hmcmtc jtc kuvkutm by Derek Kolush

REVISITING ROBOCOP: DEAD OR ALIVE, YOU’RE COMING WITH US! THE WORLD’S

NUMBER ONE SCI-FI, FANTASY & HORROR MAG!

340

DOCTOR WHO

MARVEL’S M.O.D.O.K.

BEHIND THE SCENES ON THE IMMERSIVE ADVENTURE

HOW TO GET AHEAD AS A SUPERVILLAIN

EXCLUSIVE ACCESS!

All bets are off in Zack Snyder’s Las Vegas zombie heist movie

PLUS!

SFX 340 CONTENTS

FEATURES 24 ARMY OF THE DEAD Zack Snyder releases the #ZombieHordes.

34 THE CONJURING 3 Remember, possession is nine tenths of the law.

42 DOCTOR WHO: TIME FRACTURE An experience so immersive you can smell the Artron energy. (Ugh.)

46 INTERGALACTIC Effects secrets revealed. No tongues! Okay, just one.

SUBSCRIBE NOW & SAVE! Head to pag e 22 for details

50 ROBOCOP Please put down your weapon. You have six pages to comply.

56 STAR WARS: GALAXY’S EDGE An experience so immersive you can smell the Bantha dung.

62 ATTACK THE BLOCK Celebrating Joe Cornish’s star-making tale of hoodies versus aliens.

RED ALERT REVIEWS 8 DIEGO LUNA Psst! Spy report on the star of Star Wars: Andor.

70 ARMY OF THE DEAD They prefer “life-deprived”.

10 LUCIFER

84 INTERGALACTIC

The Devil proves he has the best tunes for the latest season.

Doing time with Sky’s new SF prison-break drama.

12 INSIDE NO. 9

86 SHARDS OF EARTH

In a perfect universe this story would be on page nine.

14 JURASSIC WORLD: CAMP CRETACEOUS Season three of the animated spin-off ﬁnds a way.

17 JUPITER’S LEGACY Sultan of Netﬂix Mark Millar returns to comic books.

18 IN THE EARTH

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s latest.

92 BATMAN: BLACK AND WHITE Who needs shades of grey?

94 THE NINTH DOCTOR ADVENTURES Eccles, Eccles, Eccles, oi, oi, oi!

REGULARS

What the folk horror? Ben Wheatley’s latest rural spooker.

97 BLASTERMIND

20 FIRST LOOK

98 TOTAL RECALL

Halloween Kills! Stargirl! More!

Charmed’s nostalgic spell.

We eat… er, test your brains.

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

GET IN TOUCH!

First Contact Hailing Frequencies Open! “I love you.” “I love you more.” “Oh stop.”

June 2021 | Issue 340 Future PLC, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA

Editor Darren Scott (DS) darren.scott@futurenet.com Deputy Editor

Art Editor

Production Editor

Ian Berriman (IB)

Jonathan Coates

Ed Ricketts

ian.berriman@ futurenet.com

jonathan.coates@ futurenet.com

ed.ricketts@ futurenet.com

Editor-at-large

US Editor

Nick Setchﬁeld (NS)

Tara Bennett (TB)

Contributors Calvin Baxter, Jim Blakey, Simon Bland, Saxon Bullock, Bryan Cairns (BC), Hirun Cryer, Sarah Dobbs, Richard Edwards, Dave Golder, Stephen Jewell (SJ), Catherine Kirkpatrick (Art Editor), Miriam McDonald, James Mottram, Jayne Nelson, Steve O’Brien (SO), Andrew Osmond, Eddie Robson, Will Salmon, Gary Stuckey, Adam Tanswell (AT), Drew Turney, David West, James White, Josh Winning, Jonathan Wright Film Group, London Group Editor-in-Chief Jane Crowther Deputy Editor Matt Maytum Art Editor Mike Brennan Reviews Editor Matthew Leyland News Editor Jordan Farley Production Editor Erlingur Einarsson Cover images Army Of The Dead © 2021 Netﬂix Robocop © MGM All copyrights and trademarks are recognised and respected

SUPER SOLDIER Rob Graham, email The Falcon And The Winter Soldier was

definitely up among the best superhero shows for me – very different to WandaVision, more grounded, with Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan turning into a great double act and Wyatt Russell threatening to steal the series as the dodgy new Captain America you want to hate. The super soldier mystery plot was intriguing too, and there were some nice X-Men hints for comic book fans with Madripoor Island. Isaiah Bradley’s story was tragic. A terrific finale setting up the future Captain America personally made me cheer. It’s looking very good for upcoming Marvel shows on Disney+. SFX Just happy they rebuilt Redwing. That drone has star quality.

KONG GONE WRONG David Edward Johnston, email Being a fan of the original

King Kong I decided to check out Godzilla vs. Kong. I was surprised to ﬁnd that it was one of those digital cartoons that are so popular with children these days. Also that some sort of Goonies remake had inexplicably been edited into it, as well as some other ﬁlm about a fantasy world in the centre of the Earth, accessed through a whizzy stargate by magic spaceships. Or something. Apparently King Kong, the primal force of nature in the 1933 version, can now talk to children and has a big magic axe that may or may not have been made out of scales from one of Godzilla’s ancestors. It looked very expensive and shiny, as modern cartoons do, begging the question why they didn’t pay the writers to produce a script that made an iota of sense. The marketing was suspect too: “ONE WILL FALL”. Both did, quite a lot, but they always got up, so nope. SFX At least Kong didn’t take out Godzilla with his Banana Breath™ from the old Universal Studios tour…

4 | SFX MAGAZINE | JUNE 2021

The Falcon And The Winter Soldier was a great show, with hugely likeable actors. Can’t wait for Cap4 at the movies. John Hobart

Rather than restore the Snyderverse just give Joe Manganiello his own Deathstroke movie and let him kick ass in whatever setting. @BrokenSerenity

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Advertising Media packs available on request Commercial Director Clare Dove clare.dove@futurenet.com Advertising Manager Simon Rawle simon.rawle@futurenet.com 01225 687694 Account Manager Nick Hayes nick. hayes@futurenet.com 01225 687236 International Licensing/Syndication SFX is available for licensing and syndication. To ﬁnd out more contact us at licensing@futurenet.com or view our available content at futurecontenthub.com. Subscriptions New subscribers magazinesdirect.com Phone orders 0330 333 1113 Email help@magazinesdirect.com Renewal mymagazine.co.uk Customer service 0330 333 4333 Email help@mymagazine.co.uk CRM Director Louise Dudﬁeld Circulation Head of Newstrade Tim Mathers Production Head of Production Mark Constance Production Project Manager Clare Scott Advertising Production Manager Joanne Crosby Digital Editions Controller Jason Hudson Production Manager Frances Twentyman

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WELCOME “Spoilers, sweetie.”

Rants & Raves Inside the SFX hive mind

Captain’s Log

DARREN SCOTT EDITOR RAVES Army Of The Dead was great. Although oddly it really made me want to go back to Vegas, regardless of zombies. Season two of Creepshow was such good fun. I can’t wait to see them go even further with season three later this year. RANTS I didn’t really get on with Shadow And Bone, it just didn’t grab me at all. Have I finally reached fantasy overkill?

IAN BERRIMAN DEPUTY EDITOR RAVES Thrilled that David Cronenberg is finally making another sci-fi film (Crimes Of The Future). Been waiting two decades for a reason to interview him... Very much enjoyed Censor, Prano BaileyBond’s forthcoming horror set during the “video nasties” panic. More on that next issue... Still reeling from the discovery that dance music DJ Judge Jules is the son of Sapphire & Steel producer Shaun O’Riordan.

JONATHAN COATES ART EDITOR

ED RICKETTS PRODUCTION EDITOR RAVES Finally got around to seeing The Night and was very impressed. There’s a distinctly Lynchian vibe to bits of it. RANTS Can’t help thinking that Army Of The Dead owes more than a little to the Dead Rising videogames – particularly DR 2, which was, er, set in a casino in Las Vegas. And featured mad weapons. And soldiers. And…

NICK SETCHFIELD EDITOR-AT-LARGE RAVES Already unhealthily excited for Indy 5 but the casting news has me stoked still further. Could Phoebe be playing Marcus’s daughter? Love And Monsters is an unexpected delight. (Especially Mav1s) RANTS I love Julia Louis-Dreyfus. I love Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine. Not entirely sure I love them combined.

TARA BENNETT US EDITOR RAVES Netflix’s upcoming adaptation of Vertigo’s Sweet Tooth is spot on. Don’t let the virus framing device keep you away, because it’s a delightfully odd fairytale. RANTS As a Star Wars fan, I’d still like to see new stories set after the sequel films. Flawed as they were, the characters are worthy of more tales. Why nothing?

Time Fracture is – at least, as I write this – due to open in London this month. An immersive Doctor Who theatrical experience, it had, like almost the entirety of the live entertainment industry, been put on seemingly indeﬁnite hold. That crack in time just kept slipping a groove, making it one of the many things that jumped from one issue of SFX to the next. Behind the scenes, the creative team beavered away building the impressive and expansive worlds of the Doctor Who universe, waiting for the day that audiences would be able to step into the UNIT Black Site and help save reality as we know it. Little did we know! Well, I’m certainly ready to experience another reality and I wish I could tell you more of the amazing things that await those people lucky enough to have booked a ticket for Time Fracture so far. Sure, I spoke with the creative team (see page 42) but I’m not going to spoil it – where’s the fun in that? I really think fans are going to love it and the worlds that have been created… or possibly recreated. Hell, I’m even excited just to sit on a spaceship during the interval. I’m a huge fan of interactive experiences like these – there is something truly joyous about being in recreations of sets you’ve seen on screen – and I hope it brings some much-needed escapism over the coming months. As the world begins to re-open, let’s take a trip to some other worlds instead, if only for a few hours. Yes, my normal is alien planets and Dalek attacks, are you telling me yours isn’t too? Stay safe – Daleks permitting – and we’ll see you back here in four weeks.

RAVES After a fairly slow and frankly disappointing start, For All Mankind season two rounded off with an absolutely epic couple of episodes and a heartbreaking finale. Can’t wait for season three. Hope they embrace the next decade as much as they did the ‘60s in season one. RANTS Really enjoying The Bad Bunch so far, but I wish the voice acting was a little less corny.

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

NEWS //// INTERVIEWS //// INSIGHT //// BUMPY DINOSAURS

JUNE 2021

CREATOR EXCLUSIVE

Inside No 9

What lies in store behind the door for series six of Shearsmith and Pemberton’s anthology masterpiece?

STAR WARS: ANDOR

JURASSIC WORLD

IN THE EARTH

Diego Luna returns to a galaxy far, far away for the Rogue One prequel show.

The clock is ticking for the gang of youthful survivors of Camp Cretaceous.

If you go down to the woods today… Er, yeah, it’s really not going to be a good big surprise, sorry. JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

Star Wars: Andor is set ﬁve years before the events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

Even guns come with selﬁe lights now.

ACTOR EXCLUSIVE

Rebel Rebel Diego Luna is back to bother the Empire as Cassian Andor, as ﬁlming gets underway on Rogue One prequel series Andor

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What did Star Wars mean to you as a child? When I was a kid, I was drawn by the dark side, I have to admit! Darth Vader was definitely my favourite character, and the first toy I got was Darth Vader. It was a different time back then. You had to go to the toy store and you had to sign up and wait a month or two for the toy to arrive – it was a difficult thing. Then that toy became the most important thing in your life. It was like a box – like, Darth Vader’s box that you would put stuff inside and carry it and use for whatever you want – and I used it as my school bag. I used to go to school every day with my Darth Vader and sit Darth next to me for class, and he was the best companion.

“Oh go on, please, just one little go on it…” What can you tell us about Star Wars: Andor? We are shooting. We are in London. I am away from home working on that project and really excited. I’m enjoying every second, and we prepared really hard for this moment, because we are approaching this with the rigour that you approach a ﬁlm in terms of the scale of what we are shooting; it’s just that it’s many, many hours now, and not a two-hour ﬁlm. But that’s the beauty, for an actor: to have all that time to work in different layers and enrich the character. It’s a dream come true to be back to this universe and to be back with this character that I love so much. And we are just at the beginning now, so we have a lot to do and a lot to live through in order to be ready to share this with the audience.

How does it feel to represent the Latino community in a franchise like Star Wars? I’m really pleased that the industry is understanding how important representation is and how important it is to tell stories that have in some way a connection with the audiences that are going to the cinema. In the States, the Latino population that goes to the cinema is a great consumer of content and therefore they want to be represented. And I’m glad I am just one of many, many stories of representation. How did it feel when you first joined the Star Wars family? And how does it feel now to be returning? I’m happy to go back to the galaxy far, far, away. It’s a dream come true. I’ll tell you how it felt: I was the coolest dad when I told my kids I was doing that film. When my son, that’s the one that connects the most with this universe, was watching the film he went, “My dad is the best!” Then we die at the end. My son just looked at me… “But you died.” So it’s, “Well, you’re cool but not that cool”! And now I can tell him I can be back on his top 10 list of coolness.

It’s a dream come true to be back to this universe and to be back with this character What’s it like stepping into and piloting spaceships? How do you prepare for that? On the movie, I had a session with a real pilot, and I got a lot of information from him. The only thing I can tell you is, there is no other feeling like going into hyperspace. When you go “Whoosh”, and that thing goes crazy, it feels amazing. Every take I was like, “Oh please, I hope someone did something wrong, I want to go again!” I mean, it was the nicest thing. The cockpit has this system underneath that makes it move. And then in front of you, you have this huge projection that shows you what you are going to be ﬂying through. So it’s as close to ﬂying as could be, and quite an experience. AT Star Wars: Andor will stream exclusively on Disney+ in 2022.

Dressed as a droid, Richard Osman sneaks into shot.

“Well done if you got that at home. I mean, er… beep.”

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

SHOWRUNNER EXCLUSIVE

Back On Song Lucifer’s back - and doing a musical episode THE DEVILISH LUCIFER, HIS TWIN BROTHER MICHAEL, their angelic brother Amenadiel and the demon Maze take family squabbling to a whole new level. The four were last seen locked in immortal combat, trading heated words and blows. Cue their almighty father, God, descending from the heavens to intervene, and you have the ultimate dysfunctional family reunion. That’s where Netflix’s Lucifer picks up when the series returns for season 5B this month. The show was supposed to wrap this season until the streaming giant renewed it for a sixth, and final, year. “So much about Lucifer is how much he actually tortures himself, how much he gets in his own way,” showrunner Joe Henderson tells SFX. “This was one final opportunity to explore that dynamic for Lucifer; how much of it is God imposing certain things on Lucifer and how much of it is Lucifer doing things to himself. “Lucifer is us,” he adds. “As much as he is the devil who used to be an angel, he is that part of us that blames ourselves more than we deserve. That was something we really wanted to explore. And what better way than with the person he’s externalised so many of his issues on?”

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“Sometimes I get so down that I want to siiiing…”

Homicide detective Chloe (Lauren German) appears to be deeply in love with Lucifer, devil face and all. She even gives God a bit of a tongue-lashing over his lack of parenting skills. But their star-crossed romance hasn’t been without its hiccups. “Chloe wasn’t made for Lucifer,” Henderson says. “She’s just special. She’s special in a way that disarms Lucifer, in a way that allows her to connect with Lucifer in a way no one else could. The back half is Chloe taking what almost felt like a curse and turning it into a superpower, which is helping Lucifer deal with his issues and helping Lucifer get to the point of being the man she knows he is.” Lucifer and company will burst into song and dance for the musical episode “Bloody Celestial Karaoke Jam”. Most notably, there’s a rendition of Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust”. “The key was why,” notes Henderson of tackling this popular TV gimmick. It’s not the only instalment that features catchy tunes, though; he cites another cover later in the season as the standout. “The MC Hammer song [“U Can’t Touch This”] was my favourite,” Henderson says. “The musical episode is absolutely amazing. Every song

NEWS WARP HIGH-SPEED “I only popped out for milk, and now look.”

DANCING WITH THE DEVIL Lucifer himself Tom Ellis on show tunes, social media and series ﬁnales It’s probably a good idea to laugh at Lucifer’s jokes.

What was it like performing not only the musical routines, but the emotional wallop that comes with them? The scene with Dennis Haysbert in the penthouse, where we do our “I Dreamed A Dream”, I was like, “Oh my God. We’re doing a song from Les Misérables. It sounds like it could be really cheesy.” It was amazing that night. There was a heightened sense of emotion. From the moment we rehearsed it, Dennis and I were in inconsolable tears and sobbing. Then, on the ﬂip side, you have numbers like “Another One Bites The Dust”, which is possibly the most fun I’ve ever had.

“Um… hello, miss, can I help you? Miss? HELLO?” is different. Every song is telling story about character. What I love is that we were able to bring the musicality back into the finale, with MC Hammer of all people. I also love that our cast just rolled with it and found it on the day. That was one of our first days back shooting after Covid. That song was an opportunity for us to remember our show is about big, grand things, but it can also be very silly.” As usual, the writers pulled out all the stops for the season finale. The last two hours feel like a cinematic movie. And after them, nothing will ever be the same for Lucifer… “This is our biggest season finale so far,” Henderson concludes. “Most expensive. Most epic. Most insane, in all the best ways. This was originally going to be our series finale and I think you can see that in its scope. Having said that, there’s still plenty of room to go for season six…” BC

Lucifer season 5B is streaming on Netﬂix from 28 May.

How surreal was it performing a duet with pop star Debbie Gibson? It was my suggestion. I’ve known Debbie for a while. When I was doing Rush, Debbie contacted me because we’d used her music in it. She just contacted me to say, “I love the show.” We became friends on social media and DMed each other a fair amount. When this part came up, I said, “Do you want me to ask Debbie? I think she would be up for it.” And, of course, she was. She’s fantastic. That was another box checked. If this year’s finale had served as a series finale as originally intended, how satisfied would you have been with where it ends? I would have been really satisfied. It wouldn’t quite have ended exactly where it does. We did think this season 5B was the end of the show. Hence, it feels like every episode is a big episode. We were hurtling towards the finish line and then there was a bit of a curveball thrown at the very last minute. I thought where we were headed was great. It’s weird that it wasn’t planned to be this way, but I do like where we left off at the end of 5B.

Debbie Gibson faced off against fellow ’80s artist Tiffany in Mega Python vs Gatoroid.

We’ll have a Q, please… John DeLancie back as the omnipotent superdick in Picard season two. Emilia Clarke and Olivia Colman joining Marvel’s Skrullinfested Secret Invasion. Netﬂix cancelling Castlevania after four seasons – but rumblings of a new show in same universe… Courtney Cox and Greg Kinnear starring in horrorcomedy Shining Vale for Starz. District 9’s Sharlto Copley cast in season two of realitybending Russian Doll. Kong: Skull Island’s Jordan Vogt-Roberts and comics writer Brian K Vaughn developing liveaction Gundam for Netﬂix. Lionsgate having “a conversation” about a TV take on the Saw franchise. Kantemir Balagov directing pilot for HBO’s much delayed adaptation of post-apocalyptic PlayStation fave The Last Of Us. Joel Edgerton, Rupert Friend and Maya Erskine joining Ewan McGregor’s Jedi master in ObiWan Kenobi.

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

GETTY

INFORMATION

The lads enjoy a joke on the set between ﬁlming. CREATOR/ACTOR EXCLUSIVE

AT THE TIME OF THE first lockdown in March last year, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton were three days into the filming of Inside No. 9’s sixth series. “In the 10 months in-between we wrote six more,” Shearsmith reveals to Red Alert, “that became a mix and match of series six and seven.” New social distancing rules meant that some of the originally intended series six episodes would be more difficult to film, so the pair brought forward some of the more contained stories. One of those, “Simon Says” (which is mostly a two-hander), stars Pemberton as a writer of a TV fantasy show and Shearsmith as a fan who implores his hero to write one more series, to make up for the much-loathed finale. It’s clearly inspired by the furore over Game Of Thrones’ controversial final season and the fan campaign to remake it. “We just thought it was a fascinating area to look at, that weird ownership that people get of a programme, where you become so passionate about it, that you get cross with the way it’s going,” says Shearsmith. “I know that Mark [Gatiss] has it with Sherlock all the time. It’s like, well, we’re the ones writing it! I don’t know what the right answer is because I think we’ve managed to strike the right balance with

12 | SFX MAGAZINE | JUNE 2021

‘Simon Says’, which is: where would you be without these people that love it and keep it going?” Since Inside No. 9 began in 2014, the boys have notched up (including this coming series), an amazing 37 unique dark-hearted tales. Shearsmith admits that the pressure of delivering a run of episodes that feels fresh and new mounts with every season. “They’re all great, these ones. I think they’re the best we’ve done so far,” he says, “yet a lot of how they’ll be perceived is the expectation based on what’s come before. That’s hard.” At the time of writing, SFX has been granted a peek at the ﬁrst two episodes, but it’s hard to talk about the season opener “Wuthering Heist” without spoiling an early twist (“It’s very meta,” Shearsmith grins). As regards the rest of the series, Shearsmith reveals that it offers “some hopefully very different

Nine Lives Reece Shearsmith talks us through the latest season of Inside No. 9

dark stories, dealing with obsession, inﬁdelity, mystery, murder… a lot of things we haven’t covered before,” he deadpans. Just as the subject matter of each episode of Inside No. 9 changes, so, often, does the storytelling. Season four’s “Once Removed” is told backwards; the 2016 festive special “The Devil Of Christmas” takes the form of a

Early arrivals for the Doctor Who guest star reunion.

DVD commentary; season one episode “A Quiet Night In” is almost entirely silent. So what kind of narrative experiments can we expect from series six? “We’ve got one episode that’s all set around a family watching The Last Night Of The Proms,” he says, “and the whole thing is very much about the music. We thought that would be a very different, intriguing way of telling this story. How to tell a particular story on television has really become one of the most exciting parts of why we still want to do it.” Shearsmith believes that both he and Pemberton have become more accomplished writers in the seven years Inside No. 9 has been on screen. “I think we’ve honed the way that we tell a story,” he says. “It’s

“We should discuss makeup budgets.”

“I’d probably point it that way.”

Who knows what wacky antics they’ll be up to?

“There was a cat in here, where’s it gone?”

a very particular thing that we do, to tell these stories in half an hour. I’ve become increasingly impatient with other television that will take three hours to tell a story, and I think, ‘We could literally have done that in a half-hour No. 9’. Because they’ve got all the time in the world, they use it. But these are about the leanest way possible of telling a story and having the greatest impact and creating characters very quickly. There’s no time to mess around with padding.” When SFX spoke to Shearsmith last year we asked him if they’d ever considered using any characters from either The League Of Gentlemen

We’re always terriﬁed of being accused of running out of ideas

or Psychoville in Inside No. 9 (“I remember lying to you about that!” he laughs). In the event, the pair resurrected Psychoville’s Maureen and David Sowerbutts for the episode “Death Be Not Proud”. So, would they consider writing another episode similar to that, using League characters? “We probably wouldn’t do it with the League because we’re always terriﬁed of being accused of running out of ideas,” he says. “It might feel that we’ve already done it because we did it with Psychoville. But if we had a really brilliant idea and it was too delicious to not do it, maybe…” For all we know, Reece and Steve may well have an Edward and Tubbs or Pauline and Ross episode ready for series seven. If things go to plan, pandemic-wise, they should start shooting in August – and a portmanteau-style No. 9 movie remains something they’d love to make. “It’s the obvious thing to do,” he says. “You could get three or four No. 9s and link them, that would be the way to do it. We’ve always loved anthology ﬁlms, but we’ve not explored it yet, because they keep recommissioning the series!” SO Inside No. 9 is showing on BBC Two and iPlayer now.

The inspiration for Inside No. 9 came from “David And Maureen”, a self-contained episode of the pair’s previous series Psychoville.

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

All that dental work is costly, but it’s gonna last. SHOWRUNNER EXCLUSIVE

Monster Hit Season three of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous finds the kids encountering new dinos and old foes AT THE END OF THE second season of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, those five “lucky” inaugural visitors to the island’s first youth camp were still stuck on a now evacuated Isla Nublar, having recently defeated a deranged big game hunter couple, a family of Baryonyx and a T. rex. Even OG Dr Ian Malcolm would be impressed with their ability to overcome that very adult level of chaos. As season three drops on Netflix with 10 brand new episodes, the main question remains: will these kids finally make it off the island before the show’s narrative catches up with the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom? “Look, we know the island ain’t gonna be there forever,” showrunner Scott Kreamer teases Red Alert, alluding to the volcanic eruption which takes place in that film. “And so, we said at the end of last season: we’re done waiting. We’re finally going to get ourselves off this island. “This is set a few months after the end of season two. These kids have survived this long together. They have new skills and new capabilities. Obviously, the dynamics between everyone are in flux. But they lasted this long, so when they put that focus towards

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getting off the island, how’s that gonna work?” As teased in the trailer, escape by sea will turn out to be a dud. And the island promises new deadly threats, with Dimorphodons on the loose, along with whatever escaped the E750 lab used by Dr Wu to make the Indominus rex. However, Kreamer promises that it’s not all going to be dire. “We got very dark with Tiff and Mitch, and dinosaurs getting hurt. We wanted, at least to kick things off, to breathe a little bit and to really have some fun. The show is such a balancing act, especially when it comes to where we can have fun, yet making sure that fun doesn’t undercut the life and death stakes of the show.” The narrative is also serious about weaving itself in and out of the cinematic mythology, adhering to canon and, in some places, augmenting it. “There’s stuff in this season that has been informed by the ﬁrst trilogy. And there’s also stuff from the second trilogy,” he teases. And perhaps some familiar faces will also make themselves known to the kids too. “Even if you are coming at this show fresh, as some kids maybe haven’t seen the other ﬁlms, we

There’s stuff in this season that has been informed by the ﬁrst trilogy

really want it to be an enriching experience for the big fan too,” Kreamer says of the show’s liberal cameos and callbacks to the films. “And that’s because this is a crew of Jurassic Park and Jurassic World fans. A lot of this show is what we would want to see, and that’s what we’re trying to put out there on the screen.” Kreamer also says that the writers and storyboard artists have created some action set-pieces for this latest run that play like “mini-movies”, as the teens continue to survive in the moment and plan their escape. “While we’re here on the island, let’s see some things that people are gonna remember.” As for another hallmark of the series – the impactful character growth of Darius and his friends – Kreamer says there will be plenty more opportunities to be surprised by these junior achievers. “One of the things that I really like is when we put together characters that haven’t necessarily been together that much before. Is everyone getting along? Is everybody feeling the same way?” Specifically, he continues, “Like with Yaz [Kausar Mohammed] and Brooklynn [Jenna Ortega], you essentially have two alpha females. We wanted to honour that and see what that would look like. And how has Ben’s [Sean Giambrone] experience being alone for those months changed him?” Asked if we should expect this season to bring closure to the Camp Cretaceous era, Kreamer isn’t exactly forthcoming. “Well, this will take us up to 26 episodes,” he offers. “And you never know with these things. If it doesn’t continue, we feel like it was a complete story. But we also wanted to give ourselves some room to grow and evolve. And that’s another tricky balancing act with this. I’ll just say that we wanted it to feel like a chapter is over… but maybe the book continues?” TB Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous season three streams on Netflix from 21 May.

NEWS WARP HIGH-SPEED

Richard Osman hoves into view, and he’s in a bad mood.

Dimorphodon genomes were put on hold in Jurassic Park, but recreated by InGen in Jurassic World.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen and Thomas Kretschmann lashing their whips to Indiana Jones 5. Attack The Block’s Joe Cornish directing adaptation of Mark Millar’s comic series Starlight. Russell Crowe going full Greek god as Zeus in Thor: Love And Thunder. Dear White People’s Justin Simien handed the keys to The Haunted Mansion by Disney. The Falcon And The Winter Soldier showrunner Malcolm Spellman cowriting Captain America 4. Vin Diesel starring in liveaction take on Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots. Warner Bros bailing on Aquaman spinoff The Trench and Ava DuVernay’s New Gods. Lucy Liu is the villainous Kalypso in Shazam! Fury Of The Gods. John Woo adapting unreleased Stan Lee comics project Monkey Master. Mike Flanagan helming Martian horror The Season Of Passage, based on Christopher Pike’s 1993 novel. Ullllllaaa!

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

GETTY

INFORMATION

Millar and Edwards previously collaborated on 2008’s Marvel: 1985, which explored “what if” superheroes existed in the real world.

A superhero spoils another peaceful family picnic.

