Cast Haizea Carneros, Josean Bengoetxea, Itziar Ituño SHUDDER This bittersweet Spanish take on vampires tugs on the heartstrings very effectively. A period piece, it opens during the Third Carlist War of 1876. After an orphanage is bombed, a young girl left lying dying in the rubble begs a mysterious woman for help, thereby unwittingly volunteering to be “turned”. We then follow her path over the course of 60 years. The title refers to a promise that she will “see all the moons” – a phrase which rings increasingly hollow as she realises, through her struggles to find a place where she truly belongs, that immortality is more of a curse. The script finds interesting ways to put a new…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | TBC | SVOD SHUDDER Kicking off with a round of the titular “Slapface”, a barely veiled game of abuse, this allegory-heavy monster movie is all about the horrors of grief. Brothers Tom and Lucas are already struggling to come to terms with the loss of their parents when Lucas makes everything worse by summoning a legendary local witch. Is she real? Maybe! This is one of those slow-burners that aims for profundity but can’t stick the landing. Light on insight, even lighter on scares, it all feels kind of pointless.…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1982 | 15 | Blu-ray Director Liu Chia-Liang Cast Liu Chia-Liang, Gordon Liu, Liu Chia-Yung, Hui Ying-Hung BLU-RAY DEBUT A favourite of Tarantino (who cast Gordon Liu in Kill Bill) and the Wu Tang Clan (who named an LP after it), this Shaw Brothers movie is, however, very much not a good jumping-on point for martial arts newbies. It helps to know about the Boxer Rebellion fighters who believed they were impervious to bullets. And you need the mental acuity to follow a plot that’s both simplistic (various assassins are sent after a turncoat Boxer) and, due to confusion over various identities, utterly bewildering. But the fight choreography is stunning. And sporadic fantasy elements are a delight, especially a Hammer-tinged Sorcerers’ Hall sequence (all Dracula cloaks…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | 15 | SVOD Director Jean Pierre-Jeunet Cast Elsa Zylberstein, Isabelle Nanty, Stéphane De Groodt, Claude Perron NETFLIX This French sci-fi comedy certainly chimes with the era of lockdowns, though barring a “Covid-50” gag and continued elbow-bumping, the pandemic doesn’t intrude. It follows a bunch of bickering characters trapped in a high-tech home after the Alexa-like device in charge deems the danger level outside too high. Turns out an uprising by Borg-like androids is underway. Design-wise, it’s the sort of confection you might expect from Jean Pierre-Jeunet (The City Of Lost Children), a retro-futurist 2050 that draws heavily on the 1950s. While occasionally satirical – turning the heat up needs ministerial approval; certain cheeses are banned – the script (co-written by Amelie’s Guillaume Laurant) more often…

That Mark Kermode fella dug SHEPHERD (out now, Blu-ray/download), but we weren’t quite so impressed. A man takes a job as a shepherd on a windswept island. There, some supernatural force presses him to confront a dark secret. We said: “Littered with spooky bric-a-brac, this portentous British chiller has plenty of texture, but ultimately prompts a bewildered shrug”. Expect gross-out tactics from MONSTER MAN (7 March, Blu-ray); this 2003 horror-comedy sees two buddies pursued through hillbilly country by a Leatherface type in a Mad Max-y monster truck. We said: “Endearingly juvenile… As cheapo six-pack-and-a-pizza horror movies go, it’s a revved-up, gas-guzzling triumph.” Extras include writer/cast commentary and an animated short. Norman Bridwell’s children’s book creation makes its big-screen debut in CLIFFORD THE BIG RED DOG (14 March, Blu-ray/DVD). In this…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 432 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Richard Swan Publisher Orbit Books Sir Konrad Vonvalt is a formidable figure, an investigator and judge who travels the Empire of the Wolf dispensing justice. Few would dare challenge a man whose eldritch powers include the ability to converse with the dead – or at least that’s what Vonvalt believes. It’s a belief that begins to look at best dubious when Vonvalt investigates the murder of a provincial noblewoman, a convoluted case that reveals an imperial order threatened by corruption at its centre and growing instability. It’s a world we see from the perspective of Vonvalt’s protégé, orphaned legal clerk Helena Sedanka, who views her boss with a mix of respect, exasperation and, at times, fear. As to how reliable a narrator…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 256 pages | Hardback Author Phil Szostak Publisher Abrams ● A refreshingly complete episodic examination, including scene-specific storyboards. ● Like the concept art at the end of each episode? You’re in for a treat, because there’s loads. Weapons, costumes, vehicles – this book’s got ’em in abundance. ● Sculpted busts of saggy-titted Gamorrean guards, anyone? One early artist’s version looks like Fungus the Bogeyman. ● There wasn’t concept art of Luke Skywalker’s scene, such was the secrecy. Instead, Plo Koon was illustrated in Luke’s Return Of The Jedi robes.…

