November 2022

SFX

SFX is Earth’s greatest sci-fi and fantasy magazine

SFX2 min read
First Contact
Rob Graham, email Halo on Paramount+ might be the best videogame adaptation of all time. A lot of fun with a good cast and a solid and enjoyable sci-fi series. Netflix’s Resident Evil, on the other hand, while at least better than the last couple of
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Darren Scott (DS) [email protected] Ian Berriman (IB) [email protected] Jonathan Coates [email protected] Ed Ricketts [email protected] Nick Setchfield (NS) Tara Bennett (TB) Sam Ashurst, Kimberley Ballard, Calvi
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Rants & Raves
→ Loved all the trailers out of D23 – Kowakian monkey lizards! – but the thing I’m most excited for is The Haunted Mansion… → Enjoying Tierra Incógnita, though it does feel a bit more CBBC than Disney+! → She-Hulk is such good fun, but… → … some of t
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Captain’s Log
My favourite season is finally here – Halloween! To be fair, “spooky season” begins for me on 1 September. Things are bad enough without denying yourself some little extra pleasures in life. To celebrate, here’s our biggest issue in ages, honouring h
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Red Alert
8 DOING IT FOR THE KIDS Batman’s had his day, but his family are Gotham Knights ■
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Knightfall
BATMAN HAS DOMINATED HIS hometown for decades, but new DC Comics-inspired, open-world action RPG videogame Gotham Knights is set in a Gotham where the Caped Crusader is conspicuous by his absence. Developed by Warner Bros Games Montreal, it will inst
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Newton’s Lore
RELEASED IN 1976, THE MAN WHO FELL TO Earth stands as a touchstone of screen science fiction, weaponising the natural otherworldliness of star David Bowie to tell the tale of the ultimate outsider. But for Dan Watters – writer of a new graphic novel
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News Warp
→ Thunderbolts assemble! David Harbour, Wyatt Russell, Florence Pugh, Olga Kurylenko, Hannah John-Kamen and Sebastian Stan join Marvel’s 2024 anti-hero pile-up. → Jared Leto is the Hatbox Ghost and Jamie Lee Curtis Madame Leota in Haunted Mansion. →
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Living In A Box
A MAJOR NEW exhibition opens at London’s Science Museum this month – in fact, Science Fiction: Voyage To The End Of Imagination is the most ambitious collection it’s ever staged. Held in the museum’s largest exhibition space, Science Fiction will hou
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Play Your Cards Fright
IF HORROR AND COMEDY ARE YOUR thing, then this original card game from former Halloween Horror Nights creators might be your new party favourite. Players add victims to their body count by coming up with the best three-card short stories. But can you
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A Marvellous Miracle
WITH MARVEL firming up the rights to the character in 2013, Miracleman is finally set to make his big comeback proper this month, four decades after Alan Moore, Garry Leach and Alan Davis’s seminal reinvention of Mick Anglo’s British superhero debute
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Emery Robin
Tell us about your protagonist. → Princess Gracia (based on Cleopatra) is fleeing for her life: her sister’s usurped her as queen of their theocratic sea-planet. To regain her throne, she’s determined to win over Commander Ceirran (based on Julius Ca
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Peter Straub 1943-2022
“EVERYTHING I WRITE IS IN the genre defined by my name,” said novelist and poet Peter Straub. “Everything I write is Straubian before it is anything else.” Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Straub taught himself to read by memorising the words in comic b
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The Perfect Christmas Gift
WORTH £55.00 The award-winning true wireless earbuds with four-mic noise-cancelling call technology Punchy, expansive sound with a great feature set and classy finish with up to 35 hours whole day playtime Can be submerged in water up to a depth of o
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The Night She Came Home
HOW DO YOU SOLVE a problem like Michael Myers? For Haddonfield babysitter Laurie Strode, that’s a question she’s asked herself for over 40 years. For director David Gordon Green, well, that’s not an answer he’s giving up easily. It’s day four – of 12