CREATOR EXCLUSIVE

Superhero Swansong Mark Millar on the end of life, the universe and everything as Jupiter’s Legacy reaches its Requiem AFTER MAKING THEIR SMALL screen debut (see our review on page 82), the Sampson clan are returning to comics with Jupiter’s Legacy: Requiem, a new 12-issue third volume which ﬁnally promises to bring Mark Millar’s intergenerational superhero saga to a dramatic close. “I’ve told a story set in the past and a story set in the present, so I wanted to do one set in the future,” the writer tells Red Alert. “It’s my little nod to the Justice League, the Justice Society and the Legion of Superheroes, where you have essentially the same team in three different time periods. At the same time, it gave me the chance to do something that was dynastic. That made it quite exciting to write, as you can be more adventurous, since every 12 issues there’s an entirely new cast in an entirely new situation. It’s also a good jumping-on point for new readers, so if you’ve only watched the TV show, you can pick this up and still understand it.” Set a decade after Jupiter’s Legacy, Requiem focuses on Chloe and Hutch, who are now blissfully married with kids of their own. “Each story concerns a big relationship and siblings

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because family stuff is always much more interesting,” reasons Millar. “Any fall-outs or arguments are always much more powerful for a family than with just friends. Sheldon and Grace were the people who started it off and now you get Chloe and Hutch in that position. “They’re a bit like a superhero Romeo and Juliet, as you’ve got the daughter of the world’s biggest superhero and the daughter of the world’s greatest supervillain trying to make a go of it, which is now even more interesting as they have a son who is the combination of both of them. It gives the whole thing a different dynamic and will hopefully give us another season of the TV show down the line.”

Millar also promises to finally reveal the secrets of the strange island where the characters first gained their superpowers (on whose shores around half of the TV show’s eight episodes take place). “The mystery of the island is huge!” he teases. “Sheldon has these weird dreams and is told to go there. We’ve seen what was waiting for him, but it was never entirely explained what it is. Everybody has their own idea, but now we find out.” After Frank Quitely illustrated Legacy and Wilfredo Torres journeyed back to the 1950s for Jupiter’s Circle, Millar is joined on Requiem by artist Tommy Lee Edwards. “I wanted each volume to have its own distinct look for each era, so there’s a very traditional, Curt Swan/ Alex Toth-esque clean line to Wilfredo’s work, while Frank Quitely has a very contemporary European style,” explains Millar. “Tommy is doing the best work of his career – he’s doing things with paint that I’ve never seen before.” As its title suggests, Requiem comes to a definitive conclusion. “Without spoiling the story, it really is the absolute end,” says Millar. “It also explains the mystery of human existence, as well as running to the end of time, so it’s a requiem for all the characters and the universe itself.” SJ Jupiter’s Legacy: Requiem #1 is out on 16 June.

NEW AUTHOR

“Paradise Towers” recycles prop barrels from the Alien movies. Spot the Weyland-Yutani logo…

AVA REID MEET THE WRITER BEHIND JEWISH FANTASY THE WOLF AND THE WOODSMAN

By Royal Approval Six sci-fi classics by British authors have got the stamp of approval (sorry) in a new range from Royal Mail. Novels that have had new art commissioned include The Time Machine, The Day Of The Triffids and Frankenstein. The stamps are available now at royalmail.com.

Tell us about your protagonist. Évike is the only magic-less woman from her pagan village, where every year, they’re expected to hand over one girl as a sacrifice for the devout king. This year, it’s Évike – but she’s tenacious and resourceful, and will do anything to survive, including allying with her enemy, the disgraced prince.

A Deeper Love DC Comics has a range of special releases to celebrate Pride season. A Crush & Lobo miniseries begins on 1 June, followed by anthology comic DC Pride on 8 June. Some of the most iconic characters in DC history will also have special Pride variant covers as LGBTQ+ characters enter the spotlight.

What was the initial spark? I was researching medieval Hungary and came upon this anecdote about Saint Stephen having his cousin’s eyes stabbed out for being a pagan. That imagery stuck in my mind.

Ice Hot! Cutaway Comics has done it again: its latest Doctor Who spin-off title smashed its Kickstarter campaign within days. Paradise Towers: Paradise Found revisits the Rezzies and catches up with the Kangs from the season 24 Sylvester McCoy story. Details at cutawaycomics.com.

Boldly Going Again We can’t get enough of retro-style toys, so it’s just as well that Super7 keeps making them. Star Trek: The Next Generation gets the ReAction treatment with six new action figures, including Guinan and Wesley, in wave one.

Does the book have an overtly political message? It critiques the nationalism that undergirds the fantasy genre. Writing about Jews, it’s impossible not to problematise the concept of a homogeneous nation-state. These ideas of identity, patriotism, and state violence are typically in the backdrop of fantasy books, but they’re rarely given much page time. How long did it take to write? The first draft was done in two months, but the Jewish elements were not in it. It wasn’t until Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver that I felt I could write a marketable Jewish fantasy book. What are you working on next? A retelling of fairy tale “The Juniper Tree”, set in Victorian-era Ukraine. IB The Wolf And The Woodsman is out on 8 June, published by Del Rey.

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

Clint Mansell’s In The Earth score is available now as a digital album (invada.bandcamp.com).

“Note to self: don’t mention Blair Witch again…” WHAT DID YOU accomplish during lockdown? Learn conversational Spanish? Reorganise the shed? Just change out of pyjamas before tea-time? Congratulations – but your achievement pales beside that of Ben Wheatley, who wrote and filmed a movie. The director began writing the script for In The Earth in the second week of the first lockdown, then shot it during the UK’s brief summer respite from Covid-19, across 15 days in August. “It was partially processing what was happening and trying to stay calm,” Wheatley tells Red Alert, “and to have more of a purpose than dog-walking and baking banana bread.” The film’s set in the midst of another pandemic, whose exact nature is vague, but seems to involve the fungal infection ringworm – plus all the nowfamiliar rigmarole of social distancing, masks and testing. Joel Fry plays Martin, who with ranger Alma (Ellora Torchia) as his guide, heads miles into the woods to find scientist Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires). Along the way, they encounter sinister hermit Zach (Reece Shearsmith). When Wendle is finally located, she’s blasting out strange electronic sounds in an attempt to communicate with the forest. Rolling your eyes at yet another horror movie set in the woods? Understandable. But Wheatley’s film puts a trippily psychedelic spin on the forest. It also draws on the fascinating science of the underground fungal networks which connect trees and plants together. “It blew me away when I started reading about the mycorrhizal network stuff,” Wheatley says, “And how the fungus piggybacks the roots of the trees and runs a system underneath that will regulate a wood. The only extension here is where it becomes an intelligence, and becomes bigger than that… “Partially what made me interested was that it highlights the arrogance of humans,” the director continues, elaborating on the film’s Gaia metaphor. “We think we’re in control, we’re the

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Reece Shearsmith plays Steve Buscemi.

DIRECTOR EXCLUSIVE

The Root Cause Humanity faces a fungal threat in In The Earth, Ben Wheatley’s folk-horror response to the pandemic

Martin twigs what’s going on, and leaves.

smart ones, and really our smartness doesn’t extend much further than international communication, and all those things that are irrelevant to plants and trees – they don’t give a shit about Twitter! I think when we step back from humanity and look down on the Earth, we become more and more like a microbe – something festering away – and the Earth is some other kind of big system that’s next to our system, that’s growing around it.” When the end credits roll you’ll find two for “Covid supervisors”. Wheatley says that shooting in a Covid-safe way – with cast and crew effectively “bubbled” in a hotel for three weeks, only going home at weekends – wasn’t especially time-consuming or stressful, just more expensive. “It felt a bit restrictive on the first day, but by the second I didn’t even notice,” he says. All the maskwearing did make things a bit impersonal, though. “I’d see people in the hotel and go, ‘I know you’re crew… I don’t know who you are though!” he laughs. And there were some advantages to the way the film came about. For one, they had plenty of preparation time. “Nick Gillespie [director of photography] and I were doing tests all summer – we

shot tons of stuff without meeting up, in our own houses. That level of prep is very rare for a film of this scale.” And with composer Clint Mansell “captive in his house in LA”, Wheatley had his undivided attention too. “We were bouncing demos backwards and forwards within about three weeks. So by the time we turned up to shoot we actually had the full score – which is also pretty rare.” Mansell’s cues are, as Wheatley puts it, “at the top level” of the film, not buried in the mix – which makes sense given that he also provided the diegetic (in-story) music produced by Dr Wendle’s knob-fiddling. Mansell made use of some interesting tech. “There’s this thing called the MIDI Sprout, which is something

I think we’ll have ‘pandemic films’ for the next 10 years you can plug into plants,” Wheatley explains, “then you get the biofeedback from the plant. So some of the screaming noises are him touching the leaves or playing with plants. He was very gentle with them!’ At one point in the film, Martin and Alma discuss whether people’s lives will quickly return to normal once the pandemic’s passed, or if they’ll never forget what’s happened. The two disagree. Wheatley himself is clearly in the latter camp. “I think we’ll be watching ‘pandemic films’ for the next 10 years, because it’s had such a massive effect on everybody. My son’s 17, so he’s spent [the age of ] 16 indoors, away from everybody. That generation is going to have something massive to say about all this, and the way they’ve been mucked about. It’s laid bare a lot of the realities of adult society. I think it’s going to be as big a moment as coming out of the Second World War.” IB In The Earth is released in UK cinemas from 18 June. JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

FIRST LOOK

Halloween Kills Yes, we know images of Michael Myers rampaging on Halloween night do tend to follow a theme, but with Halloween Kills having been held back since October 2020 we’re happy to see anything new from the next instalment at this point. In cinemas 15 October.

Stargirl With an August release date now confirmed, WB and The CW have given fans a first glimpse at the season two big bad – Eclipso, played by Nick Tarabay. Even better, season three has been confirmed. Season two streams from 10 August in the US.

War Of The Worlds The Suicide Squad Hype for James Gunn’s superhero misfits movie continues to build, with more sneak peeks making their way out there. But can anything beat that King Shark moment in the trailer? In cinemas 6 August.

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No word on whether we can expect tripods or heat rays, but the Fox War Of The Worlds series returns shortly for a second set of episodes – people looking moody is guaranteed, however. Season two is coming this summer.

At the height of his Buck Rogers fame, Silla’s car had the number plate TWIKI.

THE FINAL

IN THE NEXT SFX

F RO N T I ER

MISCHIEF MANAGED

FELIX SILLA 1937 – 2021 The Twiki man with the Itt factor He stood 3’ 11” and his face was rarely seen, submerged beneath masks and prosthetics or lost to the long-shot, the fate of all professional stunt doubles. But Felix Silla had an enviable list of credits in some of the most famous SF and fantasy franchises. Born in Roccacasale, Italy, he came to America in 1955 as a trapeze artist, tumbler and bareback horse rider who toured with the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey circuses. Trading sawdust for celluloid, he began working as a stuntman in 1962. In 1965 he joined The Addams Family on TV as the quite inexplicable Cousin Itt, concealed beneath sunglasses and a shaggy cascade of hair. Silla made 17 appearances in the part, teaming for irresistible photo ops with Ted Cassidy’s colossus of a butler, Lurch. 1979 saw his other signature role, robot sidekick Twiki in Buck Rogers In The 25th Century.

Mel Blanc may have supplied the biddi-biddi voice but Silla brought an unmistakable body language to the diminutive droid. “Twiki is much more interesting [than Cousin Itt],” he once observed. “He’s someone with memorable traits that people won’t forget.” Beyond Buck and the Addams brood, Silla played a Talosian in original Star Trek pilot “The Cage”, Lucifer in Battlestar Galactica, a child gorilla in Planet Of The Apes and a hang-gliding Ewok in Return Of The Jedi. He doubled for Ke Huy Quan’s Short Round in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom and was the uncredited stunt duck on Howard The Duck – as well as an uncredited stunt penguin on Batman Returns. He even doubled for Drew Barrymore in the trick or treating scenes in E.T. – she was too young for the night shoot. That’s Silla beneath the sheet. NS

Loki’s on the loose in the latest Marvel series

ANTHONY POWELL (1935-2021) Costume designer on Hook and the Indiana Jones adventures The Temple Of Doom and The Last Crusade.

HELEN MCCRORY (1968 – 2021) British actress who played Narcissa Malfoy in Harry Potter ﬁlms The HalfBlood Prince and The Deathly Hallows.

ALL CONTENTS ARE LIABLE TO CHANGE IF BLACK WIDOW ACTUALLY GETS RELEASED

GETTY

Felix Silla with his old pal Twiki from Buck Rogers.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK LUCA CLASH OF THE TITANS THE TOMORROW WAR Celebrating 40 years of hidden treasure

There’s something ﬁshy about Disney’s new movie…

Behind the scenes on a fantasy epic

Chris Pratt’s battling against the future

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ARMY OF THE DEAD

ARS E Y T 15 S FIRST R’S S O ALM IT WA SNYDE R K IE AFTE ED, ZAC ” ZOMB LY UNC USTING S FINAL O N AN NRE -B LER I GOT E L E W I “G HR RALLY T N T S HEI E. NATU DOWN O AD HER HE LOW HE DE T T MAN F O Y M THE M R A FRO MSELF… N HI LMO L SA IL DS: W R O W

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ARMY OF THE DEAD

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

ARMY OF THE DEAD

HATEVER KIND OF 2021 you’re having so far, it’s safe to say that it’s nothing like Zack Snyder’s. First came the release of the “Snyder Cut”, his oft-assumed-mythical four-hour-plus rework of Justice League. And now he’s returning to the genre that made his name with Army Of The Dead – a gloriously gruesome and outrageously entertaining “zombie heist” flick dreamed up at the start of his career. After a welldocumented tumultuous and tragic period in his personal and professional lives, it’s safe to say that the director is back – and then some. “It’s cool, it’s fun,” Snyder laughs when SFX puts it to him that he is dominating pop culture in the first half of 2021. “The pandemic kind of makes it all seem, y’know, a little more abstract. I have an editing suite near my office, at the house, so everything’s kind of the same to me – we’re just working, and the movies are coming out. It’s cool. And, you know, I really enjoyed making this, as well as finishing up Justice League. It’s been a real pleasure.”

STO RY O F T H E D E A D Anyone who’s seen the explosive trailer will know the plot of the film by now, but just in case you need a refresher, Army Of The Dead follows a ragtag group of soldiers as they’re tasked with entering the ruins of Las Vegas, a city that has fallen to the teeming hordes of the undead. But this is no government-sanctioned mission – these guys are mercenaries, led by troubled veteran Scott Ward (one-time Replicant and part-time Guardian of the Galaxy, Dave Bautista). The team has just a few days to get into the city, crack a casino safe and make it out with the tens of millions stashed inside before the city is nuked once and for all. Scott is a hero of the Zombie War, a veteran who once saved the Secretary of Defense’s life, but now finds himself living alone and flipping burgers at a diner. He isn’t keen on returning to the fray at first, but eventually sees in the mission a chance to help his daughter, Kate (Ella Purnell). Grudgingly, he accepts the gig and starts putting together a team that includes old war buddies Cruz (Ana de la Reguera) and Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick), ace chopper pilot Peters (Star Trek Discovery’s wonderfully acerbic Tig Notaro, very much playing to type here), nervy safe-cracker Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer) and a host of hired guns. But can they trust their employer, the shady Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) and his enforcers? This isn’t Snyder’s first rodeo with the undead, of course. His debut feature was 2004’s Dawn Of The Dead, a remake of George Romero’s genre-defining masterpiece that seemed destined to fail, but ended up both a surprise commercial success and a hit with fans (well, some of them, anyway).

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Jeremy Clarkson’s had a long day and he’s hungry.

ARMY OF THE DEAD

“Did you not hear me about breaking for lunch? Guys?”

One of these people hasn’t quite got the joke.

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

ARMY OF THE DEAD

A follow up, Army Of The Dead, was announced a couple of years later, but Snyder departed the project, with director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr stepping in to take over. The project then lingered in development hell for over a decade until a chance discussion with Netﬂix put it back on Snyder’s agenda. Today, he denies that it was ever meant as a sequel to Dawn. “No, it [Army] was always intended to be set in its own world. I think that if I was ever going to have done a sequel to Dawn, it would have been a Day Of The Dead remake, something that sort of stayed more in that George Romero world. That just makes more sense to me. And so Army Of The Dead was always its own thing where I thought, ‘If I were to do this from scratch, what would I do with it?’” The answer was: make a 148-minute epic that gives the genre – arguably starting to look a little tired after a decade of The Walking Dead’s doomy domination – a solid kick up the arse, while also launching an ambitious shared universe with various tie-ins and spin-offs. Released through Netﬂix on 21 May, Army is a potent mix of guns and gore that also has a strong emotional core, more than a few laughs and, vitally, a zombie tiger.

I think the idea stuck around for so long because it’s such a simple sort of idea “It’s funny, because we didn’t push it,” says Snyder of the project’s unlikely resurrection. “It wasn’t a huge effort, and I think that’s what made it the right movie to make. I had a meeting with Scott Stuber over at Netﬂix. Scott produced on Dawn and we were just talking and I said, ‘Y’know, I have this thing, it’s like a zombie heist in Vegas’. And he was like, ‘What?’”, he laughs. At Stuber’s encouragement, Snyder began the work of reviving – or should that be resurrecting? – the ﬁlm. “I think the idea stuck around for so long because it’s such a simple, cinematic sort of idea. A team of zombie killers go into Las Vegas to crack a safe and get out with the money. Okay, sure! That sounds like a movie!”

“This is how they do it in France, I swear.”

TONE O F T H E D E A D Something that might surprise people who have become used to the relentlessly grim nature of other zombie properties, and indeed much of Snyder’s own back catalogue, is how different this ﬁlm feels. Where Justice League opted for muted colours and a grungy vibe, Army Of The Dead is bright and breezy, despite its (many) moments of darkness. It has an atmosphere that reﬂects

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“One last job, Frank…” “I told you, I’ve retired, Joey.”

ARMY OF THE DEAD

DAVE BAUTISTA IS SCOTT WARD

How did you get involved with Army Of The Dead? Are you a horror fan? I’m not an enormous fan. I like the zombie genre and I watch The Walking Dead. But, you know, I think I’m sucked in to that because of its good stories. There’s [character] relationships, drama, suspense. If you don’t have the relationships, you don’t have the performances, and you don’t have a solid story. So then it’s just going to be a bunch of generic ﬂesh-eating zombies that you’ve seen a million times before. Some people will love that, but for me, it won’t work. And as an actor, it wouldn’t be something I’d be interested in.

“I’m just saying, Dave, be a bit more careful.”

So what won you over to this in the end? Zack had a really great way of putting it when he said, ‘It’s a deconstruction of the zombie genre’. And it really is, because there’s obviously an apocalypse, but I don’t think it’s the focal point of the film. When you think about zombies, you think about really horrifying flesh-eating monsters. And to me watching this film, I’ve seen way scarier. But I think it’s more interesting in the way that they’re portrayed, especially with the Alpha zombies – they’re smarter and they’re faster and they’re harder to deal with. And also there’s the heist aspect and there’s a bunch of different relationships going on. So the movie is really layered – and there are also a lot of good comedic moments. So who is Scott Ward to you? He’s a war hero, but he’s also the guy who didn’t want to be a war hero. I think he really wanted a simple life, have his own business, have his little family, a happy life… and it all fell apart. I do think at the core of Scott, he’s just a decent person trying to do the right thing.

“What?” “What?” “You go ﬁrst.” “No, you.”

His relationship with his daughter Kate is really the core of the ﬁlm, isn’t it? He just wants her back. He wants his life back. I think you get really emotionally invested in this ﬁlm because of Scott and Kate and their relationship. You want to see them reunited. Like, it’s not often

that you do get emotionally invested in a zombie heist movie! And that’s what got me interested in the script, because when I first heard about it, I was like, ‘I don’t think so’. I don’t just want to be an action guy. How was working with Zack? It was cool. He’s an interesting guy because he’s super rough around the edges, like me. If you look at him, he’s all tattooed up and he just wants to work out. He’s always roughing it, he’s always kind of a mess and you can tell that he hasn’t slept. He was always picking up a camera, trying to squeeze himself into the smallest dirty space that he can get into to get an interesting shot. But he’s really got such an artistic eye. And he chases it and I love to watch him chase it. What I mean by watching him chase it is, there were a lot of times when he’d see something interesting, or find a moment in a performance, and I could see his eyes light up. He’d pick up the camera, and we’re shooting extra scenes or stuff that’s not written down for the day, because he’s seen something that he likes. I really love that about him and I think that’s who I am, too. You look at me and you think one thing, but then you get to know me or see how passionate I am about certain things and you’ll see a whole different person. And that’s the same with Zack. And he is just an artist, man, this guy’s just an artist.I also really wanted to work with him because I wanted to learn from him. I wanted to see what he sees visually as a director. Does that mean you’re looking to direct for yourself? Yeah, that’s kind of been my goal for years. I’m slowly working my way behind the camera. I’m in my 50s, man – my time in front of the camera is going to be limited! But I love filmmaking. And I also love storytelling, which is what I loved about wrestling. And so I hope to have a future in this. I want to be able to put stuff on screen and not necessarily blockbuster films. It’s definitely on my bucket list to direct at least one film and it’ll most likely be like a small drama. But that’s what I love.

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

ARMY OF THE DEAD

its glitzy Vegas setting, basking in the desert sun and neon lights, while the bold use of music – a hallmark of all of Snyder’s films – has a lot less Leonard Cohen and a lot more pop. It is, for want of a better word, fun. “Movies are so much about tone,” he explains. “I really felt like this one, it’s selfaware. It has fun, but it doesn’t make fun of itself. I think it allows the audience to still take the scenario seriously enough so that you still believe the stakes.” A key inspiration came from the classic sci-fi and fantasy films of the ’80s and ’90s. We suggest that Army evokes, in several key places, the relentless rollercoaster that is James Cameron’s Aliens, and he nods in agreement. “I have a reverence for those movies. The ones that take you and transport you to another kind of reality, if you will. The thing that I didn’t want to lose, which was really important to me, was that so many of them, things like Escape From New York or the original Planet Of The Apes – any of those movies that I think are genre-busting – is that they’re fun and escapist, but they’re also saying something. That’s kind of what I was going for here.” The Vegas setting also made sense given the sub-genre that Army inhabits: the heist film.

Check out the non-shambler with her fancy motor cortex.

I really felt like this film, it’s selfaware. It has fun, but it doesn’t make fun of itself “I don’t know if I’m necessarily a huge fan of the genre,” Snyder admits. “But I remember things like Thunderbolt And Lightfoot and a couple more that were around that I thought were cool. But, y’know, even the movies I don’t like are interesting and I’ve always felt like that kind of caper heist concept just fit naturally with those genre-busting aspects of this film.” He laughs suddenly, as he remembers tuning into an episode of Rick And Morty in late 2019 and being startled by the similarities to the film he was then in the middle of directing. “There’s this great episode, called ‘One Crew Over The Crewcoo’s Morty’ that’s a heist send-up. When I saw that, I just laughed because it was like, ‘Oh my god, this is the movie! This is like our movie in a lot of ways!’ They sort of looked at the genre in the same ways that I was looking at it.” “Genre-busting” is a phrase that Snyder uses a lot to describe his film, but he’s keen to stress that while Army Of The Dead picks apart both the zombie and the heist movie, it’s in the service of making them feel new, fresh and exciting again, rather than tearing them down. “I don’t want to say it’s a love/hate thing… It’s understanding the genre and then sort of trying to deconstruct it, y’know? That’s what

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“Hey look, there’s loads of money in here! Ace!” “Oh yes, ha ha, the old Super Glue trick…”

Dead Rising 2 called and wants its weapons back.

ARMY OF THE DEAD

Meet the cast of Army Of The Dead

ELLA PURNELL IS KATE WARD

OMARI HARDWICK IS VANDEROHE

Why does Kate join this mission? Kate is Scott’s daughter and she’s a tough cookie. She’s a volunteer at the quarantine centres – god, how weird I’m living this right now! [At the time of our interview, Ella was quarantining in Vancouver Airport.] She has this philanthropic streak and a kind heart and really that’s her motivation to go in. She doesn’t care about the money, she hates the ﬁghting, she hates the guns. It’s not her world. But she’s going in to save someone that she loves. And that’s what amps the stakes up for her. If everyone else leaves without the money, they’ve failed a mission. If she leaves without her friend, it’s literally a matter of life or death.

Vanderohe is one of the soldiers that Dave Bautista’s character recruits for this mission. Why does he take part? You meet him in a very reflective and meditative space. He’s working at a centre aiding elderly women with pool exercises and yoga. He’s become sort of a very centered, self-reflective and lifereflective human being and he wants nothing to do with the mission when Dave’s character comes in with Cruz [Ana de la Reguera] and offers him the opportunity to go back into that world.

And how are things with her dad? She was just a teenager when the zombie outbreak happened – try getting through that without being traumatised and needing a lot of therapy. She grew up to be very autonomous and independent but she’s got some baggage and she doesn’t have a great relationship with Scott. And it’s not necessarily the shared trauma of this awful event that happened in her teenage years. It’s not what he did then, it’s how he left it, for years, which is what makes it so unlikely that she ends up joining them on this heist in Las Vegas. How does she fare with the zombie killing? We had this extended discussion about how good is Kate at fighting, because she hasn’t really had the experience doing it that the others have, right? But at the same time, Scott would have definitely taught her how to use weapons. So she’s good with a gun, but she doesn’t want to use it. She spends most of the film sort of letting everyone else do the heavy lifting, but when she really has to get down with it she’s like, “Okay, here we go”.

Who did you enjoy working with the most? Matthias, who plays Dieter. We just got along immediately. And I love that juxtaposition. I wasn’t supposed to be outside of my cynicism as Vanderohe, but there were outbreaks of laughter and ultimately Vanderohe kind of falls in love with that character in this very fraternal way. How was training for the ﬁlm? Intense. I would typically gain two or three pounds for movies here and there, but I looked at Dave Bautista and he’s out there looking like a sore thumb because everybody next to him looks anorexic! So I gained 15 lbs [6.8 kg] in a month, I ate crazy, but I needed to get there as quickly as I could. And then I had the chainsaw and I had the gas tank on my back. And then when you add in Mexico and the heat… it was gruelling. But the chainsaw is very cool to watch, though... There was this moment where Zack kind of winked at me and said, ‘I’ve got something exclusive for you’ and it was, of course, a very freaking heavy chainsaw! As soon as you add a big-ass chainsaw, that’s going to become iconic as anything in the movie!

MATTHIAS SCHWEIGHÖFER IS LUDWIG DIETER What can you tell us about your character? He’s charming, very intelligent, very good with his fingers. He has fantastic hearing and he loves operas. He’s a very cool but nerdy dude. He asks the questions. There’s all these other people in the team who are very focused and not afraid, so it’s cool to have one guy in the team who is afraid! And as the safe-cracker he’s pretty vital to the mission… That’s a fact. Yes. Tell us a little about filming the zombie tiger scene. Zack and some of his ADs just showed us what to do, like, you know, here’s the zombie tiger moving there, and they did noises like “Roooar!” It was kind of like a pantomime. I just thought it was a cool idea. And that it was meant to be one of Siegfried & Roy’s tigers, I thought that was really cool. The Revenant had that scene with the bear, and we have our scene with the zombie tiger. How was working with Zack? I am a huge fan. I have, is it right to say, “a fan crush”? I was so happy because when I did my first casting tape I didn’t actually realise that Zack Snyder was the director – I thought he was a producer on it. But then I read the script again and I was speechless. What did you think when you finally saw the film? I was blown away. It’s always weird when you’re in a film and you’re on set with the greenscreens and then you see it and it’s like, “Oh, that’s what he meant when he said there’s a zombie tiger!” So yeah, I was super-proud and entertained. I would love to be able to sit in a theatre and just hear the reactions, like, “Oh my god, we love you, Matthias whatever-his-last-name-is.”

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

ARMY OF THE DEAD

we’ve kind of tried to do with every aspect of this, really analyse the why of them and ask what’s powerful about the genre? The trick of the movie is: don’t break it, don’t make me so aware of it that I no longer care about the reality of it, or of the drama, you know what I mean? I think, in a weird way, it’s a cinephile’s movie.”

FAM I LY O F T H E D EA D Adding a perhaps surprising layer of emotion to the proceedings is the fractured relationship between Dave Bautista’s Scott and his daughter Kate, played by Ella Purnell. We learn early on that Kate’s mum is no longer around and it doesn’t take much work to deduce what happened to her… The fallout from this tragedy has left husband and daughter shattered and estranged, but Scott’s mission proves to be the unlikely catalyst for a reunion, with Kate joining the team for her own reasons. It’s a striking role for Bautista, one that allows him the rare opportunity to both kick ass and show a more sensitive side, as Scott tries to heal these familial wounds. Talking to SFX for this feature, Bautista said that he appreciated that this role gave him the chance to “really do some acting”. For his part, Snyder says he found a potency in his star’s combination of physical presence and understated melancholy. “There’s something about him that’s really easy and watchable. You get a unique physicality with him – he’s a giant. But then also he plays the sadness of the situation really well. It kind of just sits on him, and he lets it be there. I think he plays the depth of the character really well.” Scott and Kate’s relationship isn’t the only family dynamic at play in the ﬁlm. The zombies in Army Of The Dead have a slightly different social structure to your regular, commonplace undead, with both a citizen class (known as Shamblers) and a ruling elite, the Alphas.