RELEASED 24 FEBRUARY 352 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Inga Simpson Publisher Sphere Books Get practising your breathing exercises now: if Inga Simpson’s bleak vision of the near future is anything to go by, the ability to manage your anxiety might be the most important survival skill of them all. Glass artist Rachel has had plenty of therapy in her time, but trauma still rules her life. When a plague of terror starts sweeping Australia – with people literally being scared to death – she’d rather stay out of it, but with desperate new mum Hannah and sickly baby Isaiah relying on her, she’s forced to face her fears. Thematically, The Last Woman In The World is incredibly timely. Simpson’s sparse prose is evocative, making you feel every step of Rachel’s…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 336 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Axie Oh Publisher Hodder & Stoughton The Korean tradition of telling folk stories goes back thousands of years. One well-known story, “The Tale Of Shim Cheong”, centres on the sacrificial virgin, being about a girl who offers herself up in exchange for her father’s lost eyesight. Korean-American author Axie Oh takes these strands and weaves a modern tale for a new generation. It’s one in which once a year, a sea dragon breaks through the waves to bring a girl back to its master, the Sea God, and where spirits and beasts roam the streets of a shadowy underwater kingdom. At all times it’s fanciful and vibrant, a love letter to the mythology of Oh’s childhood. But Oh also introduces a new…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 368 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Vanessa Len Publisher Hodder & Stoughton It would be easy to dismiss Vanessa Len’s debut as a bog-standard YA fantasy, given its forgettably beige title and elements recognisable to any Harry Potter fan: a protagonist hitting a certain age and receiving magical powers; a nasty family who can only be the Malfoys; a section of London that’s basically Diagon Alley. It’s a relief, then, to discover that once you’re past these familiar beats, Only A Monster becomes a thoughtful, well-constructed tale. Kicking off in contemporary times, it introduces us to 16-year-old Joan – who comes from a family of “monsters”, aka people with magical powers – as she discovers that Nick, the nice chap she fancies, isn’t what he seems. Bloodshed soon…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Image Comics Writer Matthew Rosenberg Artist Tyler Boss ISSUES 1-3 This fantasy thriller shows there’s still room for fresh end-of-the-world concepts, as long as they’re truly distinctive. Set in an America devoid of adults, it’s the story of a group of music-loving teenagers who are pushed into a quest for survival when one of them goes missing, and their record-store hideout is destroyed. In this empty land, the only life they encounter is other peculiar teenage “families”, and the mysterious Strangers who seem to run the planet. It’s a dangerous world for them, and these first three issues build up compelling conflicts and bizarre mysteries, while also pulling off a genuinely unsettling atmosphere. Matthew Rosenberg’s script cranks the creepiness up to maximum while also giving the…

WITH TECH STEADILY giving us the ability to bypass so many of life’s mind-numbing tasks, it begs the question: if you could do that on a more dramatic level, would you? Apple TV+’s new sci-fi series Severance poses a world where that’s an option. It’s set in the near future, where employees of the almost 150-year-old Lumon Industries can choose to undergo a “severance” procedure which, via an incision in the brain, separates a person’s work life from their home life. Once inside the Lumon building’s elevator, the employee sheds all memories of their “outie” life and exists for eight hours inside the windowless bubble of their job functions. Adam Scott (Krampus) is Mark Scout, a recent widower drowning in grief who undertakes the severance to check out from his…

DESCRIBING HIMSELF as “a horror movie maniac,” James Kuhoric has always longed to script a Fright Night comic. Now, along with artists Neil Vokes and Jason Craig, he has created a follow-up to writer/director Tom Holland’s classic vampire film for his own American Mythology Productions. “Fright Night is one of my go-to movies for comfort, so when the opportunity to work with Tom Holland came up, I jumped at it,” Kuhoric tells Red Alert. “Fright Night is more than just a movie to me; it’s ingrained in my persona. It’s a part of me, and I can’t wait for fans to read the story I’ve been cooking up for the better part of three decades!” Although Kuhoric praises David Tennant’s turn as erstwhile vampire hunter Peter Vincent as “a joy…

THE CREATIVE TEAM BEHIND arguably the most anticipated movie of 2022 have a lot to say about The Batman. It’s no secret that they’re fans – so we’re on common ground when SFX catches up with them to discuss rage, reboots and rogues. The on-screen adventures of Gotham’s protector are a slice of cinematic history that dates back to the ’40s, ahead of the Technicolor madness of Batman: The Movie in 1966. For director and writer Matt Reeves, it’s the latter which served as his first steps into the world of the Dark Knight. “My introduction to Batman was Adam West, as a kid,” he smiles. “It’s so funny because I recently showed my son, as I was making the movie, Batman ’66. He’s a very sensitive kid. I showed…

