Madame Web | review by Stephen Theaker

Madame Web has been given a lot of stick for being a bad superhero film, which in my view is a complete misunderstanding of what it is. It’s not a superhero film at all, it’s a comedy horror thriller that takes place in a superhero universe. Comics readers are very used to this kind of thing, but it seems to have baffled some filmgoers. Imagine a Final Destination film, but where nearly all the heroine’s psychic visions are of the same disaster: an evil Spider-Man type called Ezekiel murdering everyone he gets his hands on, in one location after another. Admittedly, he is the film’s weakest link (the animation of his movements looks clumsy, and it sounds as if his dialogue has been dubbed by someone else), but, overall, like Morbius, the film is very far from being the complete disaster that some would have you think.

In the Vanishers’ Palace, by Aliette de Bodard (JABberwocky Literary Agency) | review by Stephen Theaker

This review originally appeared in TQF65 (December 2019).

Some time ago, the world was conquered and enslaved by beings who subsequently left, vanished, and broke the world. Humans were left to survive as best they could among the wreckage and abandoned artefacts. Resources are scarce, plagues are rife, and life in Yên’s village is extremely difficult, the village elders always looking for an excuse to reduce the number of mouths to feed. Would-be scholar Yên is not regarded as terribly useful, but her mother is a healer, and knows a few words of power. When Head Phuoc’s daughter is seriously unwell, and all else fails, and exile is the price of failure, Yên’s mother calls on a dragon spirit to help. Yên is offered as the price.

ProleSCARYet: Tales of Horror and Class Warfare edited by Ian Bain, Anthony Engebretson, J.R. Handfield, Eric Raglin, and Marcus Woodman (Rad Flesh Press) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Overlords in saviours’ clothing: anthology takes a shot at capitalism with mixed results.

Despite its silly title, this horror anthology sympathises with those fed up with monied capitalists trying to take control of their lives, mostly in office and retail environments. It’s full of low earners (pizza deliverers, landscapers, gas station attendants, baristas) trying to make ends meet while suffering at the hands of the wealthy. In some stories, members of the upper class get their way, while, in others, the “rich fucks”, as one author puts it, pay their dues.

Poor Things | review by Stephen Theaker

A woman tries to commit suicide, throwing herself off a bridge. We later find out that she was pregnant, with a husband who would have driven anyone to despair. Her body is recovered by Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), God for short. While watching, given that Godwin was Mary Shelley's maiden name, I assumed him to be Frankenstein's monster, now a mad scientist himself, but if so or not, he had a father who performed similarly ghastly experiments on him. Now he continues the family tradition, performing ghastly miracles such as binding the head of a pig to the body of a chicken, or reanimating the body of a suicidal woman by using the brain of her unborn baby.

Bridge 108 by Anne Charnock (47North) | review by Stephen Theaker

This review originally appeared in Interzone #285 (January–February 2020), which also included a wide-ranging interview with the author.

In A Calculated Life, Jayna, a simulant in the midst of a low-key rebellion, goes on a sneaky trip to the Enclave market on Clothing Street and notes with distaste a striped cotton shirt with a fake fur collar. Nauseated to see such disparate things stitched together, she asks her friend Dave who would do that kind of work. Migrants, he tells her. Bridge 108 introduces us to the boy who made that shirt, and shows us how proud he was of it, and what it signified for him.

Caleb is a migrant boy of twelve years old who has been separated from his parents for some time. Europe is so dried out by global warming that starting a wildfire in France will see you imprisoned for life, and an arsonist in Portugal could face the death penalty. England and Wales, for now at least, have what we would consider a pleasant Mediterranean climate, warm enough for vineyards and sleeping outdoors in the summer.

For All Mankind, Season 4 | review by Stephen Theaker

Season 4 of For All Mankind, Apple's big-budget alternate-history science fiction show, jumps forward eight years. In their world, Stanley Kubrick finished AI: Artificial Intelligence himself, John Lennon played the Superbowl half-time show, and the USA got its first lesbian president. In 1995, humans had barely a toehold on Mars and a bomb had devastated NASA's command centre. In 2003, the multi-national Mars colony is well-established and the next stop planned is asteroid mining. After an early attempt ends in disaster, it takes a particularly valuable prize to get things going again.