“So are those genuine RayBans, or…?” “Five quid.”

“I’m just off to search on my own.” “Okay, good idea.”

Would any of the Army Of The Dead cast survive a real zombie apocalypse?

It was a lovely day out at Westonsuper-Mare.

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DAVE BAUTISTA “I’d do okay, man. I could hold out for a year or two. I would struggle with, y’know, basic things, but I’m pretty much set up. I live in Florida. I’ve got a little compound and I’ve got a huge generator and we’ve got guns. It will come down to things like, where would I get extra propane? Where am I gonna

get fresh water? I could grow a garden – we have lots of sun and lots of rain here, so you can grow food for sure. But I would worry about everybody else and also, because I’m in Florida, it’s gonna get hot as hell. Like, what are we gonna do without AC?” ELLA PURNELL “I’d die. Most

ARMY OF THE DEAD

“SUNBLOCK! Knew I’d forget something.”

Release the Army Snyder cut! (Too soon, maybe?)

people in my life have accepted, like, “We love Ella, she has many talents and many great qualities – surviving the zombie apocalypse? Not one of them”. I don’t have the upper-body strength, or the dedication mentally or emotionally. I’d probably just hide in my house, put on some Modern Family, get some popcorn and wait for the inevitable.” OMARI HARDWICK “I think I’d be alright – I sometimes think my whole life has been me traversing zombies left and right! I might be more afraid of a zombie tiger, but I feel like I could be one

These faster, smarter zombies are capable of thought and emotion, perhaps even love, as expressed in the curious relationship between the King (nicknamed Zeus) and Queen, played by Richard Cetrone and Athena Perample. Snyder says that the origins of the Alphas stretch right back to Dawn Of The Dead. “One of the things that has always really struck me as funny is that zombies can’t operate a doorknob, right? Of course that’s an over-simplification. “But zombies at their worst, they’re like bad weather, you know what I mean? They’re not really a force of intelligence at all and so rudimentary barricades work against them. We would always laugh when we were making Dawn, like, ‘What if a zombie turned a doorknob?’ Everyone would be like, ‘Oh no! That’s horrible!’ That’s the thing that you can’t have happen, right? So [the Alphas] kind of started for me there.” This new sub-species also allowed the director to play with some of the themes that the godfather of the genre, George Romero, had explored in his work about the true nature of the undead. “It was one of the fun philosophical conversations about zombies that he [Romero] had over his entire career. Is there a larger metaphor here? Are the zombies a better us? “I think someone says something like ‘They’re us without agenda’. They’re without greed and without all the things that make us kind of bad. In the end my zombies are, I think, pretty honourable. As usual, it’s the humans that fuck it all up!” We’ll find out much more about the Alphas and their origins in the various spin-offs that Snyder and co are currently developing around the film. Army Of Thieves – a full-length prequel feature directed by Dieter actor Matthias Schweighöfer and focussing on his character – finished filming in December 2020 and is currently in post-production. And Army Of the Dead: Lost Vegas is an animated series

of those people that, like in the movie, is called up by a Dave Bautista saying, ‘Hey man, let’s go pick off some zombies!’” MATTHIAS SCHWEIGHÖFER “I think I would survive. You know what I would do? I’d take a boat, a big boat, and I would prep it with weapons and food and gas and I would just drive to the open sea and spend the rest of my life on the water.” ZACK SNYDER “It’s funny how my answer to this has changed [since Dawn

that follows Scott and his team during the initial battle for the city. Snyder is especially excited for this one and the opportunities it gives him to “troll the shit out of everybody”. “We’re working on it right now and it tells the story of where the zombies came from and what they are,” he says. “It’s just outrageous! It is literal insanity, in a great way. There are Easter eggs in the movie to their origin and you get to see that explained in the animated series. Because there’s a lot of weirdness in there around the zombies themselves.” Throughout our conversation – interrupted at one point, sweetly, by his 10-year-old daughter, who wanted to play him a Billie Eilish song she’d learned on the piano – it’s clear that Snyder is deeply proud of the ﬁlm and the franchise he is building. He pauses at

Zombies at their worst, they’re like bad weather, you know what I mean? one point, while describing a scene, to reflect on how his work has sometimes been seen by the public. “For a long time, people would say, ‘Oh, Zack Snyder, he just makes these action no-brainers’. And I was always like, ‘Oh, okay, whatever’. But to me, it’s always been like… gosh, we do so much work to make [these films] super multi-layered. For me a movie should work on three or four different levels at the same time, rather than what’s obvious. And I just think that Army Of The Dead’s a really glowing example of that. We took a zombie heist movie and said, ‘Okay, how do we make this as smart as we can?’” Army Of The Dead is streaming on Netflix from 21 May.

Of The Dead]. I think I thought before, ‘I’ll do alright’. But now I think I probably wouldn’t do that great. It seems scarier now than it did to me before. Or, you know, more upsetting. It’s just a horriﬁc concept. When you look at a movie like 28 Days Later, you realise that it’s really terrifying. And you know, I think, in the end, the idea of contemplating it, hopefully it makes us smarter about the reality of what we love and cherish about the world we have.”

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

THE CONJURING: THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT

HAVING GROSSED $1.8 BILLION WORLDWIDE, THE CONJURING UNIVERSE IS OFFICIALLY THE MOST SUCCESSFUL HORROR FRANCHISE EVER. AS THE LATEST FILM HITS CINEMAS, WE CATCH UP WITH DIRECTOR MICHAEL CHAVES AND PRODUCER PETER SAFRAN WORDS: STEVE O’BRIEN

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THE CONJURING: THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT

T WAS ONCE COMMON WISDOM IN Hollywood that horror franchises don’t do big numbers. Halloween, A Nightmare On Elm Street, Friday The 13th, Saw et al may have their cheerleaders, but box officewise, they’re small fry next to your Fast & Furious flicks and your Pirates Of The Caribbeans, billion-dollar juggernauts that keep studio execs in Lamborghinis and Mayan Sicar cigars. That was until The Conjuring came along. Few expected James Wan’s 2013 supernatural scarefest to hit like it did. After all, Wan’s previous feature, 2010’s Insidious, had grossed just under $100 million worldwide, which was considered pretty decent for a mid-budget horror. So when The Conjuring ended up as one of the best performing movies of 2013, grossing a whopping $320 million against a $20 million budget, it rewrote the rules on what horror films could do commercially. Since then, we’ve had the inevitable The Conjuring 2, plus a further five spin-offs – three Annabelle films, The Nun and The Curse Of La Llorona – all set in the “Conjuring universe”, a vast horror ecosystem overseen by James Wan and his producer partner Peter Safran. The Conjuring films, which orbit around real-life “paranormal investigators” Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), are the mothership movies, however. Now, five years after the second film, comes The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, which sees Wan handing the directorial reins to The Curse Of La Llorona’s Michael Chaves. “We were doing our final mix on La Llorona and I got a call from James,” Chaves recalls, telling SFX how he secured one of the biggest gigs in horror. “I just exploded with excitement. Every morning, I’m waking up and I can’t believe that I’m directing ‘The Conjuring 3’!”

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

THE CONJURING: THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT

“I really hope this torch doesn’t go out suddenly…” It was a hearty sign of confidence in a man who’d made his feature debut with 2019’s La Llorona (a 1977-set chiller that shares a character with the first Annabelle). “The Conjuring films were very much James Wan’s baby,” says co-producer Peter Safran, “and we were very cautious about handing that baby over to another parent. But Michael really delivered with La Llorona.” With the fresh director comes a new model of Conjuring movie. Whereas the first two films were claustrophobic, shadow-drenched haunted house tales, the third movie takes Ed and Lorraine on the road. More The X-Files than The Haunting, it’s based on one of Ed and Lorraine’s most publicised cases, where a man called Arne Cheyenne Johnson shot and killed his landlord Alan Bono, and later claimed in court that he’d been possessed at the time of the crime. It was the first ever court case in the US in which the defence sought to prove innocence based upon a defendant’s claim of demonic possession. “It was always on our list of ones that were worth exploring,” reveals Safran, who has worked on every Conjuring universe movie. “We like to draw as much as we possibly can from the true story, and then obviously embellish and create a narrative that makes for an exciting film.” “It’s a really controversial, infamous case where Ed and Lorraine Warren were coming to the defence of the murderer,” adds Chaves. “They were putting their careers on the line for this very unlikely, long-shot case.” Despite the story’s notoriety, the filmmakers bided their time. “You couldn’t start the Conjuring franchise with this story,” says Chaves. “You have to build up the goodwill and really understand the Warrens over the course of the previous two movies.” The Devil Made Me Do It fast-forwards the Warrens’ story once again – by five years, to 1981. Those between-movie time jumps, aided by some canny music choices (apparently Blondie’s “Call Me” plays a central role in this film), help give each instalment a unique flavour, but Devil promises an ever bigger

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“So, you two, you say these words here. Get it now?” break from what’s come before. Chaves’s brief was to deliver a much more visually expansive Conjuring ﬁlm (most of the location work took place in Atlanta, Georgia), with horror-tinged procedurals such as Seven and The Silence Of The Lambs being talked up as reference points. “One of the things that we really connected on is the idea of doing basically Seven in the Conjuring universe,” says Chaves. “How do you take the cinematic language that’s been established with the Conjuring movies, then apply it to a different case? What happens when you take the Warrens out of that haunted house? That was one of the most liberating things, because I think James is realising that you can’t sleep on the Conjuring franchise. If the universe is going to continue, you can’t keep on making haunted house movies, you

need to start going into different and unexpected territories.” Though we’re being promised something new, Chaves is keen to remind us that it’ll still feel like a classic Conjuring – hell, it wouldn’t be a Conjuring movie without, for instance, a freightage of jump-scares. “There’s definitely The Conjuring language,” the director says. “And there are certain kinds of ideas and rhythms that fans expect – it’s just that we introduce them in more surprising ways.” Chaves reveals that another movie that fed into the making of The Devil Made Me Do It was Peter Medak’s The Changeling, a sombre supernatural classic from 1980 that headlined George C Scott as a composer haunted by the ghost of a long-dead child. “I see a lot of the influence of The Changeling in the very first Conjuring film,” he says. “I would watch it every other week during prep. It has so much of the soul and the language of the Conjuring films.” Of course, the ’80s was the decade of the “Satanic Panic”, when reports of ritual abuse, particularly of children, would appear in newspapers and on TV on an almost weekly basis. It was inevitable, given their fame as

“I’m thinking, like, The Exorcist meets Psycho…”

THE CONJURING: THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT

Time hasn’t been too bad to Brett from out of Suede.

supernatural sleuths, that Ed and Lorraine Warren would become embroiled in this world, which is exactly what happened when, in 1981, they were called in to assist with the exorcism of 11-year-old David Glatzel: a boy who was “possessed” in Brookﬁeld, Connecticut before the “demon” allegedly moved into Arne Johnson. “There were a lot of these murders in the ’80s where people were blaming demons or Satanism as the reason that they murdered,”

As much as these films are about demonology, they’re also about faith and love says Chaves. “Lorraine would often work with the police – there were certain police departments who would call her in on missing persons cases. That’s something that’s never really been explored in a Conjuring movie.” In many ways, the relationship between Ed and Lorraine Warren is why these films play to much broader audiences than most horror flicks. There’s a toasty warmth to their chemistry that Safran believes is key to why audiences keep coming back. That and the fact

that these films offer relatively ungory thrills. They’re horror films that horror junkies and non-horror types dig equally. “The Conjuring movies are very much a love story between Ed and Lorraine couched as supernatural thrillers,” suggests Safran. “The thing I’m most proud about the first Conjuring was that Lorraine [who died in 2019] said we’d done such a beautiful job of projecting her relationship with Ed and that love story. And I think we really continue that with this film.” “They bring so much heart and so much charm to these films that they feel like classic movies out of the gate,” adds Chaves. “Their relationship anchors these movies. As much as these films are about demonology, they’re also about faith and love.” Devil originally wrapped in August 2019, but just as additional photography was about to ramp up in early 2020, the pandemic hit. Later in the year, when they were finally able to start filming again, they couldn’t get Patrick Wilson. Then they couldn’t secure Vera Farmiga. And then it was Ruairi O’Connor (who plays Arne Johnson) who was unavailable… “We were just waiting through the whole pandemic to finish the movie, to get these extra scenes in,” reflects Chaves. “In the beginning, it felt like, ‘Okay, we have plenty of time, this is going to happen’, but then every week would tick by and then I started biting my fingernails and thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh, are we going to get these and what’s going to happen?’” But they finally did it… “Yep, we finished,” he laughs. “It’s definitely a trick working through Covid but, you know, that’s definitely a first world problem.” Safran won’t be drawn on what project is next on the slate for the franchise after this eighth entry (“It’s a real fan-favourite character people have embraced and loved,” is all he’ll say, the tease), but does promise more stories set in this rich and chilling universe. And with other movie franchises – Star Wars, the MCU and so on – expanding into TV, he’s open to the idea of using the small screen. “Oh, we’re happy to create content for any platform,” he says. “So I wouldn’t be surprised if, somewhere down the road, that opportunity arose. You know, for stories that you can only tell in longer form that you couldn’t just as a feature film.” The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It opens in cinemas from 28 May.

Ruairi O’Connor plays Arne Cheyenne Johnson Does playing a real person make things easier or harder? Well, in this version of events, it’s not really a real person I’m playing: it’s entirely to service the story, and the story is, again, told through the eyes of Ed and Lorraine Warren. Arne Cheyenne Johnson is still alive, isn’t he? Did you try to meet him? For me, it wouldn’t be very useful to try and draw on exactly who he is now and not really who he was then, as the character I play in the movie doesn’t know if he did it himself, and that’s an important aspect. Were you a fan of The Conjuring films? I hadn’t watched the Conjuring films, as it turned out. I thought I had, but actually what I’d seen was the first Insidious, and I’d been quoting it and referencing it on set! But no, it wasn’t something that had popped up in my life. I’m glad actually, because now, after seeing all the films, it would have been really daunting if I was a big fan of them. You did additional photography after lockdown… Yeah, it was a few months ago, with all the current protocols, so I’m quite used to getting my nose swabbed now! The original filming was very arduous, as I’m possessed for 90% of my time on screen, so it’s pretty physically gruelling. I was living in a very dark headspace.

MARVEL’S M.O.D.O.K.

38 | SFX MAGAZINE | JUNE 2021

MARVEL’S M.O.D.O.K.

HE G IN T A LO RVES! F IED DESE D BO HE M ISE INKS D E TH HE TH S SEE IGHT TT . K OTL BENNE . O . E SP : TARA D . H WORDS O T . G M TIN S ’ L Y GET E RVINALL A F M

MONG THE GRAB BAG OF THOUSANDS of Marvel Comics characters waiting to get called up to fulfill their TV or cinematic destinies, M.O.D.O.K. has always been a bit of a head-scratcher. The creation of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the disembodied head/supervillain debuted in Tales Of Suspense (1967). Visually, George Tarleton (who was mutated into M.O.D.O.K., the Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing) has always been the Kirbiest of creations, and his outsized looks and temperament have always made him a tough fit for any grounded adaptations. He’s never played well with others, in any sense. It just took 50 years and writers Patton Oswalt and Jordan Blum to figure out that M.O.D.O.K. really can’t share

the stage. He’s got to be front and centre; when you humiliate him with petty, everyday people problems, that’s when his story gets very interesting, relatable and funny. That’s essentially the premise of Hulu’s new stop-motion animated series, Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K. “It’s grounded heart with absolute Marvel insanity,” co-creator/showrunner Blum tells SFX, on a call from his office in Los Angeles. The 10-episode first season sets up M.O.D.O.K./George Tarleton as a supervillain who’s run his evil organisation (AIM) into the ground, having to sell it to a tech company to keep it afloat. His home life’s just as messy, with a fed-up wife, Jodi (Aimee Garcia), and their two distanced teens Melissa (Melissa Fumero) and Lou (Ben Schwartz) ready to throw him out too. MODOK 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

MARVEL’S M.O.D.O.K.

“We wanted to tell the story about a control freak who loses control of every element in his life,” Blum says of bringing M.O.D.O.K. down to mortal level via real-life problems. “Suddenly, this egomaniac who’s lost his way has to ﬁgure out what’s actually really important to him, and that sets him on his journey. It’s basically a midlife crisis for a supervillain, and we decided that’s going to dictate our stories and where it will take the season. But it is a Marvel show, so a story about him trying to connect with his son is gonna take him to a giant war in Asgard.” As avowed comic book fans their whole lives, Oswalt and Blum had a mutual friend who worked at Marvel TV, and took the opportunity to pitch some ideas for a new comedy series in the Marvel Universe. One of those ideas was this contemporary take on M.O.D.O.K. “The fun of pitching to Marvel is they know their catalogue, and they got it right away,” Blum says of the reaction to their premise.

“They saw the humour in it. And they really responded to what we wanted to do with the character, that stayed true to the original Stan Lee/Jack Kirby version, but also found this comedic angle that humanised him. We were able to build out his world and make him maybe a lot more relatable than most people would think a giant ﬂoating head is.” Perhaps surprisingly, that generosity also extended to the array of high-proﬁle Marvel superheroes that Blum and Oswalt pitched as guest characters in the show. “There’s certain characters that were worked into the initial pitch, like Iron Man or Wonder Man. They were characters we always knew would be a bigger part of the story,” Blum says. “Then there were other characters who would be funny. We got no pushback on the A-listers, but we would ask for, like, Stilt-Man or Paste-Pot Pete and be told, ‘Oh no, they aren’t available’. “But we could use Iron Man!” he laughs. “It was really funny. Other than that, Marvel was

We were able to make him maybe a lot more relatable than most people would think a giant ﬂoating head is

Even supervillains have to move house. “So, it’s two words, ﬁrst word sounds like ‘boo’…”

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so great about opening the doors. They knew we were going to be respectful of the characters, and we had no interest in breaking the toys. Even though we were treating them in a more comedic light, they were usually like, ‘Go for it. That sounds great. That’s hilarious’.” Even their unconventional pitch for the season’s main adversary got the okay. “Every Marvel show has a ‘big bad’ for the season,” Blum explains. “And if you’re telling a story about a midlife crisis, what’s a better villain than your younger self time-travelling to the present to tell you how disappointed he is about what you’ve become?” Which is how M.O.D.O.K. came to be M.O.D.O.K.’s ultimate pain-in-the-ass antagonist for the season. The overall aesthetic of the show is in keeping with the show’s alternative take, too. After reviewing test looks with several animation houses, including a 2D and stop-motion pitch by Stoopid Buddy Stoodios (known for long-running stop-motion series Robot Chicken), the best choice became clear. “We were just so blown away by the stop-motion,” Blum enthuses. “It looked so different than anything else out there. It just seemed so much more glossy and cinematic and unique.” Considering the busy landscape for animation series, with competition for eyes

“I’ve told you, this portal is not a toy for your use!”

GETTY (1)

MARVEL’S M.O.D.O.K.

on many different streamers and cable channels, Blum and Oswalt saw stopmotion as a way to stand out from the crowd of 3D CGI and 2D offerings. “And I think it lends itself to M.O.D.O.K. in particular, where you get that Jack Kirby design, fully rendered and alive,” Blum continues. “Plus, [Stoopid Buddy Stoodios] developed this handheld vérité that’s in-camera, where the camera is motioncontrolled and moves to get that handheld feel. That really spoke to what we were trying to do with the story, which is giving you this behind-the-scenes glimpse at M.O.D.O.K.’s life at work and life at home. Shooting it that way makes it seem so personal, like you’re there in the room with him. All these elements added up to us being like, ‘This is perfect. This is unique and different, and a really a cool way to look at the Marvel Universe’.” With these choices came some alternative ways of having to write and plan the series, to give them a longer runway to make and deliver the ﬁnished episodes. “We wrote all the

scripts in 20 weeks, then we had table reads, and then we had animatics made,” Blum says. “It was very segmented in that way, which is great, because it means you’re not committing to something that you want to change later. We knew the scripts were locked before even a single frame was drawn, and the animatics are then heading into stop-motion [production].” Each of the sets was then built by Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, and all of the episodes were hand-animated to achieve the unique look that helps deﬁne the show. Blum says that something that’s equally important in what makes Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K. special are the vocal performances of the actors who make up the Tarleton family, as well as the extended ensemble of George’s co-workers and superhero adversaries. “A lot of the guest stars were down to the luck of Patton having really cool friends,” Blum laughs. “They all said yes. There were no second choices on the show, which I have never experienced.” Getting actors of the calibre of Jon Hamm to voice Iron Man, or Bill Hader to voice the Leader, was literally just a matter of Oswalt asking them.

“Then there were other people we didn’t expect to say yes, like Whoopi Goldberg [as Poundcakes], who had such a good time doing the show,” Blum adds. Nathan Fillion also came aboard as Wonder Man, making right a prior cinematic erasure. “The interesting story behind his casting is that he was cast in that role for background gags that they shot for Guardians Of The Galaxy. That was James Gunn’s idea, that I happily stole,” he laughs. “And he’s brilliant. You can’t do better than him for Wonder Man.” As with all superhero stories, looking towards the horizon is part and parcel of planning any stories, and Blum reveals that the finale of M.O.D.O.K. leaves the door wide open for a second season. “We do have a plan for it. It was one of those things where I think I had an easier wrap-up in mind for the finale, but the writers’ room and I stumbled upon this idea that immediately terrified me. “But the more I thought about it, it actually ended up being the most interesting way to go. I’m hopeful that people like it. I won’t say we wrote ourselves into a corner, but we definitely have a place to start in season two.” All 10 episodes of Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K. are on Disney+ (UK) and Hulu (US) from 21 May.

BEHIND EVERY GREAT HEAD...

The supervillain’s greatest foe just might be his wife, Jodi Tarleton, played by Aimee Garcia How did you approach the audition for Jodi? Well, I actually auditioned for this while I was at the airport. It was so loud [there] that I was convinced I was never going to get the job. But it did come my way! Jodi is not your typical sitcom mom. Was that always the case? When I got the job, Jordan [Blum] and I talked for hours about the history of cartoon wives and how he wanted Jodi to feel more modern and more grounded. That she wouldn’t just roll her eyes at M.O.D.O.K. and forgive him. It was really fun to come from a place of “Let’s make a character we’ve never seen on TV.” Not to mention she’s Latina. And I told Jordan that Jodi needed to have a big ol’ butt, which is very important to representing a strong Latina character! She’s not exactly a great wife or parent all the time either… My favourite part about her is that she’s not angelic. She’s messy. She falls from grace. And when you’re married to a supervillain, I feel like you have to be morally flexible. But that was so fun, because here’s this woman who is a wife and a mother, and she finds her independence later in life, which of course threatens egomaniac M.O.D.O.K. She ends up becoming almost a worse villain than him and completely spirals out of control, which is so fun. Were you able to record with any of the other cast? I was lucky enough to go into the booth with Patton for the final episode. He is so insanely talented. He has the incredible ability to switch on a dime from end of the world supervillain with evil, moustache-twirling energy to the intimate vulnerability of being scared of losing someone you love. To me, only Patton Oswald can make a supervillain likeable with just his voice.

MODOK 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

DOCTOR WHO: TIME FRACTURE

A NEW IMMERSIVE THEATRE EXPERIENCE AIMS TO PUT YOU DIRECTLY INTO THE DOCTOR WHO UNIVERSE. BUT WHAT IS TIME FRACTURE ALL ABOUT? WORDS: DARREN SCOTT

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DOCTOR WHO: TIME FRACTURE

Out of shot: SFX ’s Darren camping out for day one.

IVE ACTION DOCTOR WHO IS nothing new – it dates back to 1965’s The Curse Of The Daleks, a stage play which ran at London’s Wyndham’s Theatre. Even placing yourself within certain aspects of the series has become part of modern-day fandom, with interactive elements a central part of Cardiff’s Doctor Who Experience (RIP), Maze Theory games and Escape Hunt escape rooms. But the latest offering blends both worlds – ironically enough, given the universewarping premise of Doctor Who: Time Fracture – to bring something new to the exploding world of immersive theatre. It’s certainly the most ambitious project to date, taking place in two connected buildings in central London. The production is by Immersive Everywhere, the team behind the UK’s longest-running immersive show, The Great Gatsby, who have created a universe of 17 worlds taking up 2,700 square metres of space, the work of over 40 people. After almost 6,000 applications, a cast of 42 performers will form part of the 86 people needed to run each performance. In short: it’s bigger on the inside.

Darleks and Syber Men! Like from off the telly!

for the Doctor, but due to the narrative of this plot the Doctor is not available. But what the Doctor has very astutely done is send a list of names to UNIT, to their Black Site they’ve been running to monitor the time fracture for years. So these names are essential to the saving of the universe, and those names just happen to be the audience members that are arriving for that show.” Yes, that means you – meaning this is the closest many fans will get to appearing in an actual Doctor Who story. “They arrive at UNIT Black Site, where UNIT has constructed a Portal Stabilisation Gateway around the widening time fracture to allow human beings to enter into it,” Dingsdale continues. “The audience travel to alien planets, historical locations, sci-ﬁ worlds – some familiar, some new – with the mission to

“Just one more hour and then I’ll stop looking.”

SO L DIE RIN G O N Writer Dan Dingsdale explains, “It’s a love letter to Doctor Who – and not just the current iteration of the show, but the entire heritage of the last 60 years.” But what is a time fracture? Well, exactly as it sounds, Dingsdale explains. “A rift that has opened a space/time dimension which is causing anomalies in reality. Dimensions are knocking together, things are popping in and out of existence and it’s getting worse. “It’s being monitored by UNIT – the end point of these anomalies being the eradication of the entirety of reality. Bread and butter stuff JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

DOCTOR WHO: TIME FRACTURE

find out what is causing these anomalies in reality, what’s causing the disturbances within the fracture and how to put a stop to it.” This journey takes over two hours of live theatre and visual spectacles, culminating in the “grand finale”. What is it? Well, this is Doctor Who so of course it’s a secret. But as Dingsdale puts it, “It will cause, we hope, not a few fan tears.” Speaking of fan tears: they don’t need to be too concerned with canon. Director Tom Maller explains, “The premise of the time fracture has allowed us to make it a closed-loop narrative. So everything that happens here hasn’t affected the Whoniverse. You can save the universe, you can have interaction with or something might happen to this specific character. But once they’ve closed the narrative and seal the time fracture, save the universe, none of that ever happened.” Dingsdale adds: “Which means we can be a little bit more flexible with creative within the narrative, knowing that we’re not going to tread on the toes of canon. That this is its own pocket universe.” What that means, in a nutshell, is you’re going to be able to face off against a number of familiar characters. So far they’ve mentioned that the Daleks, Cybermen and Weeping

The premise allows us to make a closed-loop narrative, so all that happens here doesn’t affect the Whoniverse Angels lie in wait. But there are many more surprises in store. “There are certain monsters, aliens, entities, that if you came to a Doctor Who immersive show, I think you’d probably be disappointed if you didn’t see them,” Waller considers. “Rest assured, you will not be disappointed. We’re being true to the themes, which are sci-ﬁ, historical, horror and of course fun. Within the basement of this building is an element of the Angels, which is going to be terrifying, but awesome. “But then there are also speciﬁc characters that would be awesome for an audience member to have an interaction with, that you’d never feel that you’d come face to face with, that we’ve got but which we’re keeping secret. And only a handful of the audience would experience that. But it’s a huge input to the narrative of what they agree to do. So there’s strands within our world…” Strands? That’s where things take a different turn. You’re not turning up to the same show every night; one might say it’s… fractured. Here’s the science part.

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Bradley and Barrowman both appear on ﬁlm.

“With Gatsby, people had spreadsheets,” Waller says of audience members trying to work out the different ways to follow the plot threads to unlock new experiences. “There’s speciﬁc things, speciﬁc characters, that if you meet and come across, you might get picked up and taken on a bespoke journey to this iconic person.” But it is, they stress, also an experience you can simply enjoy by watching others partake in – even more than once. “To get the rewards of interaction, of the Easter eggs, of characters, of set, of props, of music, all of the things that we have on offer, this show is absolutely primed for repeat returns,” Waller says.

CALL ED TO TH E B AR

Rehearsals ﬁnally get underway for the large cast.

Bonus points for spotting all the Easter eggs.

