Meet The Contestants In Next Year's Street Fighter

Street Fighters Ryu and Ken reunite when Chun-Li recruits them for the World Warrior Tournament. As they face a hidden conspiracy, they must confront each other and their past - or face destruction.

I've never really been a video gamer, but I used to enjoy mashing the buttons playing Street Fighter at university (we occasionally had a set-up where the game was projected onto a giant screen in our lounge).

Fighting games and demolition driving games were my favourites, as you could trade off a lack of skill with furious button punching up to a certain point.

Anyway, if nothing else, it means I recognise more characters in this line-up than I did when I watched the Mortal Kombat film the other year.

Street Fighter, starring Jason Momoa, 50 Cent, Cody Rhodes, and David Dastmalchian, is currently scheduled to hit cinemas on October 16, 2026, while Mortal Kombat II beats it to the punch (despite being pushed back from its original release date of last October) with a new opening date of May 15.

The Last Voyage of The Demeter (2023)

If you know Bram Stoker's Dracula, then you know The Last Voyage of The Demeter.

Inspired by the book's single chapter that details the captain's log of the doomed voyage from Bulgaria to England, Bragi Schut Jr. and Zak Olkewicz's script, directed by Trollhunter's André Øvredal, extrapolates those few pages into a near-perfect 119-minute 'spam in a cabin' horror flick.

It's July 1897 and the merchant ship Demeter is carrying cargo bound for London, including - unknowingly - a number of boxes of Transylvanian soil and one holding the sleeping body of the vampire lord, Count Dracula (Javier Botet).

Once the ship is at sea, with the crew eager to get to England quickly to earn some bonus pay, the deaths begin.

First the livestock, which was to be the crew's food for their journey, is mysteriously butchered.

Then the crew start being killed off.

The Last Voyage of The Demeter is Alien on a nautical vessel rather than a space vessel, the ship's small crew trapped at sea, being hunted by a supernatural killing machine that dines on them as they bring him closer to his desired destination: the fresh feeding grounds of Victorian England.

Kong: Skull Island's Corey Hawkins is the new ships doctor, Clemens, a man of science to counter the superstitious crew, headed by the ever-excellent Liam Cunningham (aka Game of Thrones' Davos Seaworth, another sailor of note) as Captain Eliot: an almost unrecognisable David Dastmalchian as Wojchek, the quartermaster; and Jon Jon Briones (the genie from Sinbad; The Fifth Voyage) as Joseph, the highly religious ship's cook.

A young Romani stowaway, Anna (Aisling Franciosi) is found when one of the boxes of soil is accidentally opened by rough seas, and we later realise that she was Dracula's packed lunch for the voyage.

Captain "this is my last voyage, I'm going to retire" Eliot even has his eight-year-old grandson, Toby (Woody Norman), along with him and if you think "oh, they wouldn't hurt a child" you clearly haven't been paying attention.

The fate of the Demeter and its crew is inevitable, a foregone conclusion set down in the text of Stoker's game-changing vampire opus.

But that doesn't stop The Last Voyage of The Demeter being nail-bitingly tense and claustrophobic, with several good jump scares, oozing atmosphere from every frame, and featuring a genuinely monstrous depiction of Dracula.

The vampire is no suave British character actor, instead starting a gaunt, grey ghoul and evolving through the film into a giant, Nosferatuesque bat-creature, unsentimental in its brutal slayings.

What adds to the terror is the realisation - to a modern audience - that these people have no idea what a vampire is or how to kill it, they don't know its powers and weaknesses and there is no spoonfeeding of exposition to give them a clue.

All Clemens learns from Anna is that the beast is Dracula, it drinks blood and has kept her people in servitude through fear of its wrath.

Unfortunately, The Last Voyage of The Demeter falls down in its denouement, at the very last moments when it suddenly decides to try and give the tale a pointless "feel good/Hollywood" ending, when the source material's nihilistic resolution would have had a more lasting impact.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Late Night With The Devil (2023)

On Halloween night 1977, in a bid to win the ratings war, late night talk show host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) hosted a live demonic possession on his show, Night Owls.

The (faux) documentary, Late Night With The Devil, screens the whole show, intercut with black and white, candid, behind-the-scenes footage when the talk show cuts to commercials.

It opens though with an account of Jack's rise to fame (narrated by Michael Ironside), his involvement with The (the very real) Grove, the tragic death of his wife Madeleine (Georgina Haig), and his constant struggles - and failures - to score better ratings than The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

The documentary segues smoothly into Jack's Halloween special episode of Night Owls, which opens with an obviously fake psychic, Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), who clashes with magician-turned-professional sceptic Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss).

Eventually, Christou (who might actually be sensing something) ends up projectile vomiting blood over Haig before he is taken off to get medical attention, making way for the evening's main attraction.

Then  the show (and film) introduces us to young Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), who was rescued from a brutal Satanic cult (who all, otherwise, died by fire rather than allow the FBI to take them in). Her saviour was parapsychologist author June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon), who became the girl's guardian and then started working with her, trying to understand if she really was possessed by a supernatural entity.

From the get-go, Lilly is a demonic Jan Brady with a dead-eyed thousand yard stare, but once June reluctantly calls forth whatever is inside the young girl - she refers to it as Mr Wiggles - her transformation is terrifying and impressive.

Even amongst an impressive line-up of older actors, Torelli gives a bravura performance as the centre of attention, who manages to be nightmarishly creepy even when seemingly trying to be nice and not channelling dark forces from the great beyond. 

Dark secrets are laid bare, convictions are challenged, people die graphic deaths, and general shenanigans ensue.

The build-up, and pacing, directed by Cameron and Colin Cairnes from their own script, is methodical and steady, giving the gradual of collapse of the Night Owls talk show into chaos and carnage a genuine sense of believability.

Perhaps this really is recently unearthed footage from a legendary episode of American '70s late night talk show folklore...

This is the stuff creepypasta and urban legends are born out of.

Kind of aiming for similar territory as our Ghostwatch (with a liberal dash of The Exorcist), Late Night With The Devil does a spectacular job of maintaining verisimilitude while seeding clues through its simple and straightforward storyline, right up until the end.

It just fails to stick the landing by seemingly breaking its format to peel back the curtain for anyone who hadn't already twigged why everything was happening.

Maybe a documentary bookend, akin to the opening of the film, digging more into Jack's background might been better, but then again the repeated image of Jack shouting into the camera "turn off your television" is still very striking (and very Invasion of The Body Snatchers).

I guess it could be classed as found footage, but don't be put off by that, this isn't hours of shaky cam as teenagers run through woods in the middle of the night, this has higher aspirations than that.

In truth, while "found footage" can be more miss than hit with me, I do have a particular soft spot for this story format sub-genre, the mockumentary presenting something supernatural as if it were real, especially when they are done well - which Late Night With The Devil is (barring that one niggle of mine).