Though we barely see Jodi Balfour as President Waverley in this season (Al Gore now being President), and many other major characters have died or retired along the way, there are some survivors from the late 1960s. Astronaut Ed Baldwin is a cranky old man now; hardly a surprise since he was such a cranky young man. Joel Kinnamon's performance conveys the character's age better than his rather dusty make-up. He doesn't want to leave Mars, especially with his daughter and grandson on the way there. He's not happy when old friend Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) is sent from Earth to become his boss. Her instinct was to decline the job, but she returns to service out of duty.

Barbarians of the Beyond by Matthew Hughes (Spatterlight) | review by Stephen Theaker

About twenty-five years ago, in the year 1499 (New Reckoning) five of the galaxy's worst criminals, known collectively as the Demon Princes, led their henchmen in an attack on a farming colony, Mount Pleasant, on the world of Providence, leaving many dead and taking the rest as slaves. Such is the nature of life in the Beyond, beyond the civilised safety of the Oikumene worlds.

The parents of Morwen Sabine were among those taken, and sold into slavery, ending up in the possession of Hacheem Belloch, on Blatcher's World. And it was into slavery that Morwen was born. We join her subsequent to her escape, as she arrives on Providence, and makes her way back to the former home of her parents. They left something of value there, hidden in her tree, that might help bring them home.

Such a Pretty Smile by Kristi DeMeester (St. Martin’s Press) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Unrequited love and somnambulant sculpting: alternating timelines explore mother/daughter bonds and suppression of women’s voices.

Such a Pretty Smile tells the stories of a mother and daughter dealing with a variety of threats, the most dangerous of which is a serial killer called The Cur. On a deeper level, the novel comments on women having their voices stifled in a society that drives them towards certain behaviours and activities. 

Like many recent horror novels, the action alternates between two timelines. In 2019, eighth-grader Lila Sawyer – a surname with clear implications – has a crush on her attractive but self-absorbed classmate Macie, who is more interested in Cameron, a junior in high school. Macie tries to push Cameron’s awkward brother Andrew onto Lila. To top it off, a murderer who kills young girls is on the prowl. 

All of Us Strangers | review by Stephen Theaker

All of Us Strangers tells the story of Adam (Andrew Scott), a gay writer in his forties, living alone in an empty London apartment block. He writes for film, and, when he has to (as he puts it), for television. He's trying to write a script about his childhood, but struggling, so he heads back to his home town to see his parents. Anyone who has seen the trailer will know already that his parents (played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) died in a car crash when he was a child. The film, however, doesn't tell you that they died until after we have met them, though one might guess from the conversation and their relative youth. Adam doesn't seem surprised to meet them, nor do they seem surprised to meet him, though they are aware that time has gone on without them.

In London, a nice chap knocks on Adam's door with a bottle of whiskey, looking for company. They are apparently the only people to have moved into the building yet and the silence is freaking him out. Harry (Paul Mescal) is from a younger generation, but bears similar emotional scars. Adam hates being called queer, because it was an insult thrown at him by bullies in the 1980s. Harry hates being called gay, because it was an all-purpose insult during the Chris Moyles era. Adam went a long time without ever having penetrative sex, because of AIDS, but for Harry's generation HIV would no longer be a death sentence and PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) drugs can prevent transmission. Though Adam understandably turns the drunk young man away at first, he later invites him over, and a tender relationship develops between them.

Eventually, Adam takes Harry to meet his parents.

Tales from the Spired Inn by Stephen Palmer (NewCon Press) | review by Stephen Theaker

This review originally appeared in Interzone #284 (November–December 2019).

It’s not the end of the world. The planet is doing just fine. But this might be the last year that there are any humans living on it, at least as we know them. As we learn in the first story in this collection, a clever murder mystery called “Dr Vanchovy’s Final Case”, this is an Earth where people are killed by bladder blade plants, falling cushions of fungus, and cats with silicon implants in their claws. Abandoned buildings, thousands of years old, reach up to the clouds, serving only as anchors for the webs of whooping hunting spiders. The air grows ever less breathable and anyone coming indoors has to leave their boots in antiseptic buckets.