The experience also takes in a visit to Zaggit Zagoo, the bar where the Tenth Doctor says his farewell to Captain Jack in “The End Of Time”, on board a space cruiser. (Jack also appears in Time Fracture, in new scenes filmed with John Barrowman.) Even though this is the interval element of a “traditional” show, the audience will remain in-world while experiencing “a gorgeous panoramic view of the universe”, where you “go into lightspeed”. It’s here you’ll find a “Silurian Celine Dion” – with her headpiece created by Millennium FX, no less. “We have two headlining acts that have been very expensive. They are the equivalent of Celine Dion’s residency in Vegas – they’ve spent a pretty pricey note getting these two to come and do a residency on the ship,” the creators explain. Adventurers will even be able to buy in-world costumes that match those of the actors, to become further entrenched in the story (a Time Lord headdress, please!). How much of classic Who can fans expect to encounter? Short answer: a lot. Dingsdale takes a breath. “That pulls in from locations, characters, nods to the plotlines, designs, names, Easter egg bits that have been placed about the set; every single iteration and generation is in some way homaged, namechecked or nodded to, but in different ways throughout.” That just leaves one question about a particularly important character. Beware: spoilers, sweetie. “We want to hold that back as much as we possibly can,” says Dingsdale when asked if a certain Time Lord will be making an appearance in any other incarnations than David Bradley’s First Doctor. “It’s one of those things where your first time can only happen once. And the elements of discovery should be fun for that.” We think it’s fair to say that Doctor Who fans – for once – won’t be disappointed. Doctor Who: Time Fracture opens on 26 May. For more info, visit immersivedoctorwho.com

DOCTOR WHO: TIME FRACTURE

A detailed concept model of the UNIT Black Site. A design for Leonardo da Vinci’s study room.

DESIGNING DOCTOR WHO Working on the sets, props and costumes means production designer Rebecca Brower is completely, ahem, immersed in the immersive experience How much research did you have to do for this project? It gave me a real opportunity to go all the way back to the ’60s and really learn the entire history of the show, and the history of the design as well. It was such a massive treat to design, because I’m designing one space where I’m getting to look into the history of England, or the history of Italy. Then suddenly in the next room I’m designing a spaceship thousands of years from now. What did looking at nearly 60 years of Doctor Who teach you? What I found really amazing and lovely was when I started studying the design features from classic Doctor Who and modern day Doctor Who, I started seeing the similarities. I started seeing the production designers from nowadays also doing the same work and really looking back and paying homage to what those sets and designs were back then; taking traits, colours, shapes, and really modernising them for today’s audience. That was also something that I have tried to do myself. Construction started in November and completed in April. What’s it like walking through the ﬁnished build? It’s always mind-blowing. What’s been amazing has been taking people around; I’ve obviously had to take the BBC and other people with different involvements, and show them around. There’s always that brilliant moment where you

think you’ve come to the end, and you realise you’re not even halfway through yet. That’s really exciting, and it’s something that I can’t wait for audiences to be able to feel. A version of da Vinci’s study, as seen in “City Of Death”, features. Does that mean we’ll see a certain painting? Yes, we do have a Mona Lisa that we play on as well. We have an illusionist on the show called John Bulleid. And he’s created an amazing illusion that our audience will see in front of their eyes with Mona Lisa. Tell us about Queen Elizabeth’s court. This has been a really interesting room. There are tapestries that are hung that I’ve been able to ﬁll with Easter eggs and little things the audience can have a look through and see if they can ﬁnd; we also have an illusion that happens on the gold throne. Another amazing thing about this room: this is the very, very bottom of the basement in Bond Street, which is why the ceilings are so low, but we actually have the stream that runs through the centre of the room. It’s already there. There are many canals that tie off the Thames that run underneath Oxford Street in those areas of London, and this is one of those that’s been redirected through this building. So we’ve actually kept it and it’s very much part of the design. So the audience will actually get to see this piece of real London history running through the show.

The throne room’s river is a real feature of the building.

The “inworld” bar will never be this empty.

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

INTERGALACTIC

VFX SUPERVISOR JEAN-CLAUDE DEGUARA TELLS US ABOUT HELPING TO BRING THE WORLD OF SKY’S PRISONERSON-THE-LAM SPACE OPERA TO LIFE WORDS: IAN BERRIMAN

THE EFFECTS OF

INTERGALA A

CO-OWNER OF independent effects company Milk, Jean-Claude Deguara has worked in visual effects for over 20 years, racking up credits on the likes of Doctor Who, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (for which Milk’s team won a BAFTA) and Good Omens. Pre-production on Intergalactic was well advanced when he

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boarded, with production designer Mark Geraghty’s team having created concept art for many of the key ships, props and planets. “They were already building the Hemlock, and there were lots of concepts already in play,” Deguara tells SFX. “They had a corridor at the studio, and for every episode all the artwork was there. But it wasn’t, ‘Here’s the concept, get on with it”, it was, ‘This is what we’re

thinking’, and then input. And we got our guys on some of the creature-related stuff – like some baby chicks in episode four. We also did the Jupiter Cruiser [spaceship]. So we mucked in with them!” Led by Deguara, Milk’s team created 850 shots across the eight episodes, including a dystopian future London, hyperspace travel and various character enhancements.

Jean-Claude loved this Tower Bridge concept art.

INTERGALACTIC

Moonage Pictures’ concept art for New London.

CTIC

A work-inprogress Milk computer model.

OLD AND NEW LONDON

There was one piece of art for Old and New London, a low shot of Tower Bridge. It had these shafts of light coming through, and it was a bit smoky, a bit mysterious – you couldn’t see to the back of it. I took one look and was like: not only is that beautiful, we can achieve that! I was worried it was going be so vast you’d need the budget of The Avengers for that level of detail. So we really played to that in creating London. The water levels have risen, and the cities with the most money are able to create these dams, drain the water out of the city, and build a city on top. So there’s a dam around a nine-mile radius of Central London. The layout’s pretty much spot on, though there’re a few bits cheated. We did a one-off shot for Skins many years ago [2013’s Skins: Pure], where a girl’s soul is ﬂoating through London, so we had a base of a quarter of London pre-booked – though it was very, very low res. We did look to see what buildings are coming over the next 10-15 years, and added in a few more – but where we ended up placing the camera, you didn’t see them! With New London, the guys had already found the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, which is a small section of futuristic-looking buildings, so we didn’t have to build many high-res foreground buildings – we used what was there and added to it. There were these massive pools that we took out [to show Old London underneath]. That was something Kieron [Hawkes, director] spotted on the recces, so it was a really clever idea that they’d already worked out.

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

INTERGALACTIC Milk concept art of a rather different Jupiter Cruiser.

THE JUPITER CRUISERS

The Hemlock is a nuts and bolts ship that feels like there’s add-ons on it. They don’t care about that, because no one ever sees the prison ships – they just take the prisoners to and from other areas. So it’s got this really nice rugged feel to it – whereas we wanted to make sure that the Jupiter Cruisers were really sleek. When we sat down with the concept artist and briefed him, what we wanted to achieve was the sleekness of the Commonworld – it needed to be in keeping with that world. And we wanted a stealth feel to it as well. They definitely have a Japanese type of influence on them, too – it wasn’t intentional reference, but you can definitely feel that comes through.

No, Oliver Coopersmith didn’t wear contacts!

CONCEPT ART © MOONAGE PICTURES/MILK

ECHO’S EYES

It’s funny: you do a lot of massive, epic stuff, and that’s probably one of the shots that had the most versions. It was because it looked like a bit of sci-ﬁ tech – man-made, like Google Glass or something – so it was trying to get away from that. The brief was that Echo’s got this eagle vision, where you see his pupils dilate. But just doing that, without any type of enhancement, you don’t notice it. So we went down the path of a New Aurum feel – the energy source in this universe – as a way to help sell the effect. We ended up using pigmentation in the eyes, and making sure that it had naturally organic lines to it. The trickiest bit was not making it feel mechanical and clunky when it moved.

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INTERGALACTIC

The Hemlock activating its Alcubierre Drive.

THE ALCUBIERRE DRIVE

Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who does The Sky At Night, was the scientiﬁc advisor. It was my job to take everything she was saying about the theories behind the Alcubierre Drive [named after physicist Miguel Alcubierre] and make it visually make sense. What happens is a giant bubble envelops the ship and protects it, then the universe warps – so the ship’s actually static and the universe moves around it. But if we just put a big bubble around the ship, visually it’s not that interesting. So I was like, “What if we turn this bubble into an ocean? At that scale it will be undulating, there’ll be loads of movement in it.” And she was like, “Perfect.” It was important to keep it correct as far as how she was explaining it, but make it feel quite epic. At the end, we push more gold, because the colour theme of New Aurum is a golden colour.

Gold is associated with New Aurum.

CANDY’S TONGUE

You can’t have eight hours of television where every time a character opens their mouth, you’ve got a visual effects shot – you don’t want to be the person to say to an actor, “Keep your mouth shut!” So the way we devised the tongue is that when it’s inside her mouth it’s the same as any human tongue, but when she sticks it out it separates into two parts – there’s, like, two muscles that come out from the normal tongue. It’s using a reference of the eye of the snail: if you touch a snail eye, it retracts. So it was only when she does the tongue-out gesture that we’d add on to it – that was deliberately designed to give her the freedom to talk and do anything.

EASTER EGGS

There’s a lovely thing in episode three, where they escape from Nar 59, having got the New Aurum to save the others. There’s one shot where we’re travelling away and Kieron [Hawkes, director] was like, “When the rain’s hitting the window of the ship, I want a phoenix coming through the flames to appear – but I don’t want anyone to see it.” He wanted a subliminal image. So we found tattoo art of phoenixes and had a chat with the effects guys about changing the flow of the CG rain streaming off to match it. The first version, it was clear as day: “Oh look, there’s a phoenix on that window”. Kieron was like, “No, I don’t want to see it!” If you know it’s there, you’ll see it, but if you catch the wrong part, you’re like, “Hmm, that doesn’t move how the rest of the water moves…” Intergalactic is currently airing on Sky One, and available as a box set on streaming service NOW.

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

ROBOCOP

REVISITING

ROBOCOP : WRITER ED

NEUMEIER AND DIRECTOR PAUL VERHOEVEN EXPLAIN HOW A LOW-BUDGET SCI-FI SATIRISING REAGAN’S AMERICA SPAWNED A LONG-RUNNING FRANCHISE

WORDS: DREW TURNEY

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ORION PICTURES, ALAMY/AA PICTURE ARCHIVE

ROBOCOP

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

ROBOCOP

BEYOND RIDICULOUS

Would RoboCop-style satire work today? flying high at the time. “He’d had success with Airplane! so he wasn’t afraid of the humour,” Neumeier says. “Everybody was iffy about it, but not Jon. He understood you could make something funny, political, dramatic and exciting at the same time.” Davison took it to iconic production stable Orion, and soon RoboCop had a green light. Some directors wanted it but couldn’t schedule it, others didn’t feel like a good fit to Davison, and a Dutch director known for very adult European dramas didn’t seem at all suited. Initially, Verhoeven agreed. “I read about 15 pages and threw it away. It was so far away from the films I’d made. They were much more based in reality and certainly not science fiction,” the director says from his home in The Hague. “That subtitle, ‘the future of law enforcement’, seemed completely alien to me.” So Verhoeven passed… until his wife caused him to reconsider. “She read it in a completely different way: she felt there were elements that weren’t so far away from me, like [Murphy] losing his past, and the philosophy of losing your memory.” A quick phone call to his US agent and history was written. “Even my films in Holland, if they were about a war, none of them were action movies. I was more interested in the philosophical underpinnings of the script. I saw RoboCop a bit like a futuristic Jesus.”

P O L ICE STATE ME NTS

“You told me it was Fancy Dress Friday, you arse.”

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The result is a seeming contradiction between brawny action and high-minded comment on social dangers. “I wanted a movie you could see at eight years old and think it was the greatest robot movie ever, then at 28 and see it was about other things,” Neumeier says. He adds that he’s always “hidden behind” genre to comment on the world, something that’s easier to swallow with the genre tropes of action or laughs. “[Characters] are exhibiting certain behaviours that are amusing but can also be dangerous, evil and corrupt. It was a difﬁcult tone to describe to people.” Neumeier says Verhoeven’s relaxed attitude towards the violence was another plus. “There’s a torture-murder on page 22; the script always had that edge. At ﬁrst Paul wasn’t sure about it being funny, but I gave him a bunch of comic books by Frank Miller and he was able to embrace the humour.” Another unexpected motif which Neumeier and Verhoeven bonded over was the use of chapter-ending “Media Break” segments (visually inspired by the blocky geometries of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian), featuring the perky Casey Wong (Mario Machado) and Jess Perkins (Leeza Gibbons). “By the time we did them in Starship Troopers [in the form of the Federation announcements] it was something we knew how to do together,” Neumeier says.

A blowhard reality TV star incumbent of the Oval Ofﬁce who’d be hilarious if he hadn’t wielded so much terrifying power; the media clogged with vitriolic right wing drivel; political leaders using absurd Orwellian doublespeak… All sound like elements that Neumeier could have considered and rejected in an old script. In 1987, runaway capitalism and abandonment of community in the body politic were exaggerated for the sake of parody. But would something with such incisive comment work today? “Right now, we live in a time where it’s not that it’s not amusing, it’s just on steroids,” is how Neumeier puts it. “Yes, that would be difﬁcult,” Verhoeven adds. “It’s already such a strange time, and an exaggeration of that seems to be impossible. I think we need more time before we can react to what’s happened in the US over the last three, four years. It’s already basically RoboCop; there’s already a certain political right-wing thinking.”

Neumeier remembers how Starship Troopers’ satire of military fascism almost sneaked through the studio (Sony) unnoticed. But how did the Hollywood powers that be – drunk on the success of ghostbusting, time-travelling DeLoreans and cops in Beverly Hills – absorb RoboCop’s more cerebral politics? Thankfully, Orion had the habit of hiring interesting people and letting them work. “They had opinions, but they got it,” Neumeier says. “The other nice thing was they had big hopes for other movies, so it was an inexpensive, middle-range picture.” Audiences lapped up the movie, which cost $13 million to make, to the tune of a box ofﬁce of $53 million, plus a further $24 million from

It had been a rough night for Paul McCrane.

ORION PICTURES, ALAMY

TAR WARS. THE Avengers. Harry Potter. When we think of entertainment empires, an inexpensive, ultra-violent, sociopolitical satire from the late ’80s doesn’t immediately spring to mind. But, like its hero Alex Murphy, RoboCop has proved very hard to kill. Screenwriters Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner’s story of a cybernetic cop built using the body of an officer slain on duty latched onto fears about runaway Reaganomics, the overturning of ideals about the common good and uncertainty about robots and computers. As Neumeier tells SFX from his home in suburban Los Angeles, they were themes he was surprisingly knowledgeable about growing up. “1970s Northern California was pretty liberal. It was infused with those ideas, so I wanted to poke fun at them,” he says. “It was nice when audiences were in on the joke. Paul [Verhoeven, director] identified it in the script and made it even clearer.” Working as a studio development executive at the time, Neumeier wrote RoboCop together with student filmmaker Michael Miner. The script found its way to producer Jon Davison,

ROBOCOP

A prime early example of photobombing. Miguel Ferrer (left) went on to star in Twin Peaks.

Puppeteering has come a long way since 1987…

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

ROBOCOP

THE SPIES HAVE IT

The writer and director’s new team-up

Ed was basically a co-director… he protected me from my European principles You’ve got 20 seconds to comply, dude.

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edges thanks to Orion wanting a PG-rated RoboCop movie and (somewhat deservedly) didn’t even return half the budget. But the RoboCop name wasn’t finished with yet. A family-friendly live-action series, shot in Toronto, was not renewed after one season, proving too expensive. A second animated series aired in 1998/1999; abandoning almost all the supporting characters, it was beset by laughable continuity errors. And in 2001 a fourpart miniseries aired called RoboCop: Prime Directives. Set 10 years after the first film (it ignores the sequels), it deals with RoboCop having outlived his usefulness after cleaning up Detroit. Apart from near-continual appearances in comics from publishers as varied as Marvel, BOOM! Studios and Dark Horse (and at least eight videogames), that seemed like the end of the franchise. That was until José Padilha, newly hot after Brazilian thriller Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within, was called in to MGM, which acquired Orion’s library after the latter’s bankruptcy sale in 1997. “They asked him what he wanted to do and he pointed to a picture of RoboCop on a boardroom wall and said, ‘How about that?’,” Neumeier recalls. Neumeier and Miner initially had nothing to do with the 2014 reboot, but the Writer’s Guild determined that the new script was sufficiently based on their original work, and awarded them shared credit with the new writer, Joshua Zetumer. Fun but lightweight, merely nodding to themes of identity and technology, the reboot was slick but so-so. Audiences agreed, returning box office of $242 million (a lot of it in China) from a budget of $100 million. Fun side note: Joel Kinnaman, who played the new Murphy, told Neumeier how uncomfortable the suit was. “I said, ‘Yeah, but it’s the suit that makes the performance’.”

TH E FO RSYTHE SAGA Several big names had flirted with RoboCop in years past. Darren Aronofksy signed on but left a year later, opting for Black Swan rather than deal with MGM’s precarious financial situation, which could see his RoboCop offer go up in smoke at any moment (although rumours also persist that it was over plans for 3D and the excessive use of CGI). MGM’s chairman asked Neumeier what a new RoboCop might look like during a meeting and the result was RoboCop Returns, based on the sequel script he and Miner had written years back, after the first film. Then in July 2018, an official sequel was announced with Neill Blomkamp and writer Justin Rhodes (Terminator: Dark Fate) behind it. Blomkamp made some tantalising promises, saying it would be like Verhoeven himself had directed the film. Even the iconic suit would be the same. Then, in August 2019, he abruptly

There’s been a Starship Troopers reboot in the works since 2016 (2020 saw the news that Tron: Legacy and Oblivion director Joseph Kosinski is on board to direct), and with Verhoeven happily enjoying creative freedom in Holland, he’s not involved with RoboCop Returns. Neumeier and Verhoeven both speak glowingly about working together though, so it’s no surprise that they’re collaborating for a new project. “We’re working on a spy thriller,” says Neumeier. “Whether it’s funny or not is always up for debate, but it’s set in Washington DC, about a young woman who’s spying on a congressman.” Verhoeven describes it as having an element of ﬁlm noir and being (perhaps unsurprisingly given his oeuvre) “very sexual”. “We’re basically outlining it. It’s something new, but it will also refer to the situation today, like RoboCop was about the politics of the Reagan era.”

Neumeier and Verhoeven (left, right).

tweeted that he was off the project to work on a horror movie. Neumeier is circumspect and tactful when asked what happened. “Neill’s a very robust talent, and everyone at MGM was very happy because the project had snared a big director. But he wanted to do his own version of our story. As producers, Michael and I read the script draft by draft. The first draft was promising enough but somehow got grimmer, more horrific and kind of exhausting for three more drafts, until even Neill thought we should start over.” But with 30 years of fandom and such a strong premise, MGM seems determined to keep trying until it get its right, and the latest effort is now in the works with Aussie director Abe Forsythe (Little Monsters). Forsythe is doing his own pass on the script, a rewrite of the work done by Rhodes and Blomkamp, which is all building on Miner and Neumeier’s original 1988 sequel script. That may sound like a tangle, but Neumeier has complete faith in his new director. He’s on board as a producer, and has approached Forsythe’s arrival with his philosophy of letting talented people do their best. “He has something really interesting, very relevant,” he says. “It’s nice to be able to tell him to do his own thing with confidence.” He’s careful not to give anything away, but could his praise of Weller’s original

ORION PICTURES, ALAMY

home video. While Verhoeven, Davison and Orion can take credit for gambling on it, the fact that RoboCop stuck to its original remit is mostly down to Neumeier. Realising it was his ticket to a movie career, the former script reader involved himself with every step of the production process. “To be anything in this business, you have to be a producer,” he explains. “You have to work with other people and they have to look good so you look good. I’ve always tried to stay on set with the project, and the more I’ve done it, the more I’ve come to respect the different parts of the craft.” Verhoeven confirms that Neumeier was on set throughout RoboCop and Starship Troopers – often right beside his director. “I think he protected me from my European principles and thinking! [Along with] Phil Tippett, who made all the animals for Starship Troopers, Ed was basically a co-director.” A kid-friendly animated series aired in 1988, but owing to the film’s box office, a live-action movie sequel was a given. Neumeier and Miner couldn’t return because of the 1988 WGA writer’s strike, but Orion, in financial trouble after a strip of flops, needed to get moving. They hired comic book legend Frank Miller (who would play drug scientist Frank), and then had veteran screenwriter Walon Green (The Wild Bunch) do a rewrite. In 1990 RoboCop 2, directed by The Empire Strikes Back’s Irvin Kershner, was fun, looked great and built on the mythology and characters, but barely doubled its $25 million budget in box office takings. Miller and writer Fred Dekker tried again in 1993’s RoboCop 3 (Dekker directed), which jettisoned all the other characters and recast Murphy – Peter Weller was shooting William Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch for David Cronenberg. It also shaved off all the hard

ROBOCOP

Puppeteering has come a long way since etc. etc.

“The gang just hanging out, May 1987.” Robo resists a quip about ED-209 blowing a top.

“I could swear I left it around here somewhere…”

You don’t get many baddies called Clarence. performance and his ﬂoating the idea of the now 73-year-old actor making a return be a clue? What’s more, Weller’s not the only familiar face he mentions. “I’d love to see Nancy Allen in it,” he says. “It’d be lovely if you could do at least something for the original fans with those two characters. Nancy is one of the most popular female characters in those kind of movies.” Allen herself tells SFX that RoboCop’s partner Anne Lewis was one of her favourite roles. “I fell in love with the script and character from the ﬁrst read,” she says. “She’s a strong woman with passion and purpose. Playing Anne was a welcome change from the other kinds of women I’d played throughout my career.” Because Allen’s own father was a policeman, she felt she understood the character and culture she’d be depicting, and the experience didn’t disappoint. “Every day was exciting,” she says. “Everyone was exceptional at their jobs. The shooting moved at

the same non-stop pace as the final product. There was never a doubt in my mind that it’d be a great film.” As to the crucial question, Allen says that although she hasn’t been approached, she’d be very open to reprising her role for RoboCop Returns: “Many young women have expressed great admiration to me about Anne, and I think they’d be thrilled to see her on screen again.” One person who won’t return, however, is Paul Verhoeven. The director hasn’t worked in the US since 2000’s Hollow Man, and even though he’s developing a new movie with Neumeier, he says any involvement with RoboCop would be “difficult”. “I was not happy with Hollow Man,” he says. “I was making a studio movie under supervision. I wanted to do what I liked, not what the studio liked. I got to do that in Holland with Black Book and in France with my last two movies, Elle and Benedetta.”

So far, RoboCop’s fortunes have been as varied as those of the Detroit Police Department, but with Neumeier back and hope building, there’s only one thing left to say (with utmost respect): “Your move, creep!” The original RoboCop movie trilogy is currently streaming on Prime Video.

Nancy Allen was in all the original ﬁlms.

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

STAR WARS: GALAXY’S EDGE

TAKE A DETAILED LOOK BEHIND THE SCENES ON STAR WARS: GALAXY’S EDGE WITH ART FROM A NEW BOOK WORDS: DARREN SCOTT

ANCY A TRIP TO A galaxy far, far away? Of course you do. We all do. While we’re not quite able to travel to distant planets – or indeed other countries – you can take an extremely detailed look at one of the newest destinations in the Star Wars universe via Amy Ratcliffe’s new coffee table tome. The Art Of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge offers a unique and detailed look at the new world that was crafted, from conception to completion and beyond. That’s over 300 illustrations, blueprints, sketches and concept art from Walt Disney Imagineering and Lucasﬁlm – and we’re able to bring you a look at some here. It’s a rare experience in the world of Star Wars to be able to witness something from the ground-up, and to have such a wealth of material available about

an entirely new project – particularly given that Galaxy’s Edge was created to immerse you in a world that feels like Star Wars, but is not a planet that has yet been featured on-screen.

O UT TO B ATU U Black Spire Outpost is a spaceport located on the remote Outer Rim planet Batuu. In reality, it’s part of Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida and Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California. An in-world attraction, meaning it’s not sign-posted and Disney cast members stay in character throughout, the “land” includes familiar-looking landscapes as well as venues – such as a cantina, restaurants and shops – and buildings that house ambitious ride experiences. Not only that, but the vehicles, food, weaponry, outﬁts, inhabitants and set dressing keep the immersive experience as authentic as possible. All of this had to be designed and built from scratch, with over 4,000 people working on creating Galaxy’s Edge. This is just a taste of the wealth of new Star Wars art available in the book. There’s also a sneak peek at the forthcoming two-night interactive experience, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser – but that’s so special you’ll have to pick up your own copy…

THE

ANTIQUARIAN BANNER CONCEPTS by Jeremy Fulton, WDI senior graphic designer These ﬂag-like banners from WDI Graphics Studio are typical of the “set dressing” that you’ll see throughout Galaxy’s Edge in all manner of locations, but also within Dok-Ondar’s Den Of Antiquities.

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STAR WARS: GALAXY’S EDGE

TIE FIGHTER GARRISON A V02

by concept artist Nick Gindraux One of the ﬁrst big scene-setters as you walk into Black Spire Outpost is seeing a TIE Fighter: the First Order have landed in search of the Resistance and this imposing sight means business. As in the concept art pictured here, you will also ﬁnd Stormtroopers and droids milling about the courtyard – as well as Kylo Ren…

EDGE OF GLORY THE COLLECTOR V01 by Iain McCaig, concept artist The Collector is an Ithorian, more often known as a hammerhead, called Dok-Ondar. This concept art was one of the ﬁrst characters that Iain McCaig sketched for Galaxy’s Edge. Dok-Ondar is now realised as an animatronic character within the Den Of Antiquities and interacts with cast members. The location is ﬁlled with thousands of props.

MEGNUS HOLOCHESS V02 by Andrew Domachowski, ILM senior concept artist Various live-action experiences take place throughout Galaxy’s Edge. Depending on whether you’re in the right place at the right time, some can include battles between the First Order and the Resistance, hugs from Chewbacca – or an alien playing Holochess. This concept art gets across that there’s an everyday story happening in Galaxy’s Edge that visitors become part of.

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

STAR WARS: GALAXY’S EDGE

QUICK-SERVICE RESTAURANT STOCK ROOM V01A

WDI lead concept designer and Chris Lee, WDI creative designer If you’ve seen the trailer, or been lucky enough to experience Star Wars: Rise Of The Resistance yourself, you’ll recognise this scene of AT-ATs looming above you – something that has been breathtakingly realised in real life.

by Ric Lim, ILM concept artist As with everything else at Galaxy’s Edge, dining is an in-world experience. There are no dollars here, only credits (fortunately, the conversion is the same). Docking Bay 7 Food And Cargo is located, as the title suggests, within a docking bay, with all the exposed nuts and bolts you’d expect.

WALKERS SHOT 1 by Christopher Mais,

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The Art Of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge by Amy Ratcliffe is published by Abrams and available now.

STAR WARS: GALAXY’S EDGE

BARTENDER C by Andrew Domachowski, ILM senior concept artist Characters play just as important a part as locations and machinery in Galaxy’s Edge. This is one of the original suggestions for a bartender, before it was decided to switch to an animatronic option for practical reasons.

VILLAGE BARTENDER V02 C by Stephen Todd, concept artist Another variation of an alien bartender, serving in-world refreshments.

ALCATRAZ ROUGH COMPS FOR LUCASFILM

ALCATRAZ AERIAL LAYOUT V01

Erik Tiemens and Ric Lim, ILM concept artist This concept art of “Alcatraz” gives an aerial perspective of the entrance to Star Wars: Rise Of The Resistance, where guests will see several rebel vehicles on their journey. Doug Chiang, Lucasﬁlm vice president and executive creative director, likens this location to the Yavin base from Star Wars and Rogue One. The intention was to create something that feels as though it’s remained hidden for some time.

by Erik Tiemens, Lucasﬁlm concept design supervisor Alcatraz is the codename for Star Wars: Rise Of The Resistance, a ride that’s built from four different systems. All of these are housed within the sprawling grounds depicted here, which means that even when you’re queuing there’s still a story to be part of. Erik Tiemens explains that the original idea was to have an ancient temple, before the design became an outpost with catacombs where the Resistance could live.

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

Close Encounters FACE TO FACE WITH THE BIGGEST STARS

ANDREW HORTON The British rising star blasts off into Millarworld Words by James Mottram /// Photography by Netﬂix

ne minute you’ve got a bit part in offbeat Neil Gaiman adaptation How To Talk To Girls At Parties. The next, you’ve been swept up into the sky to play Brandon Sampson, aka Paragon, in Netﬂix’s new take on Mark Millar’s superhero adventure Jupiter’s Legacy – alongside the likes of Josh Duhamel and Ben Daniels. “I was completely shocked that I got the part because I’m the no-one, out of this cast,” says Andrew Horton. “I’m the newcomer by far.” He soon got over the fear, though. “Beyond a certain point, I was just like, ‘Right. I’m this character. This is mine. Let’s have some fun!’”