What backstory did you take for your character? For me, just from the first few conversations I had with Matt over the phone, he really seemed to think that the most helpful thing for me to do would be to think about this guy’s family… really, in a detailed way, describe that life because of his work life we see in the film. But the conflict that he’s going through relies on that family life being something that gives him comfort and joy, just like a lot of people’s families do. Tell us a little bit about your history with Batman. I wasn’t the kid who was super into the comics on any level, but that’s probably bad. I consumed them like every other child did at the time, and…

What backstory did you take for your character? There’s a lot of backstory for my character in the Year One and Year Two comics. So that was helpful, and then you kind of flesh that out from there. Tell us a little bit about your history with Batman. I was a Zorro freak, then I really liked Batman when the show came on. I think I was nine and I remember all those first characters from that, and then the reinvention of it later on in the ’80s. I was aware of Frank Miller, and Year One, Year Two, all that. I like Batman because he kind of has this split personality, but he doesn’t have superpowers. Film noir is being discussed a lot – is that how the film…

What about this project piqued your interest? When I read it, I was like, “Yeah, this is crazy good.” And then [they] told me that Jack [Bender] would be directing and Jeff Pinkner [producing], who was also part of that JJ [Abrams] crew, I was like, “Oh, please, please let me do this now!” I trusted the team could take the genre and actually do the thing that I like to do, which is invest in the human beings. From is also the very first show where you are the lead character… Yeah, I hadn’t gotten a chance yet to be the lead of an ensemble, so that was also a new challenge for me. I’m usually one of several actors who are part of a thing. So, to actually lead…

ONE INSPIRATION FOR the new CBBC show Silverpoint may be rather unexpected. “We talked about the Enid Blyton book The Faraway Tree,” says producer Steven Andrew, of a conversation with writer/creator Lee Walters. “What we both really liked about it was that you always get these extraordinary events happening. I think that was the genesis of the show.” But that’s not the only thing to influence the story of a group of teenagers at summer camp discovering something amazing in the woods. “We talked about this disconnection that we felt kids have with nature and the environment,” Andrew continues. “How could we put our characters in a world that would be exciting and touch on these natural themes?” Writer Walters echoes this. “From that point, we knew what the tone…

FEDE ÁLVAREZ REMEMBERS THE first time a flesh-masked maniac took a chainsaw to his brain. It was a life-altering wound; the kind that spares skin and bone but slices deep into the raw matter of imagination. “When I was 12, I suddenly discovered this thing called horror,” the writer and producer tells SFX. “Like a lot of things in my life, I got obsessed with it and wanted to watch all the movies. I probably started with A Nightmare On Elm Street 3. You watch that and you go, ‘Hey, it’s fun, this horror thing!’ It was the time of VHS and like an addict you went to the store and asked the guy to give you something stronger. He’d look at you and say, ‘You’re a little young…’ Then…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 12A | 116 minutes Director Ruben Fleischer Cast Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg, Antonio Banderas, Sophia Ali As we all know, videogame movies have a patchy history. For every surprisingly solid Sonic The Hedgehog, there’s a bargain bin’s worth of lacklustre jumps from consoles to cinemas. Uncharted doesn’t completely fall into that latter category, though its flat script rarely sets the pulse racing. Tom Holland stars as Nathan “Nate” Drake, a smooth-talking, sticky-fingered bartender drawn into a life of high-stakes treasure-hunting by master thief Victor “Sully” Sullivan (a miscast Mark Wahlberg). They’re joined by Chloe (Sophia Ali, complete with shaky Aussie accent) on the hunt to uncover the lost gold of explorer Ferdinand Magellan. Standing in their way? The cutthroat collector Moncada (Antonio Banderas, in fine scenery-chewing form).…

UK Prime Video, streaming now US Peacock, streaming now Writer/director Abe Forsythe Cast Isla Fisher, Josh Gad, Ariel Donoghue, Emma Lung EPISODES 1.01-1.06 It’s the age-old tale: boy meets girl, boy discovers girl’s a werewolf, boy thinks, “What the hell, I’ve dated worse.” Now, you might think that since the revelation the girl’s a werewolf only comes with episode three, we’ve just given away a major spoiler. But hey, there’s a rather large clue in the title, and the show’s actually more fun if you know that going in. An Aussie/US production, the show stars Josh Gad as Gary, a widowed single dad in Adelaide who’s on the dating merry-go-round when he quite literally crashes into his dream girl, Emma (there’s a lot of unpunished, casual car crashes and property…