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Final Final Girl
Here we are again! Thanks for doing this one last time… • Are you kidding? This is my legacy. This is my final stand. This is the culmination of a long fucking time! You always say that, though. • Yeah. [Laughs] I’ve seen the meme of me with one of t
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House Calls
EVERYONE’S ENTITLED TO ONE GOOD scare at Halloween – but with 10 new haunted houses and five scare zones at Universal Orlando’s holiday celebration each year, you’ll be getting more frights than you can count… Every horror fan should experience Hallo
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Duckin’ Hell
AMEGA CRUISE SHIP, somewhere in the middle of the ocean. A missing crew member, and a brother who will stop at nothing to discover the truth. A masked killer, slaughtering a crew of teenagers in increasingly grisly ways… No, that isn’t the preview of
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Pike’s Peak
IN THE FIVE YEARS THAT DIRECTOR Mike Flanagan and his producing partner Trevor Macy have been making horror movies and series for Netflix under their Intrepid Pictures banner, they’ve been focused on telling adult stories, from Gerald’s Game to Midni
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Waking Nightmares
DON’T LOOK AT THE clock if you wake up with a start in the middle of the night. Chances are it’s the Devil’s Hour, between 3.00am and 4.00am – specifically at 3.33am, a time where things can cross between realms and the unexplainable happens. Just tu
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Making A Murderer
What can you tell us about Gideon? There have been a number of murders, and they seem to be coming closer to Lucy in terms of the circumstances of her relationship to the people. They finally catch this murderer, who is Gideon, and lock him up. But a
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The Devil Inside
HORROR WITH A LARGE SIDE OF nostalgia has been all the rage since Stranger Things made it cool for both Gen Z and Gen X to love the ’80s. It’s in that same spirit that Grady Hendrix’s 2016 horror/comedy novel My Best Friend’s Exorcism now comes to li
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The Witching Time
WHEN SALLY GREEN’S HALF Bad scooped the 2015 Waterstones Teen Book Prize, it was only a matter of time before there was a bidding war for the screen rights. In the end, it was The Imaginarium wot won it. The production company set up in 2011 by actor
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Store Wars
AN AMERICAN TRADITION with its own fanbase, Spirit Halloween is a chain of stores that take over vacant retail spaces in the run-up to October. But this year they’re breaking out and bringing the screams to screens with their very first film. Spirit
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Stake That
CINEMA MADE THE undead immortal. You hope they appreciate the irony: sunlight reduces vampires to dust but projector light has kept them alive for generations of moviegoers. While John Polidori’s 1819 novella The Vampyre popularised the idea of the b
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Bite Club
Did Hammer tell you that your films were inspired by Carmilla, the first female vampire story? Nobody explained anything. I was just a “dim dolly” as far as they were concerned. Whatever was being discussed in Hammer House in Soho was never translate
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Bloody Kids!
ANDREW HINDERAKER remembers the day that Let The Right One In entered his life. A long-time fan of the 2008 Swedish horror film, he was at a meeting at Tomorrow Studios (Cowboy Bebop, Snowpiercer) for another project when they mentioned, almost in pa
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Blood Lust
FOR A LITTLE OVER A DECADE, AMC Networks cornered the episodic horror market with their global hit franchise The Walking Dead. Starting in 2010, the series based on Robert Kirkman’s comic book spawned three spin-off series (with others still in devel
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An Interview With The Latest Lestat
Aside from Bram Stoker, Anne Rice is arguably the novelist who is most synonymous with defining vampire lore. Why do you think that is? I think Anne Rice is probably responsible for the reason why vampires are so universally loved, because they are s
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It’s A Scream!