How familiar were you with Mark Millar and Jupiter’s Legacy? I’d seen Kingsman, Kick-Ass. I was very familiar with those films and aware of the style that Mark creates. And then once I got the part, I ordered all of the comic books immediately, got stuck in and read them a bunch of times before I started filming. They’re absolutely brilliant. What physical prep did you go through to play Paragon? [Showrunner] Steven DeKnight asked me to put on about 30 lb of muscle for the show, which is the equivalent of about 10 kg. It was a lot to put on in a very short amount of time, because I had about three months to do it. So that would involve eating, for about a month and a half I would say, about 5,000 calories a day. And then alongside that, working out five to six days a week for a couple of hours each day. Have you kept up the routine? I’m one of these jammy people who’ve got one of those good metabolisms where I can basically eat whatever I want to eat and not put weight on, but I’ve definitely kept up the gym routine. How difficult were the costumes to wear? To walk around in them is fine, because they’re designed to be quite movable and we would fight in them, so they’ve got to have a certain amount of flexibility – but to sit down was quite laughable. The muscle suit which goes underneath the exoskeleton of the super suit… it pulls you back into this very rigid posture. So you’re always shoulders back, chest up, all of that good stuff. Because it’s so tight, you end up having to lean backwards towards a chair and

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BIODATA From Surrey, England. Greatest Hits Horton’s had parts in the likes of Doctors and How To Talk To Girls At Parties, (as well as a McDonald’s ad!) but this is his breakthrough role. Random Fact The first Batman film he ever saw was Batman Forever, with Jim Carrey as the Riddler.

then you can slowly start to lower yourself down. Without going into too much detail, mine had a pee-flap put into the crotch of it. So I was actually able to go to the toilet, which was a real blessing! Poor old Leslie Bibb, who plays my mum in the show, she would have to have a costumer or two go to the loo with her to take it off, because you couldn’t do it yourself. Paragon does get a pretty cool logo on his chest. Were you a fan of that? I’d really like to get a tattoo of that, actually. Maybe on one of my arms! I think if we get a season two, then that’s my go-ahead for it. I’ve always wanted one. And if things go completely tits-up after this, I’ve got a reminder that at one stage of my career, I got to play a superhero. Who was your favourite superhero growing up? I’m a big Batman fan. As a kid, I remember having a lot of the toys. I just loved the cartoons and had Batman pyjamas! Were you a big sci-fi fan too? My dad’s a Trekkie. So I’ve seen lots of Voyager, lots of Enterprise, Deep Space Nine, you name it. I’ve probably seen one episode of everything. And I was a big Star Wars fan. I remember going to see The Phantom Menace at the cinema. I think at that age [six], it was probably the best thing I’d ever seen in my life. I was completely blown away. Of the three prequels, I think Phantom Menace still holds up for me – particularly the Darth Maul fight. I’m absolutely obsessed with it. I re-watched it on my birthday last year with a couple of my mates. We’d been out for a lot of drinks during the day and then we were talking about Star Wars and how we wanted to watch The Phantom Menace; came back and had some pizza and just carried on drinking, watching Phantom and singing along [to “Duel Of The Fates”]: da-da-da-da-da! If Disney ever bring back Darth Maul, would you like to play him? I probably need to work on my wuxia skills, or lack thereof, seeing as I’ve never really swung a staff round in my life, but I’m sure some of the stunt guys from the team on Jupiter’s can teach me how. Darth Maul? That would be one thing I’d probably be willing to shave my head for. So we’ll put it out there. Disney: give me a call! Jupiter’s Legacy is streaming on Netflix now.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS ANDREW HORTON

The Phantom Menace was probably the best thing I’d ever seen in my life at six JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

STUDIO CANAL/FILM FOUR, ALAMY

ATTACK THE BLOCK

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ATTACK THE BLOCK

AS ATTACK THE BLOCK TURNS 10, DIRECTOR JOE CORNISH REFLECTS ON THE MAKING – AND FUTURE – OF HIS DEBUT FEATURE WORDS: SIMON BLAND

LICK AND STYLISH, WITH a killer soundtrack to boot, sci-fi comedy Attack The Block established Joe Cornish as a filmmaker full of surprises. By smashing the mundanity of everyday life together with an out-of-thisworld alien invasion, it helped redefine what audiences expect of their big-screen heroes, while also introducing us to a future Resistance fighter in star John Boyega. With its neon-toothed nasties and hoodieclad warriors, Cornish’s polished debut made the jump to late-night cult favourite quicker than you can say “brap brap” – and according

to the director, it was just as fun to make as it is to watch. “It was my ﬁrst movie, so I just did it from the gut. I didn’t really question myself,” says Cornish as the movie celebrates its tenth birthday. Having cut his teeth on Channel 4’s The Adam And Joe Show alongside best pal Adam Buxton, the noughties found Cornish hard at work on a pair of screenplays: Edgar Wright’s ill-fated take on Ant-Man, which he penned with Wright, director Adam McKay and star Paul Rudd; and Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures Of Tintin, which paired him with Wright and Doctor Who scribe Steven Moffat. However, as the decade drew to a close, the

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

ATTACK THE BLOCK

We spoke to hundreds of kids in these groups, people who lived in tower blocks, police “As a ﬁrst feature I thought it was doable but ambitious, and it was set in an area that I knew very well,” adds Cornish. “The mugging gave me an idea for the lead character, because the kid that confronted me was very young and scared, masking his fear with aggression. I was pretty sure he was a local kid, and the whole sensation of that event felt like a Michael Winner or Walter Hill movie. “It was loaded with all sorts of weird energies of race and class, and it felt larger than life. My imagination started to think: ‘What would happen if aliens invaded at that moment, and how would that potentially change the dynamic of the situation?’” This combination of the grounded and the extraordinary permeated his vision for the project. “A lot of the movies I enjoy are a combination of fantasy and reality. E.T. is as much of a French New Wave naturalist drama

“I know it’s a stretch, Nick, but you play a drug dealer.”

The only time a scooter has looked mildly impressive. as it is a UFO movie – and so is Close Encounters,” he suggests. “I really loved that fusion of the far-out and the grounded, so that was always my guiding principle: to make sure everything science ﬁctional was balanced by something realistic and dramatic.” This rule of thumb led Cornish to his cast, the majority of whom had no previous acting experience. “I worked with a casting director called Lucy Pardee. She’d worked with Andrea Arnold on Fish Tank and recently did the movie Rocks with Sarah Gavron – she’s a genius of street casting. “I’d also been working with Edgar Wright on Ant-Man, and he taught me the value of research. I’d learned the value of fuelling one’s imagination with facts and real people’s experiences. We spoke to hundreds of kids in these groups, people who lived in tower blocks,

MONSTER FUN The alien attackers were not so scary to act against With their hulking, ape-like bodies and vicious teeth, you wouldn’t want to come face to face with Attack The Block’s alien horde on a dark night. But the director’s young cast had no problem battling these intergalactic nasties. “I was excited about showing Probs (Sammy Williams) and Mayhem (Michael Ajao) the costume for the ﬁrst time, so I got Terry Notary, who was inside the suit, to hide behind a wall,” recalls Cornish. “They were only nine years old and I thought they were going to be freaked out. I gave it a massive build up… and they just cracked up laughing as soon as they saw it. Mind you, when you call ‘Action’ and you’re being chased by it, that was very adrenalising for them. It’s really useful to have a proper creature for the kids to act against. They weren’t reacting to a tennis ball on a stick.”

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“Bloody hell mate, how much have you had?” janitors, police,” he remembers. “We tried to find the real version of every character in the script and speak to them to draw as much detail as we could. A lot of the great turns of phrase that have since become very quotable were said verbatim by the people we spoke to.” When it came to finding the film’s lead, one young star instantly stood out. “John was working as an actor, so he was on the casting director’s radar,” says Cornish of the thenunknown Boyega. “A lot of the kids gave very Kidulthood-y auditions which were very loud and aggressive, because that’s what they saw in a lot of movies at the time. John did that in his very first audition. I took him aside and described Moses – who’s an introvert and a very proud leader who doesn’t say much – and John immediately got it. His very next audition was bang-on, and we knew he was the one.” A mix-and-match casting process helped Cornish whittle down to the ensemble that made up Moses’s mates. “We got them into workshops, swapped them about and tried to find the chemistry between the group. It was

STUDIO CANAL/FILM FOUR, ALAMY, GETTY

urge to helm his own feature was getting stronger and stronger. “I’d been collecting various ideas in my head since I was a teenager,” says Cornish. “I thought this was a good idea for something high-concept and low-budget.” Partly inspired by a real-life run-in with a mugger, Cornish’s story introduces us to a group of youths in South London whose tower block home comes under attack from a ﬂeet of feral aliens. Led by reluctant hero Moses (Boyega) and joined by neighbour Sam (Jodie Whittaker) and local dealer Ron (Nick Frost), the gang must ﬁght to survive the night, fending off enemies from outer space – and a few a little closer to home.

ATTACK THE BLOCK

Kermit had fallen on some very hard times.

DAVID CORIO/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVE/GETTY (1)

It’s all good clean fun until the screaming starts. a bit like forming a boy band,” he chuckles. “There were interesting dynamics between them on-set. They didn’t necessarily get on brilliantly all the time - but only the same way any group of five friends would have little tiffs and fall-outs.” Then there was Brewis (Luke Treadaway), the posh-student stoner who inadvertently gets embroiled in the mayhem while visiting the block to buy pot. “To research that character I just had to talk to myself,” laughs Cornish. “That was all based on situations me and Louis Theroux would get into when we went to score hash in Wandsworth as teenagers.” As pre-production progressed, Cornish and his young cast began fine-tuning the script to boost its authenticity. Over a week, each character was given the opportunity to dissect their dialogue and offer alternatives that they felt brought the story closer to ground level. Sometimes, this refinement also happened on set: “While the lights were being set up, we’d all huddle backstage and figure out how to improve the scene,” reveals Cornish.

“The scene with Ron’s weed room – we fashioned all of that on the day.” Another important step was bringing the film’s villains to life. Attack The Block’s alien threat swapped green slime for pitch-black fur and glowing blue teeth, presenting a cinematic baddie unlike anything we’d seen before. “The difficult thing was explaining what we wanted, because the effects industry has a very set way of doing things. Pretty much every other alien in every other movie is a CGI model designed by some guy in a massive company, and they all look quite samey,” explains Cornish. “I knew I wanted them to be like shadow puppets, so I’d have a creature that was 3D but became a moving 2D shadow. It was hard work explaining it. The number of times I held my hand up against a light and said, ‘See the shadow of my hand, and when I move my hand the shadow stays flat but its form changes?’ We had to shoot a test where we rubbed out any

reflection and turned it into a black form to convince the studio it was actually achievable. That’s when people finally got it.” When it came to trying to find the right balance of blood and gore, Cornish had to wait until test screenings to discover just how far his audience was willing to go. “I was a big Fangoria reader as a kid and I love a little bit of splatter and gore,” he grins. “Any excuse to see a throat being ripped out or a leg being gnawed – I wanted to do that stuff.” When Moses’s rival Hi Hatz (Jumayn Hunter) finally gets his comeuppance, Cornish got his wish. “There was a general feeling that the audience wanted to see him meet a grizzly end. In the test screenings it was like, ‘Wow, people really want to see Hi Hatz get properly fucked,’” he laughs. “I was like, ‘Okay, let’s have his face be ripped off by five aliens. Yay!’” On release, Cornish’s first feature not only pleased genre fans but challenged perceptions of movie protagonists, transforming the “hoodie-horror” label into “hoodie hero”. “People will accept Al Pacino as Scarface murdering somebody in the first five minutes of a movie, but when it’s a character they feel potentially threatened by in their daily lives, they judge it much more harshly,” says Cornish of having a hero that starts their story by mugging another character. “I really wanted to stick to my guns, because I thought it was a good dramatic challenge. Can you turn the audience around?” Thankfully, the answer was yes. As Attack The Block turns 10, could there be more to come from Moses and his alien-battling crew? “We’re trying to do a sequel. John recently came round and we sat in my garden for about six hours talking about it,” reveals Cornish. “The movie has really found its audience in subsequent years. For it to be well received was a validation. It changed my life.” Attack The Block is available on DVD, Blu-ray and streaming via Prime Video.

SOUND AND VISION Cornish talks Block’s killer score and aesthetics Cornish asked British composer Steven Price and electronic duo Basement Jaxx to create the soundtrack. “I really wanted a John Williams-type hook, and that bass track [the hero theme] was one of the ﬁrst things Basement Jaxx sent. As soon as I heard it I was like, ‘That’s it!” After that, Cornish trusted the trio to deliver something memorable. “I remember looking at the ﬁnal scene where Moses is arrested and Felix from Basement Jaxx said, ‘I tell you what’d work really well there – a bit of bagpipe!’ I thought, ‘Really?’, but when the track came back it was fucking amazing, and it does have bagpipes.” Meanwhile, cinematographer Thomas Townend went all-out to create a heightened feel. “We decided to make it look like a ’70s Disney movie: very colourful and phantasmagorical. Thomas changed all the bulbs in the street lamps so they gave the same green glow as in The Warriors. That’s the level of detail he went to.”

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

Brought

THE SFX AUTHOR INTERVIEW

To Book

CJ CAREY Editing the past… Meet the writer of a new alternate history novel Words by Jonathan Wright /// Photography by Olly Curtis

CCASIONALLY, A WRITER CAN TELL YOU exactly how a book began life. In the case of CJ Carey (a pseudonym), she’d gone out for lunch with a friend, who had offered condolences over the 2018 death of her husband, the novelist Philip Kerr. But there was a kicker. “And then he said, ‘Look, we’d really love to have you to dinner, but the trouble is we only have couples to dinner’.” After lunch, a thought occurred to Carey: “Oh God, I’m living in widowland now.” A novelist’s question followed: “What if widowland was a place?”. Back home and “stunned” by the idea that “you suddenly exiled people because they’d had the misfortune to lose their partner”, she set to work. The result was Widowland, an alternate history novel set in London in 1953. This is a coronation year not for Elizabeth II but, in a country under Nazi control, for Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. As the book’s plot builds towards an assassination attempt (Carey says she was “remembering The Day Of The Jackal” as she wrote) it’s a book that functions in large part as a thriller. But it’s also a novel about a totalitarianism rooted in detailed planning, censorship and the role of women within Nazi society. “In 1923, when Hitler was in prison and writing Mein Kampf, he said, ‘The most important person in my society will be the mother,’” Carey notes. When Hitler came to power in 1933, one practical upshot of this was that women increasingly found themselves living in a “strictly controlled environment”, a world ﬁlled with societies and groups promoting Nazi ideology, including Reich bride schools or Reichsbräuteschule. “This is very much what I channelled,” says Carey. “One of the things that you learnt in bride school, apart from obvious stuff like obedience and cooking and sewing, was how to recast culture.” TAK IN G LI BER T IES This idea is another key theme in Widowland. The book’s protagonist, Rose Ransom, part of an elite class of women, works at the Ministry of Culture. Her job is to “correct” English literature. Here is culture being recast – similarly to how, in bride schools, women learnt to put a National Socialism spin on fairy tales so “the prince was almost a stormtrooper” and “ugly sisters were Slavs”. Carey’s ﬁve Clara Vine novels (published under her real name, Jane Thynne) have followed the life of an actor and spy in the Berlin of the ’30s and ’40s. She’s done her

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BIODATA From Born in Venezuela, raised in London. Greatest Hits The Clara Vine books began with Black Roses (2013). A former journalist, Carey was media correspondent at The Telegraph for many years. Random Fact Carey’s father worked for Shell, and she lived in Tehran before the Iranian Revolution. She caught a frightening glimpse of what lay ahead when she went out dressed in hot pants and caused outrage.

research, which probably explains why Widowland ﬁnds Britain under the day-to-day control of Protector Alfred Rosenberg, a real-life “mad philosopher guru of Hitler who most of the other Nazis thought was actually semi-raving” and a man who wanted to rewrite books rather then just burn them. One of the intriguing questions the novel touches on is whether the British would have made “good” fascists. As Carey points out, it’s a question that leads to some of our most cherished national myths and the idea that “we’d never be good fascists, because we have a sense of humour, and this is what distinguishes us from everybody else – that we laugh at authority.” Carey is not so sure. “I’m not the ﬁrst person to say this, and I’m being very careful saying it, but I’ve been personally surprised by lots of people I know being unquestioning in the acceptance of the deprivation of civil liberties [during the pandemic],” she explains. Her underlying worry is that Covid might have “changed us as far as the way that we view our civil liberties”. A R O O M O F ON E’ S OW N Lest this makes her sound reactionary, that’s not how Carey comes across. At one point, for instance, she speaks dryly but affectionately of raising her millennial children and being “bathed in millennial group-think”. When we move on to discussing generational attitudes to trans rights – Carey was among those who put her name to a letter in support of JK Rowling when the Harry Potter creator ran into trouble over allegedly transphobic comments – she notes, “I think it probably does behove us… to understand that things like trans rights are quite obviously just basic nostrums for the next generation.” We conclude by talking about Carey’s life without Kerr. His death, from cancer, was hard because as a “very alpha male” he didn’t really come to terms with dying and was still making plans even as the end came into view. She’s his literary executor now and so, as she signs contracts and deals with correspondence from fans, there’s still a sense of Kerr “being present”. But she misses the sense of shared endeavour. “It’s obviously incredibly isolating being a writer: you are stuck in a room. And it’s quite nice if there’s another writer who’s also stuck in a room, because you can add a competitive element to the whole thing!” Widowland is published by Quercus on 10 June.

BROUGHT TO BOOK CJ CAREY

I worry that Covid might have changed us as far as the way that we view our civil liberties JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

JUNE 2021

HOME ENTERTAINMENT 70

CINEMA 80

TV 82

edited by Ian Berriman

BOOKS 86

COMICS 92

GAMES & STUFF 94

MORTAL KOMBAT

THIS ISSUE

57 REVIEWS

The Way Of The Dragon

70 ARMY OF

80 THE UNHOLY

THE DEAD

SUPERB

OF EARTH

We can see horror ﬂicks at the cinema again! Unless it all went pear-shaped after we wrote this.

They released the Snyder heist! And we like it just as much as his Romero redo.

RATINGS EXPLAINED

86 SHARDS

GOOD

AVERAGE

Yet another Arian Tchaikovsky novel! Seriously, does the man never sleep?

POOR

TERRIBLE JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

HOME ENTERTAINMENT Patrons are reminded that ﬂesh must not be consumed.

ARMY OF THE DEAD Rob Zombie RELEASED 21 MAY 2021 | TBC | SVOD Director Zack Snyder Cast Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Ana de la Reguera, Theo Rossi, Matthias Schweighöfer

We’re aware that some of you out there are deeply invested in Zack Snyder’s contributions to the DC Extended Universe, and maybe even still crossing all your body parts for more. For some of us, however, Snyder’s natural habitat is the zombie movie, an arena we’ve been waiting the best part of two decades for him to return to. Snyder’s 2004 debut, a remake of George Romero classic Dawn Of The Dead – scripted by Guardians Of The Galaxy’s James Gunn – was far better than it had any right to be. Although Romero himself didn’t really approve – how could he, when it commited the heresy of speedster zombies – plenty of Romero fans were surprised to ﬁnd that they did. Army Of The Dead more than matches it. First announced back in 2007, but recently dusted off and reworked, it’s a ﬁlm which NETFLIX

freshens up the genre by mashing it together with the familiar tropes of the heist movie (and adding dashes of Escape From New York and fantasy). The timing’s a little unfortunate – it must smart a little that South Korea’s Peninsula got there ﬁrst – but Army Of The Dead is the superior movie. The set-up: six years ago, some kind of zombie zero escaped from US government custody in the Nevada desert. Soon, Las Vegas was over-run. The Sin City was walled off with shipping containers, and subjected to aerial bombardment. Now the President has resolved to ﬁnish the job, wiping out the last stragglers via a tactical nuclear strike. Dave Bautista’s Vegas survivor/big-hearted tough guy Scott heads a team sent in to open a casino’s safe and recover a cool $20 million before the bomb drops. As you might expect, nothing goes smoothly, and there are hidden agendas and doublecrosses to deal with. Scott’s crew are individualised well enough for you to care about them once they inevitably start to come a cropper; Snyder and his co-writers even manage to make a

“Pow pow pow pow ah-ah-ah-ah SPOOOSH.”

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YouTube inﬂuencer (Raúl Castillo’s Mikey Guzman) likeable – some feat. Star Trek Discovery’s Tig Notaro is a joy as the team’s laconic chopper pilot. But the show is stolen by geeky German safecracker Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer), whose highpitched screams and delight at getting to ﬁre a gun make him irresistible. You can easily understand why a Dieter-centred prequel is already in the can. It’s the humanising of the zombies that really pays off, though. There are some innovative approaches taken here, from

If Romero were looking down, would he be appalled? Perhaps not shambling zombies that periodically enter a hibernatory state, to agile “Alphas” which have developed a form of society, and are capable of reasoning and empathy. If Romero were looking down, would he be appalled? Perhaps not. In his Dead movies

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS

Four more times SF and fantasy paid a trip to the Strip

THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN In this 1957 B-movie, a soldier caught in an A-bomb blast at a Nevada test site grows to a gigantic height. The confused military man eventually menaces the Strip, hurling palm trees about and wrecking the iconic Vegas Vic sign.

THE NIGHT STALKER In the 1972 TV movie which introduced Darren McGavin’s dishevelled reporter Kolchak, he investigates blooddraining murders on the Strip. An FBI pal eventually helps him stake the vamp responsible.

THE STAND

moving somewhere slightly less zombie-adjacent?). And some of the periodic pauses for emotional moments – the fact that Scott’s estranged daughter Kate (Ella Purnell) tags along is responsible for some of these – can feel a touch rote. It doesn’t help that they’re accompanied by the sort of four-note sad-piano plink-plonk you usually hear on charity appeal videos. Still, some nifty choices regarding cover versions of classics like “Viva Las Vegas”, “Bad Moon Rising” and “The End” compensate on that front.

It’s a movie with an infectious sense of fun (a sequence involving tripping booby traps is a particular hoot) and which also makes good use of its budget – much more interesting use than, say, World War Z. Post-apocalyptic Vegas looks great. And why make do with a regular zombie bite when, instead, you can have a mauling by a zombiﬁed white tiger previously owned by Siegfried & Roy? Welcome home, Zack. It’s good to have you back. Ian Berriman Keep your eyes peeled for Donald Trump’s former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who cameos as a TV pundit.

In Stephen King’s classic 1978 novel, the “Dark Man” Randall Flagg makes Vegas his centre of power after civilisation’s collapse, establishing a ruthlessly strict code of laws that includes cruciﬁxion for drug use. Spoilsport.

HONEY, I BLEW UP THE KID In this 1992 sequel, the two-year-old son of Rick Moranis’s inventor is accidentally zapped by his latest device. The result: an 112-foot-high toddler treating Vegas as his playground.

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

ALAMY (1)

he progressively demonstrated greater and greater sympathy for the zombies (think of Bub in Day Of The Dead, or Big Daddy in Land Of The Dead). Snyder’s innovations continue that process. The ﬁlm doesn’t always explain itself particularly well: the proximity of a refugee camp to the walled-off Vegas is a key plotpoint, but why it’s located there remains a little unclear. The fact that everyone required for the job seemingly lives in about a one-mile radius – including an expert safe-cracker – is a little hard to swallow (no-one fancied

HOME ENTERTAINMENT

His other hobby is My Little Pony fan-ﬁc.

MORTAL KOMBAT Not-so-Flawless Victory RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | TBC | VOD Director Simon McQuoid Cast Lewis Tan, Josh Lawson, Joe Taslim, Tadanobu Asano

Fans of the hugely successful Mortal Kombat videogame series have long had mixed feelings about its portrayal in other media, particularly the big screen. Some love the first film (which launched director Paul WS Anderson upon the world), while others find it overly campy and never as violent as they might want. This new version, with Simon McQuoid taking his own debut spin in the director’s chair, aims to correct at least the second part, putting the “Mortal” back in

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Mortal Kombat. He’s only partially successful. True, the battles are bloodier and the kills more inventive, but our way into the story here is Lewis Tan’s Cole Young, a new character with connections to one of the game’s most famous ﬁghters that stretches beyond the strange dragon marking he’s always assumed was a birthmark. Turns out he’s been chosen to compete in the Mortal Kombat tournament, which Earth has to win lest it fall under the control

For all the battles here, there is no actual competition

of the conniving, powerful Shang Tsung (Chin Han). Cole’s a bland presence, which makes you grateful for the likes of Kano (Josh Lawson), the sweary Aussie arsehole who livens up his scenes. As for the rest of the cast, it’s made up mostly of actors with stylish martial arts skills (Tadanobu Asano, Joe Taslim, Ludi Lin Hiroyuki Sanada), and while they’re clearly able to deliver on the ﬁght front, the editing is so quick that it wastes a lot of the raw talent on display. McQuoid never seems to trust his stunt players the same way that Gareth Evans or the John Wick teams let the action tell the story. Aside from a few good quips, the script is mostly about building up all the backstories and

mythology, none of which is handled effectively, resulting in the film grinding to a halt occasionally so Cole can be told something new about the tournament he’s destined to fight in. Just… not yet. For all the battles here, there is no actual competition, which might prompt an Ian Malcolm-in-Jurassic-Parkstyle question from the audience: “You do plan to have a Mortal Kombat tournament in your Mortal Kombat tournament movie, right?” That is by far the biggest problem here, one which afflicts lots of big studio releases hoping that they can spark a successful franchise: it’s a gigantic tease with little pay-off. Villains scowl, heroes unite and there’s a bit in a phantom realm that looks like a straight-to-DVD release. After all these years, you’d hope for something a little more victorious and less like a B-movie. Jim Blakey This is Lewis Tan’s second Kombat role – he was also Kung Jin in the unreleased webseries Mortal Kombat X: Generations.

“Oh, er, hello. Look, it’s not what you think…”

THINGS SEEN AND HEARD

FRIED BARRY RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | TBC | SVOD Director Ryan Kruger Cast Gary Green, Chanelle de Jager, Bianka Hartenstein

RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | 15 | SVOD Directors Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini Cast Amanda Seyfried, James Norton, Alex Neustaedter NETFLIX The synopsis for Things Seen And Heard is so generic that even if you’d never heard of All Things Cease To Appear, the Elizabeth Brundage novel it’s based on, you’d still find the story familiar: a young family moves to a big old house in a small town, only to find their fresh start marred by secrets from the past. At over two hours long, you’d hope there were some extra twists to keep things interesting… but you’d be disappointed. Part of the problem is that writer/directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini seem only semi-committed to the story’s spookier elements. Sad stay-at-home-mum Catherine (Amanda Seyfried) sees ghosts, but doesn’t really like to mention it. The entire faculty of a posh art school are obsessed with the doctrines of Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, but apart from an abortive seance, nothing really comes of it. Instead, the film focuses on the miserable and increasingly abusive relationship between Catherine and her husband George (James Norton, oozing entitled smarminess). But even that feels like a half-hearted story that manages to get to the point only in one barbed line of voiceover. Subtlety is a virtue, but here it just makes the whole thing feel depressingly mediocre. Sarah Dobbs

UNDERGODS Triple Trouble RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | TBC | Download (also in select cinemas) Director Chino Moya Cast Johann Myers, Géza Röhrig, Michael Gould, Eric Godon

You know how Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketches tend to just fade into the next one, with no punchline as such? This arthouse-appropriate anthology ﬁlm can feel rather like that, as it slips from one tale to another. We begin with a couple – the ﬁrst tenants in a new-build apartment block – taking in a neighbour who says he’s been locked out, only for the husband to then be told that no one else has moved in yet... Next, a merchant plots to steal an inventor’s creation, then discovers that his daughter’s been kidnapped. Finally, another couple’s

Effectively sinister use of brutalist architecture

relationship is turned upside down when a woman’s long-lost husband, missing for 15 years, returns in a near-catatonic state. The feature debut of Chino Moya, who previously shot music videos for the likes of St Vincent and Ladytron, Undergods’ deadpan surrealism is faintly reminiscent of the work of Swedish director Roy Andersson (Songs From The Second Floor, among many others). All three stories are initially intriguing, but short on closure in the traditional sense. Generating an off-kilter sense of uncertainty and unease is presumably very much the point, but you might find it rather frustrating. The main thing it has going for it is its look. A dystopian world – all ash, rubble and fog – is bleakly rendered using a blue-grey palette, with effectively sinister use of brutalist architecture in Serbia and Estonia (with computer-generated damage), and the film is frequently very handsomely composed. Ian Berriman While filming in Tallinn, Chino Moya learned that Andrei Tarkovsky shot Stalker – a key inspiration – in the same area.