UK/US Netflix, streaming now Showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine Cast Mamoudou Athie, Dina Shihabi, Evan Jonigkeit, Julia Chan EPISODES 1.01-1.08 Missing persons, a snuff film, a lost anthology show, an approaching comet, a demonic idol, hidden rooms, black mould, human sacrifice… Based on a podcast, this Lovecraftian mystery piles up the intriguing elements. Mamoudou Athie plays Dan, who’s hired to restore Hi8 tapes recovered from an apartment building that burned down in 1994. They include interviews with tenants shot by PhD student Melody Pendras (Dina Shihabi), as part of both her dissertation and the search for her mother. As Dan’s work progresses, he finds that his late father played a part in events, and experiences visions via which he seems to communicate with Melody across time. “Prepare to come away humming a…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1982 | 18 | Blu-ray Director Bruce D Clark Cast Edward Albert, Erin Moran, Ray Walston, Bernard Behrens BLU-RAY DEBUT Best reason to watch this cheesy, sleazy Alien cash-in? James Cameron. Made when he was a rising star at Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, it features impressive matte paintings and sets by the future King of the World, which in many ways seem like a dry run for Aliens. It’s certainly not the risible dialogue, or the bare-bones plot, which sees a spaceship crew investigating a pyramid on a desolate alien planet, meeting gruesome deaths later revealed as born of their own fear. Most dubious reason? A notorious scene in which a female crewmember is raped by a giant maggot – added despite the director’s disquiet.…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | 15 | Blu-ray (4K/standard)/DVD/download Director Johannes Roberts Cast Kaya Scodelario, Hannah John-Kamen, Robbie Amell, Tom Hopper In 1998 (when this film takes place) George Romero was working on faithfully adapting Resident Evil for Sony. Sadly, in our cursed timeline, we got several Paul WS Anderson flicks instead. Welcome To Raccoon City should feel more familiar to long-term fans; unfortunately, the fan service is the only thing that’ll give you goosebumps. It follows Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario, doing her best) as she overcomes childhood trauma to reunite with her brother Chris… just as Umbrella decides to unleash hordes of monsters on Raccoon City’s citizens. It’s a decent set-up, but the more the film shambles forward, the more brains leak out of its ears, culminating in…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD/download Director Shinsuke Terasawa Cast Elizabeth Gillies, Stephanie Beatriz, Jonathan Banks, Keith David This anime-indebted adventure begins in fine style, relocating Selina Kyle to the Spanish coast to swipe a priceless jewel from a high-rolling criminal cabal. Goodbye Gotham alleyways, hello international glamour… It’s a slick, breezy opening, complete with sports cars, chilled jazz soundtrack and a clear debt to the glittering thrills of jet-set ’60s heist movies. But while the dialogue stays consistently playful – “Do you really want to get into a schtick war, Batwoman?” Selina teases a doleful Kate Kane – the rest of Hunted fails to capitalise on such a gloriously freewheeling first act. Sure, the story racks up the air miles, hopping to Shanghai and Paris, but…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2019 | TBC | Download A romantic comedy where one of the leads is an IRS agent? Sounds far-fetched even before you get to the vampires, and yet, here we are: auditor James is investigating a dubious religious organisation when he unexpectedly falls for blue-haired bloodsucker Sarah. Swap out the YouTube subplot for references to bulletin boards and IRC and you could believe this had been down the back of an Anne Rice fan’s sofa since the mid–’90s. Lightweight and meandering, it’s inoffensive but extremely self-indulgent.…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1989 | 15 | Blu-ray Director Dean Alioto Cast Tommy Giavocchini, Patrick Kelley, Shirly McCalla, Stacey Shulman BLU-RAY DEBUT Could The McPherson Tape be the first found footage movie? Released in 1989, it certainly makes a strong case for that claim. All the elements that films like The Blair Witch Project would popularise 10 years later are in place – blurry, beaten-up VHS footage, characters talking over each other, folk running about screaming while filming – attached to a UFO storyline. It’s atmospheric enough, and ably captures that strange period of post-Whitley Strieber paranoia. You can see why some were fooled into thinking that it was genuine evidence of a real alien abduction. That said, part of its success comes through its commitment to very long periods…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | 15 | Blu-ray/download Director Yernar Nurgaliyev Cast Daniyar Alshinov, Azamat Marklenov, Yerlan Prynsetov Generally speaking, the more time you spend with a bunch of incompetent cretins, the more aggravating it gets (collect your P45 on the way out – Ed). Occasionally, however, you can find yourself warming to them. That’s the case with this goofy horror-comedy from Kazakhstan. It follows three bickering friends on a fishing trip. They use some inflatable sex dolls as an impromptu raft, which will clue you in to their dignity level. When they see some equally hapless gangsters shoot someone dead, a chase follows. To complicate matters, the gangsters have offended a sickle-wielding psycho killer. Gory deaths ensue. This is not a sophisticated exercise – expect wanking and fart…

RELEASED 17 MARCH 448 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Noah Hawley Publisher Hodder & Stoughton It’s a little more than a year since supporters of Donald Trump stormed the Capitol Building. Here was a direct challenge to American democracy. And yet, in its aftermath, a kind of guarded optimism arguably took hold. For moderates, the ascension of Joe Biden to the presidency appeared to hold out the promise of a return to politics conducted along more conventional lines. Today, with Biden struggling to get legislation through the US Senate and Trump’s hold over the Republicans apparently secure, hope is less easy to find. How are we ever to explain what’s happening in the USA to our children? More widely, how are we to explain a world of “alternative facts”, deep inequalities…