RUNNING ORIGINALLY FOR 73 issues between 1975 and 1976, kids’ comic Monster Fun returned earlier this year thanks to Rebellion, introducing a new generation to its hilarious horror with a bi-monthly series. Now it’s celebrating the scary season with
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Unholy Alliance
AFTER CO-AUTHORING both a prequel to Dracula in 2009’s Dracula: The Undead and a sequel in 2018’s Dracul, Dacre Stoker is now continuing his great-grand uncle Bram Stoker’s blood-soaked legacy in comic book form. Published by UK independent Scratch C
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Love Bites
FOR MONSTERS, VAMPIRES HAVE quite the romantic reputation. Since Bram Stoker popularised them in fiction in Dracula (1897), the pale undead have evolved over the years from terrifying succubae to gorgeous, sensual enchanters who can tempt their prey
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The Taste Of Success
How have your career goals changed since doing three Spider-Man movies? I’m just looking for different experiences to help me grow as an actor and a producer. I’m looking really for things that push me to be more. What was it about Reginald The Vampi
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The Monster Mash
IF YOU KNOW MICHAEL Giacchino’s name, it’s likely because of his Academy Award and BAFTA-winning compositions for some of the biggest cinematic franchises in the world, including Star Wars, Star Trek, Jurassic World and several Marvel Studios films.
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Archie Enemies
AFTER THE SUCCESS OF LAST YEAR’S anthology Chilling Adventures Of Sorcery, Archie Comics is marking 2022’s spooky season with the inaugural Archie Horror Month Of Mayhem, unleashing four new titles – Chilling Adventures Presents Weirder Mysteries, Ch
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Living Doll
THE ORIGINS OF THE CREEPY DOLL concept go as far back as Ealing Studios’ chilling1945 portmanteau film Dead Of Night. One section depicted the cunning exploits of a ventriloquist dummy named Hugo that seemingly turns his master (played by Michael Red
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Kill Squad
WHEN YOU MENTION CHEERLEADERS and the horror genre in the same breath, a few movies may come to mind: Satan’s Cheerleaders (1977), All Cheerleaders Die (2013), and even the movie version of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1992), where Buffy Summers was a c
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Sorry Jack… Chucky’s Back!
Directed by original co-writer John Lafia, this solid sequel is set two years after the events of the original. When his mother is incarcerated after corroborating his killer doll story, Andy (a returning Alex Vincent) is placed in foster care with g
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Art Attack
SOME NINE YEARS AFTER HE FIRST hacked and slashed his way onto cinema screens, serial killer Art the Clown (embodied with maniacal glee by David Howard Thornton) is back. In Terrifier 2 he has returned to stalk and slash his way through the town of M
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Dead End
THE APOCALYPTIC ZOMBIE – sorry, Walker – drama reaches its conclusion this month after a mammoth 11 seasons over 12 years and 177 episodes. But it’s not really the end – with several spin-off series either currently airing (Fear The Walking Dead and
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The Pleasure Principle
AFTER 35 YEARS AND 10 MOVIES, the Hellraiser franchise has been resurrected by David Bruckner, director of The Night House. With writer and creator Clive Barker on board, it marks a return to the original source material but also a departure to new t
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The sisterh Ood Of The Travel Ling Box
NOTHING LASTS FOREVER… Soon the era of the Thirteenth Doctor – and producer Chris Chibnall – will draw to a close in “The Power Of The Doctor”, a feature-length Doctor Who special which also marks 100 years of the BBC. It’s a story that will not only
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Rock Of Ages
MOST ACTORS PLAYING superheroes don’t look like superheroes until they go through a rigorous training regime and step into their expensively tailored super-togs. Before he showed up as Ant-Man, for example, Paul Rudd was better known for bringing the
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George Saunders
ALL WRITERS HAVE THEIR PROCESS. SOME are planners; some set off without necessarily knowing where they’re going. George Saunders belongs in the latter category, but in a very particular way. He likens his approach to “procedural pointillism”, after a
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“I Won’t Lie, I Had A Cry At The End!”