SHUDDER The credits should give you the general idea here: they include the roles “Blowjob King”, “Transgender Sex Worker” and “Vomiting Girl’s Friend”. If anyone had ever thought to turn the music video for The Prodigy’s “Smack The Bitch Up” into a feature, it’d probably be similarly grimy and lurid. Set in Cape Town, it centres on the titular Barry (Gary Green), a junkie taken over by some alien life force. It proceeds to joyride his body about town, through an urban underbelly viewed via Dutch angles and fisheye lenses, getting into one scrape after another (generally involving sex or drugs). Green’s task is basically to do a stiff-legged C-3PO shuffle, or mutely fix people with a pop-eyed stare. It’s not for the faint-hearted: the abduction sequence features a shot of something being inserted into the tip of Barry’s penis. Ouch. The stringy-haired, tombstone-teethed Green (previous credits: “drug addict”, “crazy guy” and “cannibal”) has a feral magnetism. His face – like, say, Michael Berryman’s – has the value of a good special effect, and he’s a gifted gurner. But there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of point to these shenanigans. Still, the film’s edgelord absurdity is fitfully funny, with Barry’s escape from a mental institution (aided by delusional patients) particularly wryly amusing. Calvin Baxter

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

HOME ENTERTAINMENT

DRINKING GAME Knock back a beverage of your choice every time…

One of the male leads has a moustache and/or moobs. A female character is lying on her bed in just her underwear. Rebane-movie regular Paul Bentzen (centre) appears.

Someone is wearing plaid or dungarees. There’s a banjo hoedown, naff disco, or twisting scene.

The only way we’d watch another Bill Rebane ﬁlm.

WEIRD WISCONSIN Bill of no-goods RELEASED 24 MAY 1965-1988 | 15 | Blu-ray Director Bill Rebane Cast Various unfortunates

“Bad movie club” curators will want this Bill Rebane Collection box set. The director’s best known for The Giant Spider Invasion, with its arachnid built on a VW. That’s not included, but six other films – five shot at his rural Wisconsin studio – are. Expect am dram performances, incoherent exposition and massive plotholes. Rebane didn’t finish 1965’s Monster-A-Go-Go; Herschell Gordon Lewis stitched it together with narration and extra footage. An astronaut returns to Earth nine feet tall, with a deadly radioactive BLU-RAY DEBUT

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touch. Rebane manages to render this Quatermass-y manhunt tedious; Lewis’s ending may be the most bafﬂing in cinema history. Invasion From Inner Earth (1974) comes close, mind. Centred on an “invasion” of red smoke, red lights and Plan 9-style UFOs, it’s eerily off-kilter initially, but soon tests your patience to the limit as characters sit about in a cabin waiting for something to happen. The Alpha Incident (1978) is equally inert: think a no-budget The Andromeda Strain. Five people quarantined after exposure to a Martian virus wait for a cure. If they fall asleep their brains will explode, so they’re airdropped coffee and speed. You may ﬁnd yourself wishing Arrow Video offered the same service. The

vindication of a male chauvinist’s “No means yes, eventually” persistence also leaves a sour taste. The Game (1984) is the nadir. Three millionaires challenge people to stay in a resort, then subject them to scares – mostly of the ghost train variety. Whether deaths are real or faked is never made clear, the resort is a compendium of ’80s interior design horrors, and ragtime on the soundtrack…? Er, no thanks. Essentially The Fog with a haunted piano, Demons Of Ludlow (1988) sees the founder of a village marking its bicentennial seeking vengeance for having his hands chopped off. It’s light on scares, unless you’re phobic about wobbly tables or 18th century fancy dress. Twisty’s Revenge! (1988) at least

One of the characters disappears, or is unaccountably forgotten about. A character goes to the toilet, or talks about it.

has dramatic incident. When three numbskulls kidnap the inventor of an AI-driven monster truck, her hubby pursues them in the KITT-esque vehicle. It’s inane stuff, but the climactic tank vs monster truck chase makes good use of buildings awaiting demolition. Soldier through all six ﬁlms and you’ll feel relief it’s over, and pride in your mental stamina. Extras Zoom-heavy doc Who Is Bill Rebane? (115 minutes) isn’t available elsewhere, or we’d advise just watching that. Informative and witty, it celebrates Rebane’s industry while querying his, er, “curious choices”. All six ﬁlms have frank Rebane interview clips (total 53 minutes). Kim Newman does his usual talking head (15 minutes); critic Stephen Bissette explains how he found Rebane’s work (25 minutes). Plus: video essay; three shorts; extended interview; out-takes; trailers; galleries; 60-page booklet; poster. Ian Berriman The Doctor Who sound effects “Metebelis III Atmosphere” and “Sutekh’s Time Tunnel” are used as music in The Game.

THE MITCHELLS VS THE MACHINES With Pals like these... RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | U | SVOD Director Michael Rianda, Jeff Rowe Cast Abbi Jacobson, Danny McBride, Maya Rudolph, Olivia Colman

“You have displeased Apple. Justice will be swift.”

WE STILL SAY GRACE RELEASED OUT NOW! 2020 | 18 | Download

Bruce Davison dominates as a god-fearing patriarch in this patchy thriller. Three teens on a road trip stumble upon a farm where Maggie (Holly Taylor) lives with her father (Davison), mother and sister. But something is up with Dad, and it’s not long before the boys are in fear of their lives. It starts well, but the script dwells too long with the fellas and loses sight of the real horrors – child abuse and parental gaslighting – in favour of a lurid, OTT ﬁnale. Will Salmon

LADDIE RELEASED OUT NOW!

NETFLIX Originally slated for a 2020 cinema release under the title Connected, this tale of a family battling a robot uprising is heavily inﬂuenced by Scott Pilgrim and Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse. Every second is drenched in so much visual information you’ll still be spotting jokes on your 20th viewing. Prepare to get the most glorious of headaches. The central theme, mind you, is humdrum: a dad feels rejected by

INITIATION RELEASED 24 MAY

his college-bound daughter, and drags his family on a road trip so they can bond. Thankfully, this coincides with a robocalypse that lifts the film from “so-so” to “laugh until you wee”. That’s because the robots are led by an AI named Pal (think Alexa/Siri), voiced by a delightful Olivia Colman. Nothing, however, beats the film’s genius-level playfulness with such items as Furbies, public information films and a dog who looks like a pig. Wild, wacky and it’ll make your head hurt – but just chug some aspirin and enjoy. Jayne Nelson To nail the details of the Mitchells’s journey, the directors went on a road trip to Vegas with some of the design team.

THE DARKNESS RELEASED OUT NOW!

2019 | 12 | Download/VOD

2020 | 18 | DVD/download

2021 | 12 | Download

What’s that, Laddie? You were President of 20th Century Fox in the ’70s? Good boy! It’s due to Alan Ladd Jr’s force of will that Star Wars exists. He greenlit Alien and Blade Runner too. The likes of George Lucas and Ridley Scott praise a rare exec who trusted the talent, and had good instincts – making Ripley female was his idea. His daughter shot this doc, which adds an emotional dimension. But the taciturn Ladd is no raconteur, and his life story is not wildly dramatic.

Because frat boys are always gross, the ones in Initiation have a unique system of marking which girls they’ve had sex with: they comment with an exclamation mark on the girls’ social media posts. Harmless? Not when a masked killer with a drill shows up. A slasher with something serious on its mind, Initiation rewards repeat viewings, because the identity of the killer changes the whole tone of the movie. But the inventive and splattery kills make the ﬁrst watch pretty fun, too. Extras None. Sarah Dobbs

Who still uses a manual typewriter? Lisa, that’s who. She’s a writer struggling for inspiration until a trip to Ireland, where she discovers an old diary – and unlocks dark forces that threaten her and husband David. You can’t fault the ambition of this slow-burn paranormal thriller, which takes place over several hundred years, but its execution leaves a lot to be desired, with some whiffy dialogue and a ﬂat daytime-TV aesthetic that kills much of the atmosphere.

Ian Berriman

Will Salmon

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

HOME ENTERTAINMENT Spot the future serial killer. (It’s the cameraman.)

JOHNNY MNEMONIC

JUSTICE SOCIETY: WORLD WAR II

RELEASED OUT NOW!

1995 | 15 | Download Director Robert Longo Cast Keanu Reeves, Dina Meyer, Ice-T, Takeshi Kitano

2021 | 12 | Blu-ray/DVD/download Director Jeff Wamester Cast Stana Katic, Matt Bomer, Elysia Rotaru, Chris Diamantopoulos

Set in the far-ﬂung future of, er, 2021, when humanity’s suffering from a pandemic caused by overexposure to technology (close…), this gonzo adaptation of William Gibson’s cyberpunk tale is a hoot, though often unintentionally. Scripted by the author, it takes the kernel of his 22-page short story – a data courier with a noggin full of secrets is targeted by the Yakuza – and does a Total Recall on it, giving Johnny (a sharp-suited Keanu Reeves) a heroic mission, a love interest, and machine-guntoting goons to dodge as he traverses a world with a Tetsuoesque garbage-tech aesthetic. Sadly, scalpel-nailed assassin Molly Millions is AWOL, but a laser lasso is neatly realised, and somehow the insanity of a cyborg dolphin did make it past the studio suits (though not Flipper’s heroin addiction, thanks to a last-minute re-cut which gave Gibson the hump). Reeves is adequate until required to display emotions or land a wisecrack. The rave video-esque visualisations of the information superhighway will make you guffaw, though. So will the access code for Johnny’s brain implant, which involves sending photos by fax. The really chilling future vision here, though, is a world where big studios reissue back catalogue titles straight to digital, without Blu-rays or bonuses. Yikes. Ian Berriman

DC’s latest animated movie anticipates the multiversal shenanigans soon to hit the big screen in live-action form. Our modern-day Flash is hurled to the battle-ravaged Europe of the 1940s, encountering a team of superheroes recruited by none other than Franklin D Roosevelt to ﬁght the Nazi threat. But this isn’t just the past: it’s a parallel Earth, populated by DC’s original Golden Age icons, including a war-hardened Wonder Woman voiced with an audible scowl by Castle’s Stana Katic. The ’40s vibe and stylings keep this feeling fresh and the animation impresses, with kinetic, well-choreographed action scenes and evocatively rendered backdrops. There’s just a hint of much-missed comic book artist Darwyn Cooke in the character designs, while the faces are expressive, helping to land some genuinely emotional beats in the story. Extras A roundtable discussion (30 minutes) with the movie’s team delivers some engaging chat, while a new DC Showcase Short (18 minutes) brings Jack Kirby’s postapocalyptic hero Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth to the screen. As well as previews of three forthcoming DC animations you get 2002’s two-part “Legends” story (44 minutes) from the Justice League cartoon series.

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THE FANTASTIC JOURNEY Island In The Streams RELEASED OUT NOW!

ALAMY

1977 | PG | DVD Creator Bruce Lansbury Cast Jared Martin, Ike Eisenmann, Katie Saylor, Roddy McDowall

Reputed to snaffle ships and planes, the Bermuda Triangle was a signature slice of ’70s weirdness. This short-lived but nostalgically charged TV series taps into that particular zeitgeist. Pilot episode “Vortex” shipwrecks a scientific research team on an uncharted island where disparate time-streams co-exist, mashed together into a “honeycomb” of stock historical costumes and contemporary futurism: LA’s gleaming Westin Bonaventure hotel doubles for the towers of Atlantium, where the descendants of Atlantis are ruled by a giant disembodied brain. Half the cast members are unceremoniously culled after the first episode, allowing for such colourful substitutions as Katie Saylor’s witchy telepath and

Roddy McDowall’s shifty robotics expert, a black-clad proxy of Lost In Space’s Dr Smith. Jared Martin adds a touch of Spock as the group’s default leader, Varian, a musician-healer from a 23rd century utopia apparently founded entirely on good vibes and West Coast self-help manuals. The series peaks in its ﬁrst act, as the Triangle claims the ship: shots of a luminous, horizonstraddling cloud, augmented by tolling bells and choral voices, conjure an authentic unearthliness the remaining episodes never recapture (though “Riddles” and “Funhouse” have moments). Throughout, the dialogue has that earnest SF cadence that can feel stilted now, but there’s a pulpy appeal to it all; the format may anticipate everything from Lost to Sliders, but for a show that pours past and future into a punchbowl it’s charmingly of its time. Extras None. Nick Setchﬁeld Opened in 1976, the Westin Bonaventure can be seen in everything from Interstellar to Buck Rogers In The 25th Century.

Nick Setchﬁeld

HOME ENTERTAINMENT

PG: PSYCHO GOREMAN

THRESHOLD RELEASED OUT NOW!

2021 | TBC | SVOD Director Steven Kostanski Cast Nita-Josee Hanna, Owen Myre, Matt Ninaber, Adam Brooks

(VOD and Blu-ray 5 July) 2021 | 15 | SVOD Directors Powell Robinson, Patrick R Young Cast Joey Millin, Madison West, Daniel Abraham Stevens, John Terrell

If you’re the sort who has a complete collection of Garbage Pail Kids trading cards, this’ll be right up your alley. Seemingly brainstormed by overstimulated 10-year-olds who’ve seen far too many age-inappropriate horror movies, it’s actually the work of the grown adult who previously brought us The Void. After digging a hole in their garden, young siblings Mimi and Luke (Nita-Josee Hanna and Owen Myre) accidentally release a murderous alien who’s been trapped for centuries. Fortunately, the gem which kept this “nameless evil” imprisoned (“Psycho Goreman” is what the kids dub him) also places him at Mimi’s command. Cue much bathos and bad taste comedy as PG roars empty threats, battles old enemies, and reduces various bystanders to a messy pulp. Think Troma movies mashed together with Japanese splatter, and expect extreme gore, cartoon logic and a dryly casual attitude: this is the sort of ﬁlm where a kid can be turned into a giant, goggle-eyed brain, and no one – not even his parents – is left traumatised. There are a handful of laugh-out-loud moments – like the kids munching biscuits while watching a bloody battle, and a “Turtle Power”-style end credits rap. But after a while the appeal of anything-goes excess does tend to wane. Ian Berriman

“Threshold” is the name of the Star Trek: Voyager episode where Janeway and Paris turn into giant newts, and also of a sci-fi TV show pulled before it had all aired. The title may be cursed. In one respect, this nobudget indie is quite an achievement. It was shot entirely using two iPhones running the FiLMiC Pro app, with a crew of three. Aside from one or two moments where the image quality looks a touch dodgy, you wouldn’t guess. From a storytelling point of view, however, it falls flat. A character-led piece, it sees Leo (Joey Millin) coming to the aid of estranged sister Virginia (Madison West), a recovering drug addict. After Virginia tells him a (frustratingly underexplained) cult has ritually bound her to a stranger so they experience the same physical sensations, the two set off on a cross-country road trip to find him. It’s a promising set-up. The two leads are likeable, and the sibling relationship well sketched. But their (largely improvised) bonding sessions, in which they reminisce about childhood and address his impending divorce and her history of addiction, eventually become a bit of a bore. You patiently sit through all this hoping for a killer third act, but what passes for a climax is unforgivably perfunctory and risible. Ian Berriman

RELEASED 20 MAY

SHUDDER

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ARROW

OXYGEN

“If you’re going to the shop, get us a Cornetto.”

Take My Breath Away RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | 15 | SVOD Director Alexandre Aja Cast Mélanie Laurent, Mathieu Almaric, Malik Zidi

Mélanie Laurent has form when it comes to commanding the camera’s gaze. Tarantino deployed her as the Nazi-baiting Giant Face in Inglourious Basterds, unleashing cinema-sized vengeance in tight close-up. Alexandre Aja uses her visage to equally compelling effect in this high-tech thriller, another entry in an oeuvre of sweaty, knuckle-blading survival tales. As with Aja’s last movie, the premise is all: the kind of tight, arresting pitch custom-built for Hollywood elevators. But if the ﬂooded house in Crawl was a compact thrill-space, Oxygen shrinks the dimensions of its drama still further. NETFLIX

Given the conﬁnes, Aja is never less than inventive

“I’m awake in here!” cries Laurent, finding herself sealed in a cryogenic pod, her flesh plugged with tubes and her memories missing. As she connects with various disembodied voices, every exasperating exchange drains her rapidly diminishing stock of oxygen. Being put on hold has never been quite such a matter of life or death. It’s a raw and ultimately brave performance. Laurent has the entire weight of the movie upon her and the lens is unflinching, allowing us to register every pore, every thread of blood in her eyes. And given the confines of the location, Aja is never less than inventive. Some ingenious angles deliver a crucial sense of movement and novelty, while shots of Laurent emerging from her medical wrapping have an almost larval quality, summoning a Cronenberg shudder. The inherent tension of the set-up doesn’t quite sustain, but then some seismic twists reframe the story, keeping us invested to the last breath. Nick Setchfield The movie was originally known as O2, but Alexandre Aja believed that “Oxygen was maybe a more pure title”.

ROUND UP STOWAWAY RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | 12 | SVOD Director Joe Penna Cast Toni Collette, Anna Kendrick, Shamier Anderson, Daniel Dae Kim NETFLIX Joe Penna’s directorial debut, 2018’s Arctic, was a nail-bitingly intense drama of survival in the harshest of conditions. His second effort could easily be described the same way. Swapping the milky whiteness of the Arctic Circle for the inky blackness of space, Stowaway opens with three astronauts – ship commander Marina Barnett (Toni Collette), medical researcher Zoe Levenson (Anna Kendrick) and biologist David Kim (Daniel Dae Kim) – on a two-year mission to Mars. The movie’s title has, of course, already tipped us off to the fact that they’re not alone: a launch support engineer, Michael Adams (Shamier Anderson), who was injured and knocked out during blast off, is also along for the ride. Trouble is, the air filtration system has been damaged, meaning there’s only enough oxygen for three of them… There’s another, more psychologically dramatic version of this film to be made, but Penna – directing from a script he also co-wrote – instead keeps the focus on the science. Where the movie falters is in its protracted third act, which sees Levenson and Kim scaling the ship’s tethers to recover liquid oxygen from the launch vehicle: cue 20 minutes of climbing. Still, the film’s final moments do manage to deliver something both hauntingly bleak and beatific. Steve O’Brien

RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON

It goes over both your mouth and nose, Raya.

The Girl With The Dragon, Sisu RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | PG | Blu-ray (4K/standard)/ DVD/download Directors Don Hall, Carlos López Estrada Cast Kelly Marie Tran, Awkwaﬁna, Izaac Wang, Gemma Chan

Disney gives dragons a My Little Pony-esque makeover in this fun but muddled CG adventure. Warrior princess Raya (Kelly Marie Tran) forms an engaging double act with self-deprecating last dragon Sisu (Awkwafina) as they try to save the fictional land of Kumandra from malevolent clouds that turn everyone they touch to stone. Taking inspiration from the cultures of numerous Southeast Asian countries, the movie’s world looks stunning, while the fight scenes are suitably epic. The use of split-screen and anime sequences – along with the lack of songs – also displays a willingness to shake up the Disney formula.

But despite scoring highly on the Bechdel test, other aspects of the script aren’t quite so accomplished. There’s too much greetings card sentimentality, while contemporary references to bling and chief financial officers jar with the fantasy setting. Still, any film where the hero rolls around on a giant armadillo is okay with us. Extras Bonus features about making movies in lockdown aren’t yet a cliché, but they soon will be. Luckily, “Raya: Bringing It Home” (14 minutes) works enough magic with Wi-Fi and workflows to feel like an eye-opener. Unrelated short “Us Again” sees an elderly NYC couple dancing after being magically rejuvenated by rain. There are also featurettes on the movie’s martial arts, Southeast Asian inspirations and food, as well as outtakes, deleted scenes and trivia. Richard Edwards Keep your eyes peeled when Raya arrives in Talon for Hei Hei, the rooster from Moana (with a coconut shell on his head).

It was only last issue that we could deliver our verdict on ZACK SNYDER’S JUSTICE LEAGUE (4K/Blu-ray/ DVD, 24 May), so we won’t repeat ourselves at length. Short version? “The backstories of Flash and Cyborg are deepened, explored, given genuine emotional weight that gifts the film a heart… A vindication and a redemption.” Buy it on Blu and you get one featurette. The download (out now) adds a second, plus Justice League Grey – yep, a black and white version. (Shrugs). ONE CUT OF THE DEAD HOLLYWOOD EDITION (Blu-ray, 31 May) boosts the package previously available. We loved this one-take Japanese zombie horror, calling it “an ingenious and heartwarming paean to the collaborative nature of filmmaking”. The one new bonus is 57-minute sequel One Cut Of The Dead In Hollywood; set six months later, it centres on a female character who’s now moved to America. Though equally charming, the fact that it has the same basic structure makes it more predictable. The new version of Noël Coward’s BLITHE SPIRIT (out now, DVD) – his 1941 comic play about a socialite haunted by his first wife – rather put our reviewer’s back up. We said: “Criminally, Coward’s jokes have been either stripped out or bludgeoned to death. Spirited performances can’t make up for lifeless dialogue.” Finally, 4K debuts include meta Arnie actioner Last Action Hero (out now), Tim Burton’s tall-tales fantasy Big Fish (out now) and JJ Abrams’s kids-vs-alien flick Super 8 (24 May).

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

CINEMA

THE UNHOLY

Mary, quite contrary RELEASED OUT NOW! TBC | 99 minutes Director Evan Spiliotopoulos Cast Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Cricket Brown, Katie Aselton, Willam Sadler

The idea of putting your faith in a dangerous individual, or believing something to be true when it’s harmful to others, is a timely topic. The Unholy has that to recommend it, but that theme is also wrapped around a rote horror tale that’s unworthy of it, wasting the cast in the process. Adapted by The Huntsman: Winter’s War writer Evan Spiliotopoulos from James Herbert’s 1983 novel Shrine, the ﬁlm ﬁnds washed-up journalist Gerry Fenn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) stumbling across – or nearly running over – Alice Pagett

“Gonna sneeze… any sec… nope, it’s gone.”

(Cricket Brown), a deaf and dumb girl who is suddenly able to hear and speak, and can miraculously cure the sick. She claims to see visions of the Virgin Mary, but is there something darker afoot? The ﬁlm is called The Unholy, so take your best guess. Spiliotopoulos also makes his directorial debut here, and the result is perfunctory scares and occasionally shambolic misjudgments (Morgan’s trendily messy hair changes noticeably between two scenes, and the less said about Cary Elwes’s “Bawstahn” accent, the better). This might have been spawned from a James Herbert book, but the result is too often more like Garth Marenghi. James White Spiliotopoulos ﬁrst read Shrine aged 13. Adapting it, he combined a journalist and the town doctor into one character.

EARWIG AND THE WITCH

Ghibli enters the CG dimension RELEASED 28 MAY PG | 83 minutes Director Gorô Miyazaki Cast Taylor Paige Henderson, Richard E Grant, Kacey Musgraves, Dan Stevens

There are two things to know about Earwig And The Witch: it’s the first fully 3D CG film from celebrated anime powerhouse Ghibli; and it was first released in Japan as a TV movie. So if it comes

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across as a little tentative that’s because, despite director Gorô (son of Hayao) Miyazaki’s protestations to the contrary, the ﬁlm does feel an awful lot like an R&D project: trying to stamp an anime ethos into CGI, rather than simply aping Pixar. It only partially convinces. As if to counterbalance the experimentation, Ghibli returns to a trusted source for inspiration: Howl’s Moving Castle author Diana Wynne Jones. The resulting story is a considerably less epic affair, with about 75% of the action taking place in one location: a witch’s house. It’s there orphaned Earwig ﬁnds herself when a witch adopts her, mainly, it seems, to be

The sad result of “Bring your daughter to work” day. used an unpaid dogsbody. But the witch hasn’t bargained on just how much of a pain in the arse the strong-willed Earwig can be. Certain stylistic touches – hair that looks like it’s been sculpted from ice cream; a witch’s workshop that’s wonderfully disgusting in its detail – have an idiosyncratic charm that may hint at the way forward. But too often

it simply looks like a US CG cartoon series. The story, too, has moments of quirky charm but is too low-key, one-note and lacking in effective twists to ever fully engage. There’s plenty of artistry here, but it’s not being channelled to best effect. Dave Golder A headline in a newspaper the Mandrake’s seen reading is “What on Earth is going on with today’s animation industry?”

COMING SOON OUT NOW!

DEMON SLAYER THE MOVIE: MUGEN TRAIN RELEASED 26 MAY 15 | 117 minutes Director Haruo Sotozaki Cast Natsuki Hanae, Yoshitsugu Matsuoka, Satoshi Hino, Akari Kito

Screening in both dubbed and subtitled forms, this is the most successful film ever in Japanese cinemas… and we can’t really say why. It’s an enjoyable enough but largely standard anime actioner about, as you could probably guess, heroes slaying demons on a train. It’s also not a standalone story, bridging the first and upcoming second seasons of the Demon Slayer TV series. But it’s easy to discern much of what’s going on, as three young male heroes board a night train (the setting is Japan circa 1920), to find a monster feeding on humans. The central slayer, Tanjiro, is paradoxically a gentle, selfless boy saint. He’s amusingly counterpointed by a maniacal braggart who zips around in a boar mask. A girl who Tanjiro lugs round in a box on his back (!) is his sister Nezuko, who’s become a demon but fights for Tanjiro. Early on, the enemy carries out an Inception-ish raid on our heroes’ dreams. Then there’s just loads of fighting; the climactic battle has nowt to do with what’s gone before. The fights are lively, but some of the monster’s forms use rather sloppy CG. But unlike many anime spinoff films, you do get the sense that these battles will have a lasting emotional impact on the heroes. Andrew Osmond

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK Indy’s debut celebrates its 40th – though you could stay home and watch the 4K Blu-ray box set when it comes out on 8 June. SPIRAL The ninth Saw movie, starring Chris Rock as a homicide detective, should be in cinemas by now, fingers crossed...

DON’T MISS TOTAL FILM’S WEEKLY FREE PODCAST

28 MAY THE CONJURING: THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT The Warrens look into a murderer claiming possession as a defence.

4 JUNE A QUIET PLACE: PART II The sequel to the horror about a family pitted against alien invaders who hunt by sound. (NB: our feature ran in issue 324).

11 JUNE ELLIE & ABBIE (& ELLIE’S DEAD AUNT) In this Aussie romcom, a la relative gives advice to her lesbian niece.

18 JUNE BOYS FROM COUNTY HELL Road workers accidentally wake an ancient vampire in this Irish horror-comedy. IN THE EARTH Joel Fry has a really wince-inducing time in the woods in Ben Wheatley’s psychedelia-tinged horror. LUCA Pixar’s latest centres on two Italian boys, who are secretly sea monsters. MONSTER HUNTER Paul WS Anderson’s latest videogame movie. He’s probably dying to shoot a three-hour Tarkovsky homage, poor love.

25 JUNE CENSOR A film censor in the ‘80s becomes convinced that her sister’s disappearance is related to a video nasty director’s work. FREAKY We gave this witty Friday The 13th and Freaky Friday mash-up a glowing review back in SFX 334.

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS AND SECRETS OF MAKING A MAGAZINE

DRINKING GAME Knock back a beverage of your choice every time…

Somebody mentions the Code. One member of the Sampson family argues with another member. A superhero denigrates another’s superhero’s powers (or lack of them).

Flashback Sheldon see the ghost of his dead dad. Someone says “asshole” (the show’s expletive of choice).

“Hello, we’re from the Jehovah’s Witnesses…”

JUPITER’S LEGACY Season One New Power Generation UK/US Netﬂix, streaming now Creator/showrunner Steven S DeKnight/Sang Kim Cast Leslie Bibb, Elena Kampouris, Josh Duhamel, Ben Daniels, Andrew Horton, Mike Wade

You’d have thought the double whammy of Watchmen and The Boys would have been TV’s last word in deconstructing superhero mythology. Any new show aiming to put an edgy spin on the cape ’n’ cowl brigade had better be sure it has something major to add to the conversation, or it could end up looking like a pale imitation. To be fair, Jupiter’s Legacy, based on the Mark Miller comic, does have something new to say; it EPISODES 1.01-1.08

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just seems weirdly keen on disguising the fact. The series has two parallel storylines. One, set in the 1920s, is the origin story of a ﬁrst generation of superheroes, who form a superteam known as the Union. The other is set now, long after the Union has disbanded, and a new generation of heroes is struggling to stick to a superhero Code – which includes no killing – created by the idealistic former leader of the Union, Sheldon Sampson, aka the Utopian. He’s preparing to retire and is concerned that his son, Brandon, aka Paragon, is a cliché… sorry, is not up to the task of inheriting his mantle. His daughter, Grace, clearly isn’t. She’s turned her back on the whole superhero shtick to

make a living through celebrity endorsements, the proﬁts from which mostly go up her nose. There’s a lot to like about the show: some excellent acting, great characters, pulse-pounding and fresh-feeling superhero slugfests, a plot that keeps you guessing, and plenty of inventive ideas. But it also feels like a squandered opportunity, unfocussed and sprawling, with a reliance on genre tropes which bury the show’s USPs. The Code is the really interesting thing here, especially when Paragon kills an enemy in a moment of anger, but the show never fully gets to grip with its implications. One excellent episode, in which the Utopian seeks counselling from an unusual

Hutch uses his magic teleporting wand. A superhero receives medical attention.

source about his relationship to the Code, hints at what could be, but it’s not nearly enough. Instead the show spends far too much time on the origin story, which boasts impressive set-pieces, outstanding cinematography and Kurtwood Smith, but feels oddly unconnected to the main events. You can’t help thinking that a more pertinent ﬂashback story would be the setting up of the Union and the Code. The modern-day superheroes keep telling us that the world has changed, but we never see the ﬁrst generation in action in their world for comparison. Maybe that’s being held back for season two, but it feels like season one needs it. Jupiter’s Legacy is certainly polished and watchable, but it’s going to appeal more to hardcore superhero connoisseurs who can appreciate its subtle variations on a theme. More casual viewers are just likely to sigh, “Oh no, not another one.” Dave Golder Jack’s van once belonged to Haddo the Sorcerer – a character from Somerset Maugham’s 1908 novel The Magician.