RELEASED 3 MARCH 400 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Aneesa Marufu Publisher Chicken House There’s a lot of thinky stuff to chew on in this debut from 24-year-old Aneesa Marufu. Using a fantastical South Asian-inspired setting, The Balloon Thief explores both women’s rights and racism (flipping the status quo, so that darker skins rule whiter ones). Don’t hesitate for fear these themes will be rammed down your throat: Marufu skilfully avoids heavy-handedness, and her tale also includes fascinating magic, jinn, ifrits and alternate dimensions. Our protagonist is teenager Khadija, who rebels against arranged marriage and society’s sexism when she steals a hot-air balloon, flying off to find adventure. She gets it, too, landing smack-bang in the middle of a slave revolt and a plot involving evil jinn. Well-paced and filled with…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 352 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook 352 pages | Paperback/ebook/ audiobook In a near-future world where genetic engineering is commonplace – no one eats real meat any more, and furniture is made from fungus-based mycoleather – the questions we already face about the engineering of humans become all the more urgent. Is it ethical to remove a disability? What about a tendency towards a heart problem – or alcoholism? How much might a parent change, if they could? Susan and her husband have been trying to conceive for almost four years, breaking her heart with each month that passes. One night, she drunkenly sleeps with a colleague, and falls pregnant. She’s desperate to keep the baby, but knows testing after birth will reveal her true father. She hears of…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Paperback/ebook Author WM Cleese Publisher Titan Books In the overgrown gardens of a sprawling estate, deep in the Argentinian Pampas, someone is hacking away at the trees. Someone… or something, as Las Lágrimas’ new head gardener Ursula discovers. It’s 1913, and Ursula fancies herself a woman of the new world. Rejecting outdated Victorian notions of sex and class, she flees her overbearing family and sets about making her way in the world. Naïve but headstrong, she can’t resist the prestige of being head gardener at a legendary house, even if every other candidate for the job has refused it. Even the arduous journey doesn’t deter her. Then, of course, the haunting starts. Pitched somewhere between Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Susan Hill’s The Woman…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Marvel Comics Writer Donny Cates Artist Ryan Ottley ISSUES 1-3 Following up an iconic comic-book run can be challenging, especially when the run in question gained as much acclaim as Al Ewing’s dark, horrific take on the Hulk. So you can’t blame Marvel for deliberately heading in a different direction, but any longtime Hulk fans may be a little thrown by this new adventure for the angriest superhero in comics. Fresh off their Venom run, writer Donny Cates and artist Ryan Ottley aren’t interested in picking up threads from Ewing’s saga. Instead, they throw the audience straight into a set-up where Bruce Banner has gone full anti-hero after apparently causing a mysterious tragedy in El Paso. Bruce has also managed to mentally imprison the Hulk persona,…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 60 minutes | CD/download Publisher Cutaway Comics AUDIO DRAMA With his big voice and even bigger personality, Brian Blessed inevitably dominates this audio version of the Cutaway Comics miniseries, even if he doesn’t really play a prominent part until the final quarter. And while he is often at explosive full throttle as the dark Time Lord, Blessed also taps into Omega’s sensitive side, channelling his genuine confusion as he struggles to understand how some of his subjects might not welcome him as their god. Providing a measured counterpoint to his bluster and rage, Claire Dean’s Minyan princess Malika is actually the beating heart of the drama, as she strives to foil Omega’s scheme to free himself from a black hole by stirring up negative psychic energy on…

STEMMING FROM an idea to create an Excalibur-style team book that’s part of the Captain America line rather than the X-Men, Captain Carter, a new miniseries by writer Jamie McKelvie and artist Marika Cresta, will see Peggy Carter propelled into the modern-day Marvel universe. “It just struck me that there was a currently unexplored space there for something taking place in Britain at the point we’re at right now,” McKelvie tells Red Alert. “I love a lot of Marvel’s British characters, but historically many of them are seen through a lens of kings and queens and castles, and magic. Captain America is a working class kid from Queens, while Captain Britain is basically landed gentry. I understand why, as the fairy tale aspect is appealing as viewed from across the…

Did you look to make this version of Catwoman different to others? I think a lot of that work was done for us already, because the story is so good. The script was so good and so different, and Matt’s vision was so different. When you start working from a place where you’re thinking, “Okay, I have to do something differently, because I want to be different”, that feels a little bit dangerous creatively. It was really about, for me, just trusting the story that Matt’s written, and doing my best to almost forget about the idea of Catwoman and what she means culturally and really just focus on telling the story. I think naturally it does feel very different. What lessons do you feel you’ve learned on movies that…