The Unbalancing, by R.B. Lemberg (Tachyon Publications) | review by Stephen Theaker

The star in the ocean off the city of Gelle-Geu has slumbered for almost a thousand years, but now it is beginning to have nightmares. And because that star is tethered to the Mother Mountain, a nearby volcano, the twenty thousand inhabitants of Gelle-Geu are in no small amount of danger. Unfortunately, the previous keeper of the Star of the Tides decided that nothing could be done to stop the disaster, and so kept it secret.

When new starkeeper Ranra Kekeri takes over, and discovers how little time remains, Ranra takes a very different view. If there’s a way to calm the star, Ranra will find it, but before that can be done the new starkeeper may have to figure out what the star actually is – all while dealing with the worries caused by an aggressive former partner, Veruma, a cruel and delusional mother, Adira, and a potential new partner, the poet Erígra Lilún.

Badland Hunters | review by Stephen Theaker

Although not a direct sequel, this South Korean film is set in the world of Concrete Utopia, which doesn't seem to have had a UK release. Based on a comic called Pleasant Bullying by Kim Soong-nyung, the previous film apparently showed the aftermath of an earthquake striking Seoul so hard that all the skyscrapers collapsed. People tried their best to survive in a devastated urban environment, to build some kind of order among the chaos, but things went awry: a Sight and Sound review described it as "a Ballardian story set in a post-apocalyptic apartment complex".

I doubt many reviewers will use "Ballardian" to describe Netflix's Badland Hunters, which is a self-consciously pulpy and over-the-top affair. A prologue shows us that, when the earthquake hit, mad scientist Yang Gi-Su was trying to resurrect his daughter. Three years later, by which time a drought has added to everyone's problems, he is still mad-sciencing away, and with the help of soldiers has taken over an apartment block that still stands. With his new experiments, Yang Gi-Su aims to create humans who can survive the extended periods of dehydration and malnutrition that are practically inevitable in this dry new world.

Lone Wolf 28: The Hunger of Sejanoz, by Joe Dever | review by Rafe McGregor

Holmgard Press, hardback, £19.99, November 2022, ISBN 9781915586056

I’ve been delaying my review of the most recently published collector’s edition because I was hoping to be able to report that Holmgard Press had achieved at least one of its goals: that either the whole cycle of thirty-two Lone Wolf gamebooks had been published or that a large proportion of the cycle was back in print. Unfortunately, both goals remain in development at the time of writing. Regarding availability, there are now three editions circulating: original (paperback and secondhand only), collector’s (hardback and secondhand only), and definitive (which can be purchased from Holmgard Press, Amazon, and no doubt other online bookstores). The only definitive editions in print at the time of writing are books 1 to 12, 1 to 5 (the Kai series) in hardback and paperback and 6 to 12 (the Magnakai series) in hardback. Books 13 to 20 (the Grand Master series) are relatively easy to find on the secondhand market (and usually not extortionate, for the original editions anyway), but books 21 to 31 (the New Order series) less so. People seem to be hanging on to the Holmgard Press Collector’s Editions pretty tightly and I’ve not seen any copies of books 28 to 31 available for a while now. The original edition of Lone Wolf 28: The Hunger of Sejanoz (which was published by Red Fox in 1998) reached a peak price of £1894 on the secondhand market in February 2022, but both original and collector’s editions are now completely unavailable fourteen months after the publication of the latter. Regarding the completion of the series, Lone Wolf 32: Light of the Kai is going to be released in two parts, which Holmgard aims to publish in October 2024 and October 2025 respectively. I have to ask why. Two parts mean that Joe Dever’s original conception of a thirty-book cycle has been changed to thirty-three, but the press’s stated intention is the posthumous realisation of his vision (Dever sadly passed away in 2016). I am also concerned that the perceived need to publish the final book in two parts is evidence of an exacerbation of the source of my criticism of Lone Wolf 31: The Dusk of Eternal Night, which I reviewed in TQF69. Finally, 2024 is the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Lone Wolf 1: Flight from the Dark (yes, that does make me feel old) and it would have been great to have the cycle completed in such an auspicious year.

The Lost Village: A Novel by Camilla Sten (Minotaur Books) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Strong storytelling compensates for tired concept. 