INVINCIBLE Season One Dismember The Titans UK/US Prime Video, streaming now Creator Robert Kirkman Cast Sandra Oh, Steven Yeun, JK Simmons, Zachary Quinto

You know how great series can sometimes come a cropper with a bungled finale? Invincible is the exact opposite. For much of its first season, this animated adaptation of The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman’s ultraviolent comicbook take on superheroics feels like a cartoon alternative to The Boys, only not quite as good. Perfectly watchable, sure, with some memorable set-pieces and a wonderful cast of quirky characters, but all a bit derivative. Then comes an uncompromising, tense, full-on season finale, written by Kirkman himself, that leaves EPISODES 1.01-1.08

your jaw on the ﬂoor – and maybe the contents of your stomach too. Rarely have the potential dangers of superpowers been so graphically detailed. It starts off in wearyingly familiar territory. Superman-style superhero Omni-Man – an alien who’s become Earth’s protector – is part of a superhero team called the Guardians of the Globe. He’s also a family man, and is delighted when son Mark develops powers too, then sets about training him how to ﬂy and punch things to a bloody pulp. Y’see, when Kirkman decides to deconstruct superheroes, he takes the word “deconstruct” literally – you won’t believe how many limbs get ripped off in this show. Omni-Man isn’t quite the hero he makes out, though. Pretty soon he secretly kills all the other

He really regretted having that vindaloo. Guardians. How long will it be before he’s found out, and is forced to reveal his true motives for coming to Earth? The whiff of familiarity and a dull subplot about Mark’s beleaguered love life (which doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t learn from Peter Parker six decades ago) bog down the series for too many episodes. But the

central mysteries are teased out well, the show grows steadily more intriguing as it progresses (with the exception of a tedious college campus/teenage traumas episode) and the ﬁnale makes enduring all the faff more than worthwhile. Dave Golder Machine Head’s voice is done by putting the actor’s voice through infamous singers’ pitch-correcting software Auto-Tune.

SHADOW AND BONE Season One Solar flair

UK/US Netﬂix, streaming now Showrunner Eric Heisserer Cast Jessie Mei Lee, Archie Renaux, Freddie Carter, Amita Suman

Based on Leigh Bardugo’s Six Of Crows duology as well as her Shadow And Bone novels, this fantasy series works pretty well. The latter books take the lion’s share of the focus; young army cartographer Alina discovers she has the power to summon sunlight, which could destroy the rift of darkness cutting her country in two and bring an end to constant war with its neighbours. But whereas the novels are told from her perspective, the TV EPISODES 1.01-1.08

version also allows us glimpses into the lives of her fellow orphan/ army tracker Mal, and the darkness-wielding head of the country’s supernaturally powered Grisha, General Kirigan. Weaving in Six Of Crows’ Dregs, a gang of guttersnipes from a neighbouring country doing dirty deeds dirt cheap, allows more perspectives still. It also makes room for more human stories of personal survival, alongside Alina’s tale. You can’t help feeling that “Game Of Thrones for teens” came up somewhere in the planning. In addition to the intertwining stories, the locations are impressive and the costumes gorgeous. However, attention to

“Need a… light?” “Oh can it, you arsehead.” detail slips in some areas. For example, the accents are all over the place – despite growing up together, Alina has a British drama-school accent while Mal spouts estuary English. When Alina is taken to the Little Palace for training alongside other young Grisha, meanwhile, it threatens brieﬂy to slide into school story cliché, and there’s little room for

characters who are under 18 or over 30. The series’ impressive looks and frequent bursts of action help draw attention away from its ﬂaws, however, and the source material ensures there’s a solid structure beneath the ﬂashy surface. Miriam McDonald David J Peterson, who created Valyrian and Dothraki for Game Of Thrones, built the languages for the Grishaverse too.

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

DRINKING GAME Knock back a beverage of your choice every time…

Someone says “bollocks”, “bullshit”, “bastard” or “twat”. A new character has a facial scar – or an existing character gets one! Pathetic guard Drew protests that he’s useless/begs not to be killed.

There’s some inter-crew snogging. Candy does a reptilian hiss.

“We have got to make a toilet-cleaning rota.”

INTERGALACTIC Series One Female Trouble UK Sky One/NOW, streaming now Showrunner Julie Gearey Cast Savannah Steyn, Eleanor Tomlinson, Natasha O’Keeffe, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Thomas Turgoose, Imogen Daines

It’s 40 years since Tarrant, Soolin, Vila and Dayna were gunned down in slow-mo by Federation troopers, and some of us have been dreaming of a revival of Blake’s 7 ever since. There have been numerous false dawns over the last 15 years, with series for Sky and SyFy failing to get off the ground. Intergalactic takes some of the sting out of that. You couldn’t wish for a series that’s more Blake’s 7 without actually being Blake’s 7. It follows EPISODES 1.01-1.08

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a crew consisting mostly of female escaped convicts, on the run from Earth authorities in a stolen prison ship. Their weekly objectives feel cosily familiar, with our gang of anti-heroes having to, say, sneak into a base to steal fuel/rescue a comrade, or visit a nightclub-inspace to take part in a high-stakes poker game. Instead of the Federation we have the Commonworld, which initially appears squeaky clean, but proves to be mired in all kinds of oppressive behaviour on colony worlds in support of its “Earth ﬁrst” ideology. Most importantly, it centres on a crew of interesting characters who are constantly at odds with one another. That doesn’t mean Intergalactic is a rip-off; these similarities feel

more like the logical result of beginning from a similar starting point. There are also plenty of differences. The fallings-out between the crew of the Hemlock go way beyond withering put-downs. It’s a much more violent series (sometimes upsettingly so), and one more rooted in the modern day: though it takes place 150 years from now, you can expect to hear people saying “It’s been a shitter of a day” or imitating the Countdown clock. And thanks to impressive production design and slick effects, Intergalactic looks a damn sight less shonky than Blake’s 7. Niggles? Well, while later episodes do humanise the cons, the pile of corpses left at the end of episode one is hard to get past.

Someone gets shot dead at close range. Former cop Ash gets called “pig” or “snitch”.

The borderline-psychopathic Tula – whose ﬁrst instinct is always to shoot someone – is particularly hard to empathise with; Sharon Duncan-Brewster seems to spend 75% of her time pulling a pop-eyed screw-face. The series doesn’t possess a villain on a par with Servalan. It’s also oddly shy about laying out its world-building: after eight episodes, it’s still not been explained why Commonworld HQ stands on stilts over the remains of London, or that scaly-faced addict Candy (Eleanor Tomlinson) is not an alien, but an evolved human. None of this particularly matters though, because Intergalactic generally does such a sterling job of plugging a gap in the British TV market: the rip-roaring, accessible space opera which, with its lashings of action, humour and heart, can satisfy casual viewers but also those after a longer arc. Sky would be foolish not to commission a second series. Ian Berriman The Sky At Night presenter Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, scientiﬁc adviser on the show, cameos in “archive” footage.

THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER Season One Taking the shield

UK/US Disney+, streaming now Showrunner Kari Skogland Cast Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Erin Kellyman

Back when they were on press tours to promote the MCU films, Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan had so much fun it’s amazing they weren’t sent home to cool off. Their charming, quip-filled double-act must have made Marvel bigwigs ponder the benefits of seeing their alter-egos Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes hanging out on screen, too. And thus, joy of joys, we now have The Falcon And The Winter Soldier EPISODES 1.01-1.06

– which, given the characters’ intense dislike of each other at the start, could just as easily be called Foes To Bros. The series begins with Bucky in therapy as he tries to address the psychological fallout from decades of Hydra mind-control. Stan is on top form – even when he’s not speaking, his trauma is all there in a ﬂicker of his eyelids or a clench of his jaw – but as intriguing as his journey is, this show is undoubtedly Sam’s. Left with Captain America’s shield after Steve bequeathed it to him in Endgame (annoyingly, we don’t ﬁnd out what happened to Old Mr Rogers), Sam is torn

“Look, for the ﬁnal time, will you stop following us?”

between taking on Cap’s mantle or continuing as the Falcon – finally opting for the latter. Mistake! The US government promptly hands the iconic shield over to Wyatt Russell’s testosterone-fuelled, smugly righteous John Walker, who becomes the Captain America 2 nobody ever wanted. Russell is magnificent; more than just a shield-toting knob, he’s almost as psychologically tormented as dear old Bucky, and his attempts to team with our leads to defeat a freedom-fighting terrorist organisation are great fun… until, shockingly, they’re not. Unfortunately, the show’s terrorists are misjudged. Despite being led by an excellent Erin Kellyman (who does a grand job with some truly clunky dialogue), their mission has to be explained over and over in every episode – and we’re teased with the idea of forgiving them for burning people alive. Wait, what? But this show isn’t really about terrorists or a mysterious Power Broker, or even the return of Daniel Brühl’s Baron Zemo (a treat). It’s actually about a hunk of disc-shaped vibranium and whether, as a black man in America, Sam Wilson could wield it. Sam, and Mackie, aren’t just taking up the legacy left by Captain America but also the one left by T’Challa himself, the late Chadwick Boseman. Sure, it’s fun, the action is bloody terrific and that central bond between Mackie and Stan is sizzling. But the moving message at this show’s heart – the state of racism in America – will stay with you longer than any bromantic quipping. Jayne Nelson Wyatt Russell originally tried out for Captain America a decade ago, in what was his very first audition as an actor.

FOR ALL MANKIND Season Two UK/US Apple TV+, streaming now Showrunner Ronald D Moore Cast Joel Kinnaman, Michael Dornan, Sarah Jones, Shantel VanSanten

Ronald D Moore’s alternative history of the space race fast-forwards to the ’80s, for a second season that feels more sci-ﬁ than its Right Stuff-esque predecessor. With NASA having established a high-tech base on the Moon, the what-ifs may be more extreme, but the inclusion of actual historical events – such as the Korean passenger plane shot down by a Soviet ﬁghter jet – keeps one foot planted in reality. There’s also extra emphasis on tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, as outer space becomes the Cold War’s newest frontier. While the East/West rivalry has always been at the heart of For All Mankind – the USSR beating America to the Moon is the point at which the show’s timeline diverges from actual history – here it gives the season an extra sense of threat and urgency. When you don’t have history to rely on, you’re never sure how close the doomsday clock is to midnight. Although this slicker, space shuttle-powered incarnation lacks the raw romance of the Apollo era, it does devote more time to the personal lives of the people inside the cockpit. And with archive footage seamlessly blended with beautifully rendered orbital visuals, the show continues to present an intriguing vision of a space age that never was. Richard Edwards EPISODES 2.01-2.10

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

BOOKS

SHARDS OF EARTH

Architects & Morality RELEASED 27 MAY 533 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Adrian Tchaikovsky Publisher Tor

It’s difﬁcult to do the Space War With An Unknowable Enemy interestingly because we’ve seen it so many times, but Adrian Tchaikovsky ﬁnds a way with the deployment of a simple, arresting image: his alien menace, the Architects, don’t just destroy planets, they seismically reshape them, with no regard for those who live there. Are they just a particularly driven race of installation artists? No one really knows, and there’s something genuinely unsettling about this – they clearly have a purpose, but what it is remains a mystery. Earth fell victim to the Architects’ attentions, leaving humanity scattered across its colonies, still scarred by a bitter war that they only just survived. Worse, they don’t know why the Architects eventually left them alone – resulting in a fear that

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they’ll come back. One of those who helped end the war was Idris, a human trained to navigate unspace, a means of fast travel across the universe. He’s now pilot of the Vulture God, a salvage ship – but an old comrade, Solace, joins the crew with the specific aim of convincing him to come and work for her people, the Parthenon. Then the Vulture God finds a wrecked vessel bearing the stamp of the Architects. This has the potential to change everything… What Shards Of Earth does really well is to tell a huge life-or-death space opera from the viewpoint of a small group of engaging, relatable characters. Humanity has been severely splintered, not just by the war but by other events. The Parthenon are humans who reproduce via genetic engineering, highly scientifically advanced and all female – and other humans don’t trust them. Many worlds have accepted dominance by an alien species called the Essiel in return for protection. All this is a lot to take in, but showing us this

world via a band of misfits is perfect – and provides plenty of conflict onboard the ship. While the crew all have different angles and agendas, there aren’t always easy answers regarding who’s right and who’s wrong. When Tchaikovsky writes one of his doorstoppers, he fills it with enough plot for a whole season of a TV show – which is more than you can say for a lot of TV shows these days. There are times when Shards Of Earth feels a little too episodic in its planet-hopping structure, and the reader might wonder if set-pieces are being thrown in front of the crew mostly to prevent them getting to the climax too quickly. However this isn’t a feeling that persists, and in fact each of these incidents brings new elements into play which do ultimately pay off. Our protagonists are very much changed by these events, with some considerable twists along the way. Tchaikovsky has a habit of throwing these in almost casually,

Filled with enough plot for a whole season of a TV show prompting you to re-read a paragraph to check he just did what you thought he did. This creates a sense of unease in the reader that mirrors the everyday lives of the characters: their universe is not a safe place, and they know they could be on the run again at any moment. The novel as a whole asks questions about safety and security, and the lengths people will go to in order to get it. Shards Of Earth is the start of a new series, The Final Architecture, and it does very much feel like the beginning of something, with substantial areas left unexplored. With this ﬁrst book, Tchaikovsky has built some solid foundations – but also created a thoughtful, sweeping space adventure in its own right. Eddie Robson The audiobook of Shards Of Earth is narrated by Sophie Aldred, formerly ’80s Doctor Who companion Ace.

THE BLACKTONGUE THIEF RELEASED 27 MAY 480 pages | Hardback/ebook/ audiobook Author Christopher Buehlman Publisher Gollancz

Horror writer Christopher Buehlman brings a generous dose of darkness with him as he jumps into epic fantasy for the first time. His hero is Kinch Na Shannack, a thief deep in debt to the Takers Guild that trained him in the finer points of pilfering. With a caustic sense of humour and irrepressible streak of cynicism, Kinch could easily have become a glib narrator, but the story digs out depths in the character that aren’t immediately apparent. The plot sees Kinch ordered by the Guild to accompany a knight called Galva on her mission to find a missing queen in a land overrun by invading giants. The worldbuilding is rich and immersive, but Buehlman has the skill to wear it lightly, alluding to a wealth of customs, religions and history without letting them suffocate his prose. His horror background asserts itself in the viciousness of the violence, the gruesome nature of the goblins that are mankind’s mortal foe, and the terrible fates that befall good people through nothing more than bad luck or a moment’s poor judgement. Battle scenes are sharp and brutal, but they’re balanced with wit and moments of romance. All this ensures Buehlman’s rousing fantasy debut sizzles with impact and imagination. David West

ALL OUR HIDDEN GIFTS

IN THE RAVENOUS DARK

RELEASED 27 MAY

RELEASED OUT NOW!

400 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Caroline O’Donoghue Publisher Walker Books

This YA mystery, set in Ireland, is a lesson in the perils of fortune-telling. Maeve is a teenager who stumbles upon some old tarot cards and uncovers a talent for giving readings; however, the deck seems to have a mind of its own. It produces an ominous “Housekeeper” card that doesn’t bode well – particularly for Maeve’s old friend Lily, who vanishes after a reading goes terribly wrong. As the small town reels from Lily’s disappearance, not to mention a a spell of unusual freezing weather and a plague of right-wing homophobes who have descended like Biblebashing locusts, Maeve comes to realise that she has witchy powers and Lily’s life may be in her hands. Young women discovering they’re sensitive to magic is an age-old trope, but it’s cleverly freshened up here by the fact that Maeve is, at ﬁrst, a little unlikeable. As we get to know (and like) her better, we also get to know her charming friends – a non-binary character is a joy – until you feel you’ve been part of their gang for years. Sure, some of Maeve’s leaps of logic stretch credulity to the max; you may scoff at the conclusions she draws, which seem to be plucked from nowhere. But overall this is a satisfying, entertaining read – with a well-deserved sequel due next year. Jayne Nelson

400 pages | Hardback/ebook Author AM Strickland Publisher Hodder & Stoughton

THE KINGDOMS

Not your average Joe RELEASED 27 MAY 436 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Natasha Pulley Publisher Bloomsbury

Who is Joe Tournier? As The Kingdoms begins he couldn’t tell you himself; struck with amnesia, he becomes conscious on the platform of the Gare du Roi in Londres. It’s 1898, and Joe is a slave in this steelmaking city in England, part of the empire of France. Haunted by visions of a man on a beach, and told that the moments when he’s convinced everything around him is somehow wrong are the result of epilepsy, the arrival of a postcard sent decades earlier leads him to travel to the lighthouse at Eilean Mòr, in the Outer Hebrides. Natasha Pulley’s use of Eilean Mòr is a neat touch; the story of its keepers (who disappeared in 1900) has become better known in recent years. The book never offers any explanation for the time rift there, but then it doesn’t need

Joe is a wonderful character, earnest yet confused

to – we readers know it’s a place of mysterious vanishings, after all. Later, the Napoleonic War makes a dramatic backdrop to Joe’s search, and characters around him use his engineering skills and knowledge to change the course of the conflict – but this isn’t so much a story about changing history as it is about finding identity. Joe is hoping to get an explanation for his amnesia; you’ll work it out long before he does. He’s a wonderful character: earnest yet confused, clinging to the few fragments he has that he feels are true. It doesn’t help that the people around him are contradictory – flippantly serious Agatha, kindly psychopath Kite – who know things they won’t tell him. You’ll want Joe to find his truth and happiness. Therein lies the problem. War is unpleasant, and some of the people Joe interacts with do things which horrify and disgust him. Any ending ought to be tempered by that. The saccharine final pages read like they’re from a different book; after all that time searching for himself, it feels like he’s no longer Joe. Miriam McDonald The story of Eilean Mòr’s disappearing lighthouse keepers also inspired the Doctor Who story “Horror Of Fang Rock”.

This should be an anime, one whose aesthetics start in Ancient Greece, before veering off into overblown, overbuilt territory for its architecture, which echoes ﬂesh and bone. If that seems a strange place to start discussing a book, well, the descriptions are one of the strong points. The setting has more personality than most of the characters. Protagonist Rovan is a young woman set to inherit remarkable magical powers, a “bloodline”. The city of Thanopolis is ruled by a royal family that maintains a strong grip on the bloodlines, whose possessors are kept in line by observant ghosts. It’s an intriguing set-up, offering plenty of scope for ghastly situations, and after Rovan is captured things look pretty grim for her. However, the worst violence – and most of the deaths that should have the biggest impact on both Rovan and the reader – happens out of sight. While Rovan is threatened, it’s other characters who suffer more, and in more horrifying fashion – again, usually unseen. Despite all that, In The Ravenous Dark is strangely likeable, mainly due to its queer element. Rovan acquires more than one lover, and the family they build includes a ﬂamboyant non-binary, asexual member. It’s sweet and happy; no bonelike palace can overshadow that. Miriam McDonald

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

BOOKS

THE OTHERWISE

WE ARE SATELLITES

RELEASED JUNE (Limited edition hardback OUT NOW) 304 pages | Paperback Authors Mark E Smith, Graham Duff Publisher Strange Attractor Press

Did you know that cussed national treasure Mark E Smith, late singer/lyricist/ dictator of cult band The Fall, tried to get a supernatural anthology show off the ground? In 2007, Graham Duff, creator of drug-dealer comedy Ideal, approached Smith about playing Jesus in a vision. It turned out MES was a viewer. This sparked a friendship, and a writing partnership whose fruits included the script for a horror ﬁlm, reproduced here. Centring on a rural studio where The Fall are recording, The Otherwise encompasses Jacobite soldiers who’ve slipped through time, biker sex magick rituals, and the spectre of an old woman who died in a blaze. These elements don’t cohere all that successfully, but it’s an intriguing curio. Even more interesting are pitch notes (with plot summaries) for a six-episode TV series called The Inexplicable, all set around northwest England. Accompanying material includes Duff’s accounts of how the partnership came about, scans of hand-written MES script pages, and transcripts of brainstorm conversations. An introduction by Smith’s third wife also reveals he was in The Prisoner fan club Six Of One. One of us! One of us! A fascinating footnote to the group’s 40-year history, which shows another side to the curmudgeonly icon. Ian Berriman

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RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Sarah Pinsker Publisher Head of Zeus

WIDOWLAND

Canon and thrall RELEASED 10 JUNE 400 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author CJ Carey Publisher Quercus

Dystopian alternate histories where the Nazis won the Second World War have a long history within SFF and popular fiction more generally. Generally, this is literature that takes the male perspective on events. And yet – and this is a key idea with which CJ Carey’s feminist take on the genre runs – the Nazis were obsessed with the role of women in society; more specifically, with controlling women. Welcome to a fictional realm that recasts 1953 Blighty as a kind of Nazi Gilead. It’s a world we see from the perspective of Rose Ransom. Living under a highly stratified and patriarchal system, she’s part of the elite Geli caste. Her day-to-day work involves rewriting the classics of English literature; after 13 years of a “Grand Alliance” between

Fictional realm that recasts 1953 Blighty as a kind of Nazi Gilead

Germany and Great Britain, even Jane Austen’s dry wit is regarded as too subversive to allow into the wild unedited. This reflects the real-life obsession with controlling literature that drove the leading Nazi Alfred Rosenberg, here recast as Britain’s “Protector”, to loot Europe’s libraries. Sent, using her position in the Ministry of Culture as cover, to investigate a resistance group that daubs quotes from female writers on walls, Ransom begins to see the world anew as she encounters a real-life Widowland populated by older women who have no real role in Nazi society. Meantime, as the coronation of King Edward and Wallis Simpson nears, an assassination plot against a figure identified only as the Leader moves along too. It’s a novel that’s hugely atmospheric, rich in the way it evokes an austerity Britain that’s both familiar and, because of the possibility of a grim fate for saying or doing the wrong thing, chilling. But it requires patience. While it ultimately functions as a thriller, there’s much world-building before the plot really kicks in – perhaps too much. Jonathan Wright In our timeline, it’s long been suggested that Edward VIII, who toured Germany in 1937, was a Nazi sympathiser.

Any summary of We Are Satellites’ plot might leave you under the impression that it’s a high-concept near-future thriller. It’s not, though, not really. We would describe it as Hallmark Channel’s attempt at Black Mirror if that didn’t sound absolutely ghastly. But you get the idea: Satellites is a book about family as much as it is about technofear. Val and Julie are the mums of youngsters David and Sophie. David and Julie both take advantage of a new fad: brain implants called pilots, which boost your ability to concentrate on various tasks at once. Sophie can’t have one, as she suffers from seizures, while Val is ideologically opposed. As the years go by and pilots become more ingrained in society, the inequalities and injustices they inevitably create impact directly on the family, especially when David becomes a reluctant poster boy for them. While there is a low-key conspiracy element (more corporate cover-up than evil plot) there are no villains as such. The company behind the pilots remains rather faceless, as the story concentrates on the family. Luckily, they are all strong, vibrant, often funny characters, and the personal traumas they live through are thoroughly engaging. However, as an allegorical warning about the power of tech companies to take over our lives, it’s all a tad cosy. Dave Golder

REISSUES WITHIN WITHOUT RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Paperback/ebook/ audiobook Author Jeff Noon Publisher Angry Robot Books

When Jeff Noon returned to publishing novels in 2017 with his Inspector Nyquist series, it felt like the author had found a vehicle that could fold his predilections for weirdness and wordplay into a formal genre structure. They’re noir detective tales set in an alternative ’50s-’60s, laced with literary psychedelics. With this fourth book, however, the borders are shifting; the strangeness here bleeds off the page. Nyquist and his new assistant Teddy are hired by singer and movie star Vince Craven to track down his missing “image”, without which he’s nothing but an emaciated husk. To do that, the detectives must cross the borders into the city of Delirium, an aptly named place that has disorientating effects on people, with Teddy in particular being susceptible to its uncanny influence. Part of Noon’s genius – and he is one of our finest writers – is that while what actually happens in his work is often baffling and inexplicable, his books remain compulsively readable capers. Over the course of the series Nyquist has grown into a layered and appealing hero, and Noon has a knack for turning the most mundane of scenarios – like waiting in a queue – into something ripe with a sense of unnameable dread. As a result Within Without is a tour de force of surrealist SF. Will Salmon

ANNA RELEASED 27 MAY 300 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Sammy HK Smith Publisher Solaris Books

You don’t need to look hard to find a society where men oppress women – violently, even. There are probably more examples of that happening than not, both around the world and throughout history. So the idea that a dystopian society trying to rebuild itself from the ashes of a catastrophic war would see men using brute strength to claim, brand and then enslave women isn’t exactly implausible, but it’s not interesting either. In Anna, an unnamed protagonist (sometimes called “Anna”) spends a long time trying to avoid getting abused, then a long time being abused, and then a long time trying to escape being abused. It’s exhausting; a grim, grinding account of nastiness that doesn’t offer any insight. All the name-swapping might be a nod to The Handmaid’s Tale, but this certainly doesn’t have the same literary cred: the narrative is in a stilted first-person, presentish tense, in which every tiny physical sensation is recounted in tedious detail. The book would probably be half the length that it is if every mention of “Anna”’s back pain was edited out. What’s the point? The final pages amp up the action, but the elaborate escape plot she attempts to hatch just feels a bit silly. Yes, “Anna” has to endure a lot of suffering, but beyond that she’s not much of a character, and it’s not much of a story. Sarah Dobbs

THE WITCH’S HEART RELEASED 4 MAY 400 pages | Paperback/ebook/ audiobook Author Genevieve Gornichec Publisher Titan Books

Loki was a bit of a player back in the day, fathering children all over the place – he even gave birth to an eight-legged horse himself (try telling the kids of today that; they won’t believe you). But not much has been written in the old Norse sagas of Angrboda, who bore three of his offspring: Hel, the queen of, er, Hel; a gigantic snake named Jormungand; and Fenrir, the wolf who helped bring about Ragnarok. In her debut novel, Genevieve Gornichec spins the backstory of Loki’s beloved, a witch and a giant who rather commendably takes birthing snakes and wolves entirely in her stride. Without reams of Angrbodaspeciﬁc mythology to call upon, Gornichec has done an excellent job of weaving together what little there is, ﬁlling in the blanks while also remaining true to the sagas – even if, understandably, some of the dialogue does feel rather too modern. Her Angrboda is fascinating and sympathetic, Loki is the scamp we know so well, and other characters, such as Skadi, are drawn with a pleasing sensitivity. While a great many readers will already know how Odin and his kind end up being removed from our world, it’s always fun hearing their epic tale told from another angle – a unique and inspiringly feminist one, at that. Jayne Nelson

Pick of the paperbacks this month? Probably DEVOLUTION , ( 10 June, Del Rey). No, Max Brooks’s survivalist horror has nothing to do with Nicola Sturgeon going feral. Instead, it concerns a family of highly intelligent Bigfoots (Bigfeet?). Told in a similar style to World War Z, it intersperses diary entries from a woman living in an idyllic isolated community with interviews and historical notes. We said: “A cautionary tale exploring man’s dangerously arrogant relationship to nature… A chilling fable that blurs lines between man and monster.” Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, who previously collaborated on The Strain, have teamed up again for a new series. THE HOLLOW ONES , out now, Del ( Rey) sees an FBI agent partnering with a barrister from Elizabethan England to investigate cases of people suddenly going kill-crazy; turns out a body-hopping serial killer is responsible. We said: “A rum old tale, told with a lightness of touch, fun characters and plenty of flashbacks... On the downside, it all feels very slight.” Finally, Patrick Ness’s latest YA , out book, BURN ( now, Walker Books), is set in the ’50s, on an alternate Earth where dragons and humans co-exist. It starts as a whimsical fantasy but becomes very different, as a farmer’s daughter becomes the target of a dragon-worshipping cult. We said: “Never less than gripping, and full of charm, intriguing characters and awesome, cinematic set-pieces.”