What do you think people will take from this version? Matt as a filmmaker is someone who concentrates on the emotional heart of a story. In this case, that is what beats very, very, very loud underneath that dystopian Gotham, and the web of lies and untruths that Gotham is. I think this film has hope, actually. As a story, there is light and a way of bringing down corruption, and a kind of isolation that we face. It’s a very relatable film. It’s a film that does speak to the now and has real heart at the centre of it, but also hope. Is there something different that you’ve brought to the character? When Matt and I first talked about it, one of the things that we wanted to…

FOR THE LAST THREE decades, writer Jeff Astrof has built a career writing realistic stories for strong women. From Friends to The New Adventures Of Old Christine and Angie Tribeca, he’s aged up with his leading women, sharing their authentic experiences navigating the world. Now, as a writer of a certain age, it was perfect timing when he was introduced to Catastrophe creator Sharon Horgan to help develop her series idea of doing “The Shining as a comedy.” Reflecting on reading her spec script for Shining Vale, Astrof tells Red Alert that he especially remembers the very last page’s striking quote. “It said women are more than twice as likely as men to be depressed, and more than twice as likely as men to be possessed. And the symptoms are…

How did you come to be involved with Silverpoint? I got asked to do a tape for the show, did it and I didn’t hear back for about a week, so I thought, “Ah well, maybe next time”. Then they asked me to do another. Time went on, and before I knew it I was being asked to read alongside other actors so that producers could see what we were like together. I remember walking my dog in the park with my mum, and she got a call to say I had got the part! What was the appeal of joining this show? What appealed to me was the theme. I really do like sci-fi adventure and action shows like Stranger Things, and I adore Marvel. I’m not sure if Marvel…

With all these sets, because we knew they were going to be coming back at different points during the series, we thought it was very important that everything look very different, so there was no confusion that you might have still been in another set. We knew as well that there was a lot of jumping around in the story. So that was something that we were really mindful of, and we really made an effort to make sure that every main set had its own feel. You should do that most of the time anyway, but it was more so on this because they were recurring sets. If it’s a single episode, once that’s finished you can get away with more in the next one – something could look…

TM: I came into the show – I hadn’t seen the last few episodes yet because they were still being edited. They said, “Raffi and Seven are a couple now.” Sure enough, by the finale, there was a shot of them holding hands. And I think that came from just the chemistry. I mean, Michelle has chemistry with every human being on the planet. She’s a blast. The same with Jeri, Jeri has such a good sense of humour that you could burn your whole day just joking with her on set. So it was sort of natural for these two to come together, they were very close friends to begin with. Where we find them is a really interesting place in a relationship to start; we kind of meet…

It’s made of cheese! You can trace Wallace & Gromit’s A Grand Day Out back to folk tales in which a simpleton (often a wolf) mistakes the Moon for a round of cheese on seeing its shape reflected in water. A collection of sayings by 16th century playwright John Heywood, which includes the phrase “the moon is made of a greene [ie unaged] cheese” helped popularise its proverbial use to describe credulity, with the idea then entering into children’s stories. It’s hollow! German astronomer Johannes Kepler imagined moon-dwellers living in caves in his Somnium, written in 1608, while second Astronomer Royal Edmond Halley proposed the idea of a hollow Earth in 1692. HG Wells namechecked Kepler in The First Men In The Moon; his 1901 novel imagines a hollow Moon,…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 83 minutes Director Stacey Gregg Cast Andrea Riseborough, Niamh Dornan, Jonjo O’Neill, Eileen O’Higgins Shot in Belfast, Stacey Gregg’s feature debut blends psychological thriller and kitchen sink drama. When you’re looking for an actor who can nail “haunted face” you can’t do much better than Andrea Riseborough. She’s perfectly cast here as Laura, a mother whose daughter Josie died in a car crash years ago. When new neighbours move in next door, Laura slowly becomes convinced that their daughter Megan – who knows things she really shouldn’t – is Josie reincarnated. Riseborough is impeccable in the lead role, and Laura’s journey into irrational belief develops credibly, at a sensible pace. Firmly grounded in workaday reality, Here Before could have just looked like a soap, but…

UK/US Netflix, streaming now Directors Lee Jae-kyoo, Kim Nam-su Cast Yoon Chan-young, Park Ji-hoo, Cho Yi-hyun, Park Solomon EPISODES 1.01-1.12 “It’s Train ToBusan,” someone says early on in episode two of Netflix’s latest Korean sensation. “[Zombies] should be in movies,” his friend replies. To be fair, they’re both dead right. Netflix’s new horror series takes Train To Busan’s distinctive mix of slow-burn soap opera drama and fast-moving zombies, and stretches out both. It starts steadily, then goes nuts, focusing on the coming of age challenges of high school students… before all of their problems get tossed screaming from the nearest window, to be replaced by jerky undead acrobats, who twist grotesquely to power towards the nearest victim. It’s hard to be bothered about bullies when your best mate is trying…