How would you sum up the Centenary Special? It’s trying to make sure that we give the audience a really nice final farewell. With it being Jodie’s last, the crew really wanted to do it justice and make it as brilliant as possible, so it did feel slig
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Reviews
100 Trouble In Paradise RATINGS EXPLAINED SUPERB GOOD AVERAGE POOR TERRIBLE ■
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Frightfest Round-up
▸ SCREENING DATES 25-29 AUGUST With 74 features shown across the horror weekend, it’d take a supplement to cover everything screened at Frightfest, but here’s our pick of 10 notable films which you’ll be waiting a little while yet to see in cinemas/v
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Don’t Worry Darling
▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 123 minutes ▸ Director Olivia Wilde ▸ Cast Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Olivia Wilde, Chris Pine, Gemma Chan, KiKi Layne Following her hugely likeable 2019 teen friendship debut Booksmart, Olivia Wilde returns to the director
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Barbarian
▸ RELEASED 28 OCTOBER TBC | 107 minutes ▸ Director Zach Cregger ▸ Cast Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgard, Justin Long Watch the trailer for Barbarian and you think you know what you’re going to get: a tense red flag simulator, as a woman (Georgina Ca
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THE BRAVE ONES Season One
▸ UK/US Netflix, streaming now ▸ Showrunner Akin Omotoso ▸ Cast Sthandile Nkosi, Bonko Khoza, Nomalanga Nkosi, Zamani Mbatha EPISODES 1.01-1.06 African folklore forms the exotic backstory to a series set against the considerably less exotic backdrop
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SURFSIDE GIRLS Season One
UK/US Apple TV+, streaming now ▸ Showrunner May Chan ▸ Cast Miya Cech, YaYa Gosselin, Spencer Hermes-Rebello, Sonita Henry EPISODES 1.01-1.10 Based on the popular graphic novel series by Kim Dwinell, Surfside Girls is a cosy but charming tale of two
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AMERICAN HORROR STORIES Season Two
UK Disney+, Wednesdays US Hulu, streaming now ▸ Showrunners Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk ▸ Cast Quvenzhané Wallis, Bella Thorne, Denis O’Hare, Gabourey Sidibe EPISODES 2.01-2.08 The more traditionally formatted anthology series from the makers of Americ
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Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
UK/US Netflix, streaming now ▸ Showrunner Rafal Jaki ▸ Cast Zach Aguilar, Giancarlo Esposito, Emi Lo, Aoi Yûki EPISODES 1.01-1.10 The neon-lit alleyways of Night City were born in a role-playing game by Mike Pondsmith and eventually adapted for Polis
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THE IMPERFECTS Season One
UK/US Netflix, streaming now ▸ Creators Dennis Heaton, Shelley Eriksen ▸ Cast Italia Ricci, Morgan Taylor Campbell, Rhianna Jagpal, Iñaki Godoy EPISODES 1.01-1.10 It’s easy to see why stories about misfits with superpowers continue to resonate with y
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Thor: Love And Thunder
EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | 12 | Blu-ray (4K/standard)/DVD/download ▸ Director Taika Waititi ▸ Cast Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tessa Thompson, Christian Bale The return of co-writer/ director Taika Waititi to the Thor franchise had many
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My Best Friend’s Exorcism
▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | 18+ | SVOD ▸ Director Damon Thomas ▸ Cast Elsie Fisher, Amiah Miller, Rachel Ogechi Kanu, Christopher Lowell PRIME “Hell is a teenage girl.” Yeah, that’s a line from Jennifer’s Body, but it feels just as apt concerning this
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Maniacal Mayhem
EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED 17 OCTOBER 1936/1940/1951 | PG | Blu-ray ▸ Directors Lambert Hillyer, Arthur Lubin, Joseph Pevney ▸ Cast Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Stanley Ridges, Charles Laughton BLU-RAY DEBUT There’s a luminous quality to old Hollywood stars –
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Goodnight Mommy
▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | 15 | SVOD ▸ Director Matt Sobel ▸ Cast Naomi Watts. Cameron Crovetti, Nicholas Crovetti, Peter Hermann PRIME While there’s nothing seriously wrong with this English-language remake of Austrian filmmaking duo Veronika Franz
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Jurassic World: Dominion
EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | 12 | Blu-ray (4K/standard)/DVD/download ▸ Director Colin Trevorrow ▸ Cast Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Laura Dern, Sam Neill Dominion writer/director Colin Trevorrow says he knew where he wanted this trilogy clo
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Brian And Charles
EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED 10 OCTOBER 2022 | PG | Blu-ray/DVD ▸ Director Jim Archer ▸ Cast David Earl, Chris Hayward, Louis Brealey, Jamie Michie Eccentrics come about third, behind tea and queuing, on the list of Stuff British People Love. That alone should
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The Black Phone
EXTRAS ▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD/download ▸ Director Scott Derrickson ▸ Cast Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Jeremy Davies Making a horror film centred on a child killer requires good judgement if it’s to be done tastefully. The lat
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(round Up)
When the Justice League are kidnapped, Superman’s mutt Krypto and Bat-Hound-in-waiting Ace assemble a team including a pig, a turtle and a squirrel to rescue them in DC LEAGUE OF SUPER-PETS (Blu-ray/DVD, 10 October). Blu-ray bonuses include deleted s
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The Thousand Earths
▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 586 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Stephen Baxter ▸ Publisher Gollancz It’s safe to say that nobody does massive, epoch-spanning Hard SF quite like Stephen Baxter. He’s a writer known for his inventive speculation and s
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Illuminations
▸ RELEASED 11 OCTOBER 464 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Alan Moore ▸ Publisher Bloomsbury It’s probably not wildly unfair to describe Alan Moore’s literary output to date as “intimidating”. His first book Voice Of The Fire explored the li
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Reissues
Pick of the paperbacks: Andy Weir’s PROJECT HAIL MARY ( , out now, Penguin). The author of The Martian once again puts the sci in sci-fi here, as a scientist wakes up on an interstellar craft, discovering that he’s the last surviving member of a miss
SFX7 min read
Beyond The Burn Line
▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 464 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook ▸ Author Paul McAuley ▸ Publisher Gollancz Paul McAuley has moved in recent years between noirinflected SF, climate change near-future fiction and hard SF – respectively Something Coming Throug
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Andy Weir
What’s your daily writing routine like? I wake around 6.00am, because I have a baby. Once the morning chaos settles down, I spend the rest of the morning doing work stuff that isn’t writing: answering fan mail, talking to my agent, scheduling events.
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Bullet Time
▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! 159 pages | Hardback/ebook ▸ Author Joe Fordham ▸ Publisher Titan Books • Eighteen interviewees here. No Patrick Stewart or Brent Spiner, but the likes of Jonathan Frakes and Alice Krige more than compensate. • Draws some interest
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Lost In Time
A machine used to send criminals on a one-way trip into the past. One of its inventors, Sam, wrongly accused of murder. Will his creation become his undoing? “The act of transporting something with Absolom essentially branched our universe – it creat
SFX4 min read
Axe: Judgment Day
▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Marvel Comics ▸ Writer Kieron Gillen ▸ Artist Valerio Schiti ISSUES 1-3 When a big event comic arrives, and it’s yet another example of Marvel or DC going “Hey – what if these two separate teams of superheroes actually f
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Amazing Fantasy 1000
▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Marvel Comics ▸ Editor Nick Lowe ▸ Artists Various SPECIAL ISSUE Anyone wondering if they missed the other 900-ish issues of Amazing Fantasy can rest easy – Marvel is playing its sneaky renumbering game, cooking the book
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The Thirteenth Doctor
After which sporting event was Jodie Whittaker’s casting announced? What were the first words spoken by the Thirteenth Doctor? In “Kerblam!”, what is the rather unusual lethal threat? Name this historical figure from a Thirteenth Doctor story. What h
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The Island At The Top Of The World
I went to primary school before the advent of video recorders (I’m ancient), so we saw films on actual film, projected in the school hall. Among these formative, proto-cinema experiences, I remember Children’s Film Foundation fare like A Ghost Of A C
SFX3 min read
The Last Of Us Part I
▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Reviewed on PlayStation 5 ▸ Publisher Sony VIDEOGAME After a fungal contagion spreads, creating ravenous “infected”, our hero Joel is met with tragedy… then we skip on 20 years. The world is a cruel, nasty mess, and he’s become
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Steelrising
▸ RELEASED OUT NOW! ▸ Reviewed on PlayStation 5 ▸ Also available on Xbox Series S|X, PC ▸ Publisher Nacon VIDEOGAME What if King Louis XVI had attempted to thwart the French Revolution by unleashing an army of clockpunk automatons onto the streets of

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