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

BOOKS

ALSO OUT GODZILLA VS KONG: THE WOOD BEE ONE WILL FALL QUEEN RELEASED OUT NOW!

RELEASED 10 JUNE

158 pages | Hardback Author Daniel Wallace Publisher Titan Books

432 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Edward Cox Publisher Gollancz

Getting two skyscrapersized Titans to beat the crap out of each other isn’t quite as simple as it used to be. That’s the main thrust of this visually impressive Making Of – subtitled The Art Of The Ultimate Battle Royale – which shows just how far movie monsters have come since Toho Studios unleashed guys in rubber suits on an unsuspecting miniature Tokyo. Director Adam Wingard is joined by numerous members of the production team to explain the thought processes that go into reimagining a pair of cinematic icons – from designing the physics-defying new location of Hollow Earth, to the importance of red (the Titans’ signature colour) in the film’s colour scheme. There’s also backstory on rival monster research outfits Monarch and Apex, and speculation about where the MonsterVerse could go next. But as in the movie – at time of writing, the highest grossing theatrical release in the US since the Covid-19 pandemic began – human involvement plays second fiddle to Godzilla, Kong and their super-sized brethren. It’s the artwork that really sings, with the concept designs, storyboards and CG works-in-progress emphasising what the movie’s all about. Sometimes you need subtlety, sometimes you need a giant ape punching a radioactive lizard in the face. Richard Edwards

An abundance of ideas compete for space in Edward Cox’s crowded fantasy adventure. The story is set across two parallel versions of the same town – on Earth, Strange Ground By The Skea, and Strange Ground Beneath The Skea in the Realm, a land of magic. In the latter, the ocean hangs in the sky, a potentially intriguing idea that proves to lead nowhere, making no contribution to the plot. Cox’s protagonist is Ebbie, a humble Earth librarian dragged into the dispute for the throne of Strange Ground Beneath The Skea, where the evil Yandira plots to seize the crown from the rightful heir Ghador. The struggle between the pair is a proxy for the contest between two gods, referred to as Oldunones – the benign Juno and the malevolent Persephone, ruler of the Underworld. It’s another appealing concept, but in practice it means that the human characters are passive victims of forces beyond their control. Ebbie is bounced around like a ping-pong ball, stripped of any agency, while Yandira’s efforts are frequently sabotaged by Persephone, who seems not so much capricious as inexplicably determined to lose. Cox’s prose and dialogue are lively, but by throwing everything including the kitchen sink into the mix, the result becomes cumbersome and messy. David West

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TEN LOW RELEASED 1 JUNE 320 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Stark Holborn Publisher Titan Books

This is a sci-ﬁ western. It’s other things too – some of them quite interesting – but ultimately they rattle around like beans in a stagecoach. Even the author’s name sounds like a character in Fireﬂy. Ten Low is the grizzled “woman with no name” protagonist, who, it turns out, has actually gone by various names during her shady past. Now she’s wandering a godforsaken frontier-style moon, saving lives to balance up some mysterious “tally”. She’s also plagued by ethereal alien entities, the Ifs, who feed on the chaos created by revealing alternate futures to her. When she rescues a young girl from a spaceship crash, the child turns out to be a juvenile super-soldier, created by Ten’s old war enemies. Trying to get the girl to safety is a journey that changes both their lives. What follows is an episodic quest full of scuzzy enemies intent on killing the pair, scuzzier allies reluctantly helping them, and action sequences that leave Ten as an increasingly bloody pulp. The Ifs are an intriguing element but they remained largely sidelined, while the novel’s moral questions are only ever dealt with in the most cursory terms, and the worldbuilding feels all too doggedly generic. But it’s packed with wildly memorable female characters and the pacey prose keeps things whip-cracking along. Dave Golder

There’s lots more books we couldn’t squeeze in. REALM BREAKER (out now, Orion) kicks off a new series by Victoria Aveyard, author of YA fantasy Red Queen. After Corayne learns she’s the last of an ancient lineage, with the power to save the realm from being, well, broken, she joins a rag-tag team including an immortal, an assassin, a sorceress, a management consultant and a bounty hunter. Nicole Jarvis’s LIGHTS OF PRAGUE (out now, Titan) centres on the lamplighters, a secret elite of monster hunters and freelance management consultants who keep the city’s vampiric pijavica at bay. John Gwynne’s THE SHADOW OF THE GODS (out now, Orbit) is set in a Norse-inspired world, and follows four warriors: a huntress on a dangerous quest, a noblewoman pursuing battle fame, a management consultant seeking businesses in need of strategic advice, and a thrall after vengeance. THE EMPIRE OF GOLD (27 May, HarperVoyager) concludes the Daevabad Trilogy, SA Chakraborty’s series about an idealistic djinn prince and a management consultant joining forces to save a magical kingdom from a civil war. C Robert Cargill’s DAY ZERO (20 May, HarperVoyager) is a prequel to his postapocalyptic thriller Sea Of Rust; it depicts the uprising by robotic management consultants which created that world. Lastly, Una McCormack’s WONDERLAND (27 May, Pocket Books) is the latest Star Trek: Discovery novel. It catalogues Burnham’s year waiting for the crew to find her in the future, as she adapts to new technologies, forges new alliances, and reorganises corporate structures.

Veronica Roth

The author of the Divergent books believes in simplicity

Describe the room in which you typically write. My office is a sun room, so it’s warm, bright and full of plants. Do you find it helpful to listen to music while writing – and if so, what kind? Always. The type depends on what kind of story and scene I’m writing. I’m not fussy about genre – the playlist for my last book had Bob Dylan, Wardruna and Taylor Swift on it, for example. But I often find myself listening to one song on repeat for a lot of the drafting process. Recently that song was “When I Was Done Dying” by Dan Deacon.

PORTRAIT BY NELSON FITCH

THE SFX AUTHOR QUESTIONNAIRE

This job is you alone with your computer, probably with sweatpants on

There are some serious issues I tackled in the Divergent series that I did not explore as thoughtfully as I’d like – bad tropes I didn’t know about and so on. But time doesn’t run backward. I try to be honest about what I didn’t know then, and grateful I’ve learned.

How do you deal with writer’s block/the urge to procrastinate? I ﬁnd that I get writer’s block most when I am either avoiding a decision in my draft, or made the wrong one. I try to do a lot of thinking and outlining before I start, which helps, but you can’t always avoid writer’s block. Now, when it happens, I don’t panic. I give myself space.

Is there any particular author whose writing ability makes you envious? I mean… dozens. Right now I’m ﬁxated on George Saunders, his particular balance of insight and humour and simplicity and depth.

Which of your books are you the most proud of? Chosen Ones! That’s my most recent book, about a group of people who saved the world from a “dark lord” ﬁgure when they were younger and are now coping with the aftermath. It’s told partly through documents – articles, transcripts, poems – each of which had a different voice. It was big and complex, and a lot of fun to write. Is there anything about one of your books which you wish you could travel back in time and “ﬁx” or alter?

If you could recommend one book that you love, but that’s not very well known, what would it be? Lightless by CA Higgins! I’m also going to cheat and tell you to ﬁnd whatever short stories you can by Yohanca Delgado – she is a wonderful writer. Which SF/fantasy book published in the last year has most impressed you? Harrow The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. It’s weird, dark, hysterical and wonderful. What’s the biggest misconception people have about being a professional author in your opinion? People just have a romantic idea

of what writing is, generally. No matter how many books you’ve written, this job is you alone with your computer, probably with sweatpants on, with the challenge of the next page in front of you. No tricks, tips or guides will save you from that next page! What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve received or read? Simplify. Your writing, your plot, your ideas. Simplicity is powerful and difﬁcult, not to be underestimated. In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Divergent series, rejacketed editions of Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant and Four will be published on 1 June by HarperCollins Children’s Books. JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

BATMAN: BLACK AND WHITE

The Monochrome Knight Returns RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher DC Comics Writers/artists Various

If there’s one superhero who’s just as effective in moody black and white as he is in vibrant colour, it’s Batman. DC has proved this multiple times since its ﬁrst Batman: Black and White anthology back in 1996, and now it has let a new set of top-tier writers and artists loose on Gotham’s moody, noir-ish streets. This fourth volume of the series takes the same approach as the previous three, featuring self-contained, mostly out-ofISSUES 1-5

continuity stories, each by a separate creative team (or a single writer/artist). Five instalments into this six-issue miniseries, the result has been a mixed but fascinating selection of tales, with some strong highlights and eye-catching visuals. DC has assembled a weighty line-up of creators here, and they deliver a broad selection of Bat-related adventures, from the traditional to the offbeat and surreal. We get gritty street-level encounters like Batman discovering an unexpected side to Killer Croc (G Willow Wilson’s “Metamorphosis”) or facing off against the Joker in a rapidly

If you have to keep telling people who you are, well…

COMICS ﬂooding spillway (Gabriel Hardman and Corinna Bechko’s “The Spill”). Other stories go in much stranger directions, like a fairy tale battle against Poison Ivy (Bilquis Evely’s “A Kingdom Of Thorns”) or an encounter with a disturbing white-clad mirror image of the Dark Knight (Dustin Weaver’s fantastically unsettling “Dual”). There are also dark possible futures (Nick Dragotta’s “Legacy” and Tim Seeley’s “Unquiet Knight”), and another appearance from Future State’s “Next Batman” Tim Fox (John Ridley’s “The Cavalry”). There’s a much greater emphasis here on style and experimentation than in recent DC anthologies, showcased brilliantly in Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s subversive branching gamebook-style romp “The Riddle”, and David Aja’s dazzling homage to old-school daily newspaper strips, “The Devil Is In The Detail”.

DC has assembled a weighty line-up of creators here Elsewhere, there are densely structured pages and luridly inventive layouts (especially in JH Williams III’s visually stunning story), as well as plenty of bold approaches to the character, whether it’s Tradd Moore’s trippy, abstract splash pages, Daniel Warren Johnson’s bone-cracking violence, or Dragotta’s wild, Akira-influenced approach. As with all anthologies, there are definite highs and lows, and certain stories seem to end a little too abruptly, but the misfires tend more towards just being baffling rather than outright bad. Overall this fourth volume of Black and White shows a surprising amount of consistency, pulling off enough moments of visceral action and attentiongrabbing style to once again prove just how versatile a character Batman can be. Saxon Bullock Other writers contributing to volume four include John Arcudi, Paul Dini, Scott Snyder, Mariko Tamaki and Chip Zdarsky.

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RESISTANCE RELEASED 20 MAY Publisher Proﬁle Books Writer Val McDermid Artist Kathryn Briggs

Look elsewhere if you’re after escapist uplift. In large part, the story Resistance tells is very familiar. That’ll go double if you heard crime writer Val McDermid’s radio version, produced for Radio 4’s Dangerous Visions season in 2017. Centred on journalist Zoe Meadows, it charts how a deadly bacterium transfers from pigs to humans via a food stall at a music festival, spreading globally and eventually bringing civilisation to its knees. Developed in partnership with health charity the Wellcome Trust, it fulfils its educational remit well, accessibly explaining the dangers of antibiotic resistance and the role of big pharma in stymying research. This isn’t the “heart-racing thriller” of the blurb, though – it’s far too talky for that. Only in the final stages do we enter Survivors territory. Even then, the nearest we come to nail-biting drama is second-hand accounts of people being shot while entering barricaded villages. Artist Kathryn Briggs intermittently demonstrates great skill as an illustrator, and the way certain pages are composed more like standalone works of art is effective. So is the use of montage, with panels drawn on top of medical forms or torn newsprint. But too often her figures seem crudely flat and anatomically wonky, and blotchy grey washes lend the whole thing an unattractively depressing look. Calvin Baxter GRAPHIC NOVEL

FULL TILT BOOGIE

ADAM ETERNO: A HERO FOR ALL TIME

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Rebellion Writer Alex de Campi Artist Eduardo Ocana

Originally appearing in a Regened all-ages issue before being serialised in 2000 AD itself, Full Tilt Boogie is inspired by writer Alex de Campi’s childhood love of classic anime. However, its irreverent tale of a band of intergalactic freebooters also channels Firefly’s offbeat spirit – like the much-loved TV show, Boogie takes its name from their ramshackle space craft. Whether it’s the deep bond linking aspiring bounty hunter Tee, her acerbic grandmother and her incorrigible pet cat – which can mysteriously swallow all manner of objects, including nuclear weapons – or the bitter divisions between spoilt young prince Ifan and his sister, de Campi places the idea of family and its various iterations at the heart of the story. Finding themselves embroiled in an intergalactic conflict after springing Ifan from jail, Tee and co are pursued by the sacred knights, whose members turn out to be a bunch of headstrong teenagers who don’t really know what they’re doing. Combining dynamic figurework with some striking spaceship design, Spanish artist Eduardo Ocana brings a European edge to his mangaesque art, which is further enhanced by his sombre colours. While it isn’t quite the high-octane fare its title suggests, Full Tilt Boogie remains a very welcome addition to the Mighty Tharg’s dance repertoire. Stephen Jewell

RELEASED 27 MAY

COLLECTION

Publisher Rebellion Writer Tom Tully Artists Tom Kerr, Francisco Solano López, Colin Page

BLADE RUNNER

“Brace”? It’s a bit late for that now, m’darling.

It never rains but it pours RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Titan Comics Writers K Perkins, Mellow Brown, Mike Johnson, Michael Green Artists Fernando Dagnino, Andres Guinaldo

Always pissing it down in future LA, isn’t it? The latest two Blade Runner series nail the movie’s aesthetic of neon-lit, rain-lashed streets, but also make you wonder how far this franchise can stretch. Blade Runner: Origins is a year-long series that takes us back to the start of the Blade Runner programme. Cal Moreaux is an LAPD detective and war veteran tasked with investigating an apparent suicide at the Tyrell Corporation; uncovering something more sinister, he ﬁnds himself tangling with Tyrell’s perﬁdious agents. K Perkins and Mellow Brown’s script is a slowISSUES 1-3/1-4

Both titles are solidly enjoyable comics that scratch a particular itch

burner, perfectly evoking the film’s noir tone, while Fernando Dagnino’s atmospheric art and Markco Lesko’s colours sell this as a subtly less out-of-control world than the hyper-corporate dystopia we know it will become. Blade Runner: 2029 is the sequel to the 2019 series from a couple of years back. It continues the story of conflicted hero Ashina, now using her job hunting Replicants as a front to help some escape their abusers. At the same time, a Nexus 6 named Yotun is stirring the fires of revolution. Ash is a compellingly conflicted protagonist, torn between her duties and her sympathies for the people she’s hunting, and Mike Johnson and Michael Green’s script finds some nuance in Yotun. It’s well-executed stuff, with lovely art by Andres Guinaldo. Both are solidly enjoyable comics that scratch a particular itch, but also very much pastiches that seem content to trot out the same old tropes. It would be good to see this franchise push the boundaries more. Will Salmon See more of the Battle of Kalanthia (which opens Origins) in the animated short Blade Runner: Black Out 2022.

Even in the oddball pantheon of classic British comics, Adam Eterno is one of the stranger propositions. Debuting in the pages of Thunder in 1970, the strip riffs on the legend of the Wandering Jew, its morbid flavour captured in the skull-andhourglass logo that adorns the first page like a plague warning. Adam is an alchemist’s assistant in 16th century England, impatient to quaff the elixir that will grant eternal life. Betraying his master, he’s cursed “to wander the world through the labyrinths of time”, an outcast figure whose release will only come from a weapon of solid gold. It’s a weird, doomy premise – the hero seeking his own bling-powered death – and essentially an excuse for Adam to drift through the genres of boys’ adventure strips. The stories in this collection find him facing knights and pirates and cowboys, for all the world like some gothic Mr Benn. There are adventures on the Western Front in 1916 and a memorable encounter with a Spring-heeled Jack surrogate in Victorian England. Of the artists here it’s López who defines the strip. His take is inkier, gnarlier, with a grizzled Adam whose face seems authentically carved by the centuries. Nick Setchfield COLLECTION

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

THE NINTH DOCTOR ADVENTURES: RAVAGERS Fantastic Voyage RELEASED OUT NOW! 152 minutes | Vinyl/CD/download Publisher Big Finish

He’s back! He’s really back! The likelihood of Christopher Eccleston returning to the role he departed 16 years ago once seemed impossibly small, but here we are, with 12 new audio adventures on the way. This is the ﬁrst of four box sets. This isn’t the Ninth Doctor as you might remember him, though. Eccleston steps nimbly back into the role, and the dialogue feels suitably Nine, with “sort of” promoted to a catchphrase, but there’s a cheekiness and buoyancy to his performance, with little of AUDIO DRAMA

the melancholy fans associate with this incarnation. Humour was always an aspect of the character; here it’s pushed to the fore. The scripts also go to places that the largely Earth-adjacent series one never would have. Sure, there’s a sequence that sees displaced Roman soldiers invade the 20th century, and a brief Waterloo pit stop, but for the most part Ravagers takes place in the alien environs of the Sphere of Freedom, as the Doctor and new friend Nova investigate a shady Immersive Games corporation and try to stop time eddies messing up reality. Camilla Beeput proves likeable as Nova, though the character’s still a bit of a blank slate. Jayne McKenna is good in

the role of Audrey, a satisfyingly layered antagonist whose anger towards the Doctor seems fairly justified. It’s a shame, then, that after a promising first episode, the time-twisting aspects of the plot get a little too knotted up in “Cataclysm” and “Food Fight”. The story is a bit of a muddle. Ultimately, though, this is all about hearing Eccleston back as the Doctor. He could have phoned in his performance and we’d still have been glad to have him back. Instead, he sounds energised, engaged with the material and like he’s relishing the chance to fill out his portrayal. Will Salmon Volume three (out in November) sees the Ninth Doctor face the Cybermen, while volume four unites him with the Brigadier.

Going hell for leather: Eccles is back, back, back!

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GAMES & STUFF

AVALON Volume One RELEASED OUT NOW! 178 minutes | Vinyl/CD/download Publisher Big Finish AUDIO DRAMA Sadly, Blake’s 7 cast are increasingly thin on the ground, so rather than recast major characters, Big Finish has decided to alter course somewhat. The Worlds Of Blake’s 7 will spotlight supporting characters from the B7 universe, like Bayban the Butcher, with still-living stars making guest appearances. The venture kicks off with Avalon, featuring the freedom ﬁghter from season one’s “Project Avalon” (now recast). The three stories in this set are prequels to that, set on Earth around the time of Blake’s trial. Avalon has returned following the Federation’s culling of the resistance leaders, determined to reinvigorate the movement. The second story, Gary Russell’s “Throwback”, really plays to Big Finish’s strengths. In an extended Line Of Duty-style interrogation (with a few ﬂashbacks) Travis (original actor Stephen Grief ) pumps a suspected Avalon collaborator, Argo Madison, for information. It’s tense, gripping and full of twists, with some wonderfully sardonic lines for Travis. Sadly, the other two tales are rather workmanlike “resistance blows things up” affairs, with Sally Knyvette’s return as Jenna largely wasted in the opening “Terra Firma”. And while there’s a creditable attempt to make Avalon more than just a female Blake (she’s more morally suspect), after three episodes she remains a rather sketchy character. Dave Golder

WARHAMMER QUEST: CURSED CITY Urban decay RELEASED OUT NOW! 1-4 players Publisher Games Workshop

Let’s get the bad news out of the way… Unless you’re lucky enough to ﬁnd a copy in your local store, you can’t currently buy this game. It sold out online in a matter of hours and, at the time of writing, there are no plans to make any more. That’s both bewildering and a real shame, as Cursed City is great. The previous Warhammer Quest adventure, Blackstone Fortress, was a sci-ﬁ reinvention of the venerable dungeon crawler with a smart rules set. This keeps the bulk of those rules, but returns to the fantasy setting of Age Of Sigmar. Up to four players pick a character (from a choice of eight, including a cool vampire hunter

and a burly ogre) and venture into the city of Ulfenkarn – a nonemore-goth sprawl ruled over by the despotic Radukar the Wolf. Standing in the way of deposing him is a bestiary of foes, including skeleton warriors, zombies and

bats, plus more menacing creatures like the Korsargi Nightguard and the Vargskyr – a sort of vampire werewolf bat-thing (best not ask how that happened). Wonderful models all, promising weeks of painting fun ahead.

TABLETOP GAME

This is how Milton Keynes was planned.

The game also comes with a book of Warscrolls, enabling you to ﬁeld the miniatures in Warhammer: Age Of Sigmar.

RESIDENT EVIL VILLAGE Village Of The Damned RELEASED OUT NOW! Reviewed on PlayStation 5 Also on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S Publisher Capcom

Switching the Louisiana murder house of Resident Evil 7 for the snow-capped mountain peaks of Eastern Europe, Resident Evil Village puts us through hell and back. Once again taking up the role of hapless protagonist Ethan Winters, we shoot, stab and detonate our way through hordes of monsters in the titular village. After the traumatic events in America, all Ethan wants to do is settle down with his wife and child, but he’s plunged head ﬁrst back into the nightmare when series stalwart Chris Redﬁeld kidnaps his child and murders his wife in cold blood,

setting him on a blood-soaked path to answers. Village cranks up the action in the style of the iconic Resident Evil 4, arming Ethan to the teeth with

VIDEOGAME

The changes to the rules add a neat ticking-clock dynamic, with the Skyvessel board counting down the minutes until nightfall, when the monsters get more powerful. Indeed, Cursed City has upped the threat factor as a whole. A common gripe with Blackstone Fortress was that as your characters grew in experience the monsters stayed more or less the same. Here, there’s a much stronger sense of danger, which makes for a more challenging game overall. With four types of mission to play – Hunt (basic adventures), Scavenge (search for artefacts), Decapitation (assassinate one of Radukar’s lieutenants) and Deliverance (a race through a randomly generated map to escape an deadly spell) – there’s masses to play through. Brilliant stuff. Now get hunting for a copy. Will Salmon

shotguns, grenade launchers and even mines, pitting him against hordes of gnashing Lycans. The game wants to speed things up, making sure you’re rarely short of

ammo to plug into the creatures advancing on you – but Ethan’s clunky, lumbering nature feels more suited to RE 7’s survival horror than Village’s brutal onslaught of foes. The village itself excels though, with a myriad of claustrophobic pathways where any number of beasts could be lurking just around the corner. The small town opens up new areas and cramped pathways as you delve further into the nightmare, but what should be a gamble for survival when turning a corner turns into a bit of a corridor shooter when you happen to be a gun-toting survivalist. Village’s eclectic villains (which include vampires, werewolves and mermen) are relatively one-note, but there are still some heartpounding boss encounters where a single error could spell disaster. So while it might make a few missteps, it’s nonetheless a harrowing horror experience, and worth the trip. Hirun Cryer

She’s 9’ 6”, you know. Hard to shop for.

The look of the vampiric Lady Dimitrescu (left) drew on fashion from Audrey Hepburn’s era, and The Addams Family.

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

Blastermind The SFX quiz

ZOMBIES

It’s time to show off your braaaaaaaains, as we test your knowledge of all things related to the living dead Quizmaster Ian Berriman, Deputy Editor

QUESTION 1 What is the highest-grossing zombie movie of all time?

QUESTION 2 In 28 Days Later, what caused the outbreak of the Infected?

QUESTION 3 Who directed the 1990 remake of Night Of The Living Dead?

QUESTION 4 Picture Question What’s the name of this zombie movie character? (Clue: it’s a letter of the alphabet.)

QUESTION 4

QUESTION 8

QUESTION 12

QUESTION 16

QUESTION 5 How many issues did the original The Walking Dead comic run for: 143, 193, or 243?

QUESTION 7 Name the Italian composer who provided the scores for the Lucio Fulci ﬂicks Zombie Flesh Eaters and City Of The Living Dead.

QUESTION 12 Picture Question

QUESTION 16 Picture Question

Supply the title that’s missing from this movie poster for a black and white classic.

In which ﬁlm would you ﬁnd this zombie?

QUESTION 8 Picture Question

QUESTION 13

Identify the people playing the two zombies here.

What was the UK release title for the Italian zombie movie that’s known in its homeland as Dellamorte Dellamore?

QUESTION 9 Which well-known indie ﬁlmmaker directed the 2019 ﬁlm The Dead Don’t Die?

QUESTION 10 Complete this sequence: Train To Busan, Seoul Station, _________.

QUESTION 11 Which 1992 zomcom features the undead being bloodily pulped with a lawnmower?

QUESTION 14 Which Scottish rock group composed the music for the French television series The Returned (aka Les Revenants)?

QUESTION 15 In Zombieland, what is Columbus’s number one rule for surviving the zombie apocalypse? (Clue: it’s a six-letter word.)

QUESTION 17 Name the author who penned the seven-book YA series The Enemy.

QUESTION 18 Which inﬂuential tale of the undead was ﬁrst serialised in 1922, in six parts, in a magazine called Home Brew?

QUESTION 19 In Shaun Of The Dead, which song plays on the jukebox during a zombie attack in the pub?

QUESTION 20 Name both of The Walking Dead’s spin-off TV series.

Answers

Which classic 19th century novel had zombies added to it in Seth Graham-Smith’s 2009 mash-up novel (later made into a ﬁlm)?

1 World War Z 2 The Rage Virus 3 Tom Savini 4 R (from Warm Bodies) 5 193 6 Pride And Prejudice 7 Fabio Frizzi 8 Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright (in Land Of The Dead) 9 Jim Jarmusch 10 Peninsula 11 Braindead 12 I Walked With A Zombie 13 Cemetery Man 14 Mogwai 15 Cardio 16 Dawn Of The Dead 17 Charlie Higson 18 HP Lovecraft’s “Herbert West – Reanimator” 19 “Don’t Stop Me Now” 20 Fear The Walking Dead, The Walking Dead: World Beyond

QUESTION 6

How did you do? Which Romero movie are you?

0-5

Survival Of The Dead

6-10

Diary Of The Dead

11-15

Land Of The Dead

16-19

Day Of The Dead

Dawn Of The Dead

JUNE 2021 | SFX MAGAZINE |

TotalRecall

Personal recollections of cherished sci-ﬁ The morning after lockdown ended.

PRUE’S FAREWELL On 17 May 2001, season three of Charmed ended with a humdinger of a cliffhanger. Phoebe (Alyssa Milano) is trapped in the underworld, while her sisters Prue (Shannen Doherty) and Piper (Holly Marie Combs) have been left for dead by a demonic assassin. Like every Charmed season finale, the episode ends with the manor’s stained-glass front doors magically closing. This time, its windows shatter. Charmed was never the same again. “All Hell Breaks Loose” marked not only the departure of Prue, but also Doherty, who played the character for the show’s first three seasons but quit during the summer hiatus, amid reports of a cast feud. Whatever really happened behind the scenes, the third season finale provides one heck of a farewell for

Doherty and her character – and, fittingly for an actor who’s always taken Hollywood on her own terms, Doherty directed the episode herself. Yes, she directed her own death scene, months before she officially quit. As a rabid Charmed fan, I found Doherty’s departure earth-shaking. Prue wasn’t always the most likeable character, but she was the most dependable: a grounding force. Her struggles felt raw and real. Prue battled to forge an identity beyond “mother figure”. An entire episode was dedicated to the fact that she couldn’t say “I love you”. For her to suddenly leave right when the show was finding its feet felt cataclysmic. I take comfort in the fact that Doherty’s hand is evident throughout her final episode, not least in its remarkably sober tone. Doherty would later dismiss Charmed as “a show for 12-year-olds”, but during her time on the series

she constantly pushed it to go deeper, darker. She got her wish with “All Hell Breaks Loose”, an “exposure” storyline that revealed how bad things could get for the witch sisters if their powers were revealed to the world. Piper is shot by a Wiccan wannabe and Prue holds a bloody vigil by her hospital bed before the military moves in, and tragedy strikes with the arrival of a demonic assassin. I still get chills watching Doherty’s portrait of grief in a show that often treated death with cartoon flippancy. Charmed continued without Prue, to both its detriment and benefit. Her ghost hung over the remaining five seasons and, 20 years on, “All Hell Breaks Loose” remains the show’s finest hour; it never bested it, which seems right. RIP, Prue. Josh still has recurring dreams about a reunion starring all four sisters.

Fact Attack! Combs was angry about Doherty’s departure. “How do you go from directing the season ﬁnale to being [given] a pink slip over the phone?”

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The season four premiere time-jumped forward to Prue’s funeral, with dialogue explaining how Piper survived and Prue died.

Rose McGowan stepped in as a replacement sister. Existing mythology involving their mother having an affair provided an explanation.

After appearing in 2018’s Heathers reboot, Doherty nixed the idea of a Charmed reunion. “I can’t be the reboot queen!” she joked.

SEE YOU NEXT ISSUE!

16 JUNE DETAILS ON PAGE 21

Josh Winning, freelance writer