UK/US Prime Video, streaming now Showrunner Naren Shankar Cast Dominique Tipper, Steven Strait, Wes Chatham, Shohreh Aghdashloo EPISODES 6.01-6.06 This is the final season, right? Did Amazon forget to tell the showrunners? It’s not just a case of a show ending with a few questions unanswered (what about the Ring Entities? What about the Protomolecule?); The Expanse actually introduces whole new subplots that scream “foreshadowing”. One new character even pops up out of the blue apparently solely to provide a vital twist to another ongoing plot. This is fine if you’ve read all the books, but seems an odd decision when you know the vast majority of your viewers won’t have. Maybe it’s a cunning ploy to get fans demanding a sequel? However, if you think of season six as…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | 18 | SVOD Director David Blue Garcia Cast Sarah Yarkin, Elsie Fisher, Mark Burnham, Jacob Latimore NETFLIX Tobe Hooper’s 1974 original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was so effective not because it was a gnarly bloodbath – only one victim actually gets a saw in the guts – but because of its dead-eyed, cold-blooded cruelty. It’s a film that gazes into the face of insanity, with a killer who’s an emotional void. This latest revival – the ninth instalment, somehow – has other ideas. Trendy urban types are set to turn a Texan ghost town into a hipster utopia. Leatherface has been a good boy for five decades, but when a woman who took him in dies as she’s turfed out by the gentifriers, he…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | PG | Blu-ray (standard/4K)/DVD/download Directors Jared Bush, Byron Howard, Charise Castro Smith Cast Stephanie Beatriz, María Cecilia Botero, John Leguizamo, Jessica Darrow Encanto’s supernaturally catchy “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” topped the UK charts; Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Midas touch has created an all-new Disney phenomenon. But this film is more than just its music, it’s an emotion. And that emotion is joy. In a dazzlingly rendered Colombia, we meet Mirabel (Stephanie Beatriz), who’s part of a magical family but has no magic gift herself. Unusually for a Disney tale, the villain isn’t external: it’s the tension that bubbles up within any large family, which threatens to destroy their home unless Mirabel can find her missing Uncle Bruno (John Leguizamo). There’s a little too much exposition…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | TBC | SVOD ARROW This monochrome indie comes on like a poundshop-budget mash-up of Clerks, Tetsuo and The Matrix. An LA slacker gets tangled up with mysterious neighbour Gary, who fits him with a clunky prosthetic hand which can, er, make a toaster explode. James Markham Hall Jr (nephew of the Predator actor!) catches the eye, bizarrely mannered as Gary. Featuring MDMA enemas and a trans character with dildo mitts, it was clearly a lark to make, but feels like mates mucking about.…

EXTRAS RELEASED 28 FEBRUARY 2021 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD/download This horror ekes a ton of tension from its small cast. Drifter Isaac is hired to care for Olga in a house on a remote island. Ignoring a spooky wind-up bunny and other red flags, he agrees to be physically chained to the building… Caveat’s tangle of twists and turns keep you guessing but don’t quite resolve satisfactorily. Still, it’s a skilfully made debut, with a central location as grimy and gothic as a Vaughan Oliver LP cover (ask your dad, kids). + Extras Two commentaries; storyboards.…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1973 | 15 | Blu-ray Director Kevin Billington Cast David Hemmings, Gayle Hunnicutt, Lynn Farleigh, Eva Griffiths BLU-RAY DEBUT Real life husband and wife David Hemmings and Gayle Hunnicutt bring a ready-made glamour and frisson to this tale of ghosts. Essentially a two-hander, adapted from a play by Richard Lortz, it isolates a brittle couple in a fogbound country house that’s seemingly haunted by the past – or is it the future? There are intriguing parallels with Don’t Look Now, released the same year and another exploration of parents caught in the aftermath of a child’s death. Its tone and fascination with time fractures also anticipates Sapphire & Steel. The screenplay’s flabby, though, expanding the play in unhelpful ways, and the sniping and overwrought staginess ultimately…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1976 | 15 | Blu-ray Director Kostas Karagiannis Cast Peter Cushing, Donald Pleasence, Luan Peters, Nikos Verlekis BLU-RAY DEBUT On paper it’s promising: genre icons Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence; stunning Greek backdrop; secret chambers, forbidden rituals, hooded shenanigans. Even an eerily pulsing score by pop polymath Brian Eno. Alas, this tepid ’70s chiller is more impressive in kit form than as finished object. Cushing is a reliably gaunt, glacial presence but the story is a mythological mess, bringing us bull-worshipping Minoan cultists in league with Satan (“The Devil has many faces,” we’re told, but it doesn’t wash). While the Greek locations add flavour and production value, the lack of tension and shortfall in scares sink this flat, muddled horror. + Extras A choice of original…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 672 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Kate Heartfield Publisher HarperVoyager How much alt do you like in your alt-histories? Here Kate Heartfield creates a version of 18th century European royalty that is clearly complete fiction, yet also sticks closely to major historical events. It opens with Maria-Theresa of Austria, Holy Roman Empress, considering marriages for her daughters. Two of them, Maria Carolina and Maria Antonia, have come into possession of a book belonging to their murdered governess, a small embroidered book of spells. Around fact, Heartfield weaves a story of conflict between an order dedicated to keeping magic secret and in the hands of a privileged few, and rogue magisters seeking to bring power to the people. Maria Carolina marries and becomes Queen of Naples; her closest sister…