The Lost Village unites stories from two different timelines. The present-day component covers the danger that unfolds while Alice Lindstedt’s crew shoots a teaser for a documentary about the decades-abandoned Swedish village of Silvertjarn. There is a threat out there, and we’re not sure whether it’s human or supernatural. 

The second piece gradually reveals what happened to this mining town in the 1950s, as well as the story of the birth of a mysterious baby that was left when nearly nine hundred people disappeared. 

What happened? Was this a mass suicide? Mass migration? Was it aliens? Russians coming in and kidnapping them? Alice wants to get to the bottom of this mystery. Author Camilla Sten faces the challenge of creating something new in the arguably oversaturated film-crew-encounters-threat-while-documenting-mysterious-setting horror market. The present story, told from Alice’s perspective in first person present, takes a while to get going — there’s a lot of walking around the site and not much happening to suggest the place is dangerous. Where Sten makes up for that, however, is in the conflicts between Alice and Emmy, whose friendship with Alice was shattered by something that happened in college. This tension will mount as Alice continues to make decisions that put her team at risk. Other crew members include Emma’s boyfriend Robert, Max (interested in Alice), and Tone, an amateur photographer about whom Alice withholds critical information from the others.  

The past story unfolds in third-person narration from the perspective of Alice’s great grandmother Elsa. One of Elsa’s daughters, Margarete (also Alice’s grandmother), has already left Silvertjarn when handsome and charismatic Pastor Mattias arrives and captivates many villagers, chief among them Elsa’s younger daughter Aina. Relationships deteriorate as the pastor’s influence intensifies. 

As the climax approaches, Sten steps up the tension by quickly flipping between timelines. 

The Lost Village does not top the charts in terms of scare factor. Rather, its strength lies in its handling of complex relationships and susceptibility to silver-tongued leaders.—Douglas J. Ogurek ***

Hanu-Man | review by Stephen Theaker

The first film in what is hoped to be a new superhero universe, Hanu-Man introduces us to Hanumanthu (played with a good deal of charm by Teja Sajja), a feckless young man who amuses himself with petty larceny, and feeds himself by taking the food his sister (Varalaxmi Sarathkumar) makes, and insulting her while he does it. They live in a picturesque mountain village called Anjanadri, which might be a nice place to live were it not for the village champion, who demands a tax and engages those who protest in wrestling bouts to the death.

Hanumanthu is sweet on Meenakshi (Amritha Aiyer), who has returned from the city to spend the summer. After she incurs the wrath of the village champion, skull-wearing bandits attack a coach she is on and brutally murder the other passengers. Hanumanthu, in saving her, gets himself stabbed, kicked off a cliff, and likely to drown, but a kindly god takes note of his heroism. In the water, Hanumanthu is drawn to a pearl, a magic pearl that formed around a drop of the monkey god Hanuman's blood, a pearl which will heal his wounds and grant him the strength to fight.

As long as it's sunny in Anjanadri, that is...

Hounds of the Underworld by Dan Rabarts and Lee Murray (Raw Dog Screaming Press) | review by Jacob Edwards

This review originally appeared in TQF64 (March 2019).

New Zealand’s answer to Richard Morgan.

I don’t read as much as I’d like to – life spills over; time seeps away – but there are names from my editing days at Andromeda Spaceways that I still look out for. Dan Rabarts is one of them. I particularly like the way Dan builds his stories, grounding them in both character and setting and then pursuing an idea of real substance. When I heard he’d written a novel – co-authored with Lee Murray – I put it at the top of my short but optimistic “to read” list.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Season 1 | review by Stephen Theaker

Shortly after the events of the excellent 2014 Godzilla film, a young American woman, Cate Randa (played by Anita Sewai), and a young Japanese man, Kentaro Randa (Ren Watabe) discover that they share the same father: Hiroshi Randa (Takehiro Hira), who disappeared after Godzilla fought the two MUTOs in San Francisco. He didn't die in the fight, he just said he had important things to do and scarpered, a bigamist abandoning both his families to the vagaries of an increasingly dangerous world. Cate's search for answers brings her to Kentaro, then to Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell), a mothballed Monarch monster-hunter with his own agenda, and then brings them eye-to-eye with a monster or two. For Cate and Kentaro it's the adventure of a lifetime, but this isn't Shaw's first monster mash.