RELEASED 3 MARCH 336 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Jessamine Chan Publisher Hutchinson Heinemann Of all the powers that the state has over its citizens, one of the most terrifying is its ability to remove your children. The line between protecting children from harm and allowing families to recover from genuine mistakes is a fraught one – so what happens when that line shifts too far in pursuit of perfection? The School For Good Mothers is set in a near-future US where that line has shifted, with the consequences the stuff of authoritarian nightmares. Frida Liu has “a bad day” and leaves her daughter Harriet unattended for several hours. The police are called, and her ex-husband is given custody while she attempts to convince a judge she’s a fit mother. Frida…

RELEASED 17 MARCH 384 pages pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Kyle Buchanan Publisher William Morrow Books If you think the Beatles wrote the book on long and winding roads, they’ve got nothing on the fourth Mad Max movie and its journey to the big screen. This in-depth oral history (subtitled The Wild And True Story Of Mad Max: Fury Road) charts director George Miller’s two-decade quest to resurrect his post-apocalyptic franchise, and the behind-the-scenes story is almost as awe-inspiring as the film itself. The main conclusion of Blood, Sweat & Chrome is that, under any normal circumstances, a movie as ambitious and downright crazy as Fury Road should have stalled long before it arrived in cinemas. Miller started working on his magnum opus in the distant days of the 20th century,…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 448 pages | Paperback/ebook/audiobook Author GR Macallister Publisher Titan Books This book takes far, far too long to become interesting. Usually with genre fantasy which isn’t entirely satisfactory, the worldbuilding is strong but the characterisation is weak, or vice versa. In this case, however, neither of them is particularly good. The premise – in a world of matriarchal kingdoms, something happens to prevent the births of any more girls – means that things start about a decade and a half before one of the last girls born, a powerful magician, has much agency, and so you’d expect the setting to be rich in detail. That’s not actually the case. Likewise, though the narrative switches between a number of women, including a warrior queen who defeats her predecessor…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Dark Horse Comics Writer/artist Jeff Lemire ISSUES 1-5 Essentially an examination of grief, this poignant five-parter centres on a bereaved father, who is lured into a mystical labyrinth after receiving a phone call from his long-dead daughter. Dropping in the odd puzzle or portent, Jeff Lemire underplays the fantastical elements, so you’re never quite sure whether the whole thing is happening inside the increasingly unstable Will Warren’s head. Striking up a friendship with his kindly neighbour Lisa, Will is lead deep into Toronto’s hidden underworld by her previously missing, now-talking dog, where he encounters a particularly fearsome minotaur. Both drawing and writing the series, Lemire brings a personal touch to the sensitive subject matter, which is further enhanced by his charmingly ragged cartooning. Adopting a muted…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Marvel Comics Writer Chip Zdarsky Artist Marco Checchetto ISSUES 1-3 Spinning out of Daredevil’s monthly book, this event series’ titular devil is actually Wilson Fisk, erstwhile Kingpin of Crime. Now a Trumpian Mayor of New York, he introduces an act banning superheroic vigilantism within the city limits in a bid to win a second term in office. While Chip Zdarsky’s central premise brings to mind a streamlined Civil War, he also highlights how the Big Apple is very much the nexus point of the Marvel Universe. Zdarsky also evokes the Faustian spirit of Spider-Man: One More Day – and the big-screen No Way Home – with the Purple Man’s children wiping Daredevil’s true identity from society’s collective memory, an insidious mind-block that inspires Fisk’s latest vendetta against…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Format Nintendo Switch Publisher Nintendo/The Pokémon Company VIDEOGAME After 20 years, the Pokémon series is getting a much-needed shake-up. Pokémon Legends: Arceus moves the game to a more open world and finally puts the focus on the creatures themselves, with the ultimate goal of catching ’em all. You’ll be doing that at a point in time where people fear Pokémon, and need your help to understand more about them. Tasked with creating the region’s first Pokédex, you’ll spend the majority of your time catching, researching and discovering what there is to be found in Hisui, and bringing it back to be documented. It’s a refreshing change to the traditional Pokémon gameplay formula. The core elements remain, but presented in a way that’s the closest realisation of what…