Star Trek: Picard, Season 3, by Terry Matalas et al. (Paramount) | review by Stephen Theaker

This review originally appeared in TQF75 (November 2023).

The first two seasons of Star Trek: Picard were divisive, to say the least. When it was first announced – with Michael Chabon on board! – I was delighted. The first two seasons of Discovery had been smashing, so I had high hopes. Hopes soon dashed by a programme that seemed to have exactly the same problem as the final film, Star Trek: Nemesis: it had been bent out of shape in order to tempt back its two biggest stars, giving them leaden, actorly storylines.

Patrick Stewart had rejected the proposals for season one several times before finally agreeing to it, and one of the things he didn’t want to do was a mere reunion. And so we had two seasons of a substitute crew running around while Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner got their teeth stuck into some proper acting. There were episodes I enjoyed, there were others I didn’t, but it was disappointing and often quite dull. The lowest point was Picard persuading Guinan to stay on Earth for humanity’s sake, despite World War III being imminent.

The Final Girl Support Group (Berkley) by Grady Hendrix

Disjointed, drawn-out and dull mystery comments on society’s obsession with violence toward women in film.

The Final Girl Support Group details Lynnette Tarkington’s journey from justifiable paranoia and reclusiveness – she’s a two-time survivor of attacks from killers who wiped out people close to her – to a focus on being part of a group and helping others. The novel also explores a collective obsession with films in which women get mutilated and murdered by crazed men, as well as why attractive, able-bodied white women dominate the final girl stereotype.

Lynnette, whose best friend is a plant, belongs to the Final Girl Support Group led by therapist Dr Carol Elliot. Each group member is the sole survivor of a killer’s rampage. Their ordeals have also spawned horror films whose storylines echo those of classics such as Scream, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, and Friday the 13th. The most entertaining final girl is the drug-abusing Heather, an abrasive type who drops f-bombs and isn’t beyond flicking a cigarette butt into a swimming pool.

When Lynnette, whose own brutal Christmastime trial inspired Slay the Halls (invented by the author), suspects someone is trying to kill everyone in her group, she goes on high alert and tries to warn the others. As the talky first-person narrator gets closer to unveiling the killer, the danger intensifies. 

Throughout the novel, author Grady Hendrix interweaves snippets from different fictitious sources such as horror fanzine articles, scholarly film critiques, text from the back cover of a VHS tape, and police interview transcripts. Despite their attempts to create a commentary on the horror genre’s fixation with harming women, these asides detract too much from the main story. All this shifting about makes it hard to get invested in Lynnette or the other characters. 

Several drawn-out scenes lack compelling content. When Lynnette is in a car with a teenage girl, for instance, nothing happens to advance the story. The two seem to repeat the same basic ideas just to keep the story going. 

The novel’s saving grace is its focus on women uniting to combat male aggression. Another aspect worth commendation is the juxtaposition of the quick, violent deaths of horror films with the slow, exhausting deaths of reality.—Douglas J. Ogurek **

Invasion, Season 2 by Simon Kinberg, Dan Dietz, et al (Apple TV+) | review by Stephen Theaker

As season two of Invasion begins, it is 121 days since the alien invasion began (though you would think it at least a year or three from how much the children have grown), and humanity is losing the war. Benya Mabote, World Defense Coalition President (played by Moshidi Motshegwa), leads the war effort. The aliens, of whom we've seen nothing but their killing machines, have already transformed a quarter of the planet to suit themselves and show no signs of stopping. Weird new plants are growing and their spores make the air unbreathable for humans. Millions are dead.

In season one our Japanese, English and American protagonists reached their various destinations, and helped to bring down an alien ship. Unfortunately an even larger ship arrived soon after, and so they must return to the fray. The most significant character is Mitsuki (Shioli Kutsuna), who is abducted to the Amazon jungle to communicate with a downed alien ship. The man responsible is tech bro Nikhil Kapoor. Apple TV+ shows often seem to feature a Steve Jobs visionary type, and this one is played by Shane Zaza, whose line readings are peculiarly reminiscent of Commandant Lassard at the podium.