"Come With Me If You Want To Laugh"

Variant cover art by Bill Galvan

He's faced The Punisher, The Predator, the Evil Dead's Army of Darkness, even a Sharknado, and now unstoppable Archie Andrews runs afoul of The Terminator... when the futuristic, killer cyborg ends up in Riverdale.

Launching in October, the five-issue miniseries, Archie vs. The Terminator, sees the trouble begin with John Connor enrolling at Riverdale High.

Tracked by the Terminator, John can rely on his mother, Sarah Connor, for assistance, but who is going to protect Betty, Veronica, Jughead, and the other residents of the Riverdale?

Celebrating the 35th anniversary of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the new series is written by The Terminator: Metal's Rory McConville, with interior art by the father and daughter team-up of Steven and Lily Butler.

Published by Dynamite, in collaboration with StudioCanal and Archie Comics, the first issue comes with a variety of covers on offer, which you can see here along with character designs for the Connors and their cyborg foe.

Main cover art by Francesco Francavilla

Variant cover by Björn Barends

Variant cover by Robert Hack

Five Minutes of People Reading The Necronomicon

This compilation was released as part of the promotion for Evil Dead Burn, thus the segment from the current movie gets the most screen time.

I like the fact that not all of the spells read out are the same, suggesting multiple ways of raising the deadites, which really intrigues the gamer in me, always seeing the potential for bringing the Necronomicon into my own roleplaying games... no matter what the genre or setting.

And I can't help wondering what old HP Lovecraft would make of this cinematic use of the legendary, fictional tome from his tales of cosmic horror? 

The Friday The 13th Prequel Nobody Asked For

A prequel to the Friday the 13th franchise, the series follows single mother Pam Voorhees who has been unable to shake her grief after her young, sickly son Jason tragically drowned in the town lake almost a year before. 

When two strangers arrive at Pam’s door digging into her past, a disturbing chain of events are set into motion, leaving the townspeople of Crystal Lake wondering: just who is Pam Voorhees?

Do we really need a prequel to the Friday The 13th franchise? Do we need a deep dive into Pamela Voorhees' psyche? Surely we know all we need to know from the first movie?

There's no mystery about any murders here (spoiler: it was Pamela Voorhees) unless the show screws with the established mythology or buries it under a mountain of unnecessary distractions (as was done with the pointless, and quickly forgotten, Bates Motel).

Of course, I'm going to watch all eight episodes of Crystal Lake when they drop, though, as I'm a big fan of the Friday The 13th movies. And it stars Linda Cardellini (which is enough reason to watch anything).

Maybe, it will (fingers crossed) tie into the Deadite/Evil Dead seeds sown in Jason Goes To Hell. Now, how cool would that be?

Or, at least, add in something different and supernatural to the story of the Voorhees family.

You can learn more about the show from this useful article over on Dread Central.

Crystal Lake comes to Sky in the UK this October.

This Week The Evil Dead Burn

French poster for Evil Dead Burn

Your Highness (2011)

In the little publicity over here at the time of its cinematic release much play was made of Your Highness - and even later in the marketing of the DVD - being a "stoner comedy", with much of the humour seemingly derived from pot-related jokes and situations.

But that is so not the case. Your Highness is a brilliant, well-observed, swords-and-sorcery film that happens to also be hilariously, tears-down-the-cheek, laugh-out-loud funny, obscenely lewd and crude (although with very little actual nudity), quite gross at times with moments of graphic violence and only about two or three scenes involving weed.

James Franco is Fabious, heroic favoured son of King Tallious (Charles Dance) who returns home from his latest quest, having rescued a beautiful maiden - the naïve Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel) from the tower of the evil sorcerer Leezar (Justin Theroux).

Unfortunately, on the day of Fabious and Belladonna's wedding, Leezar crashes the festivities and kidnaps the bride-to-be - thus prompting Fabious to embark on another quest.

However, the King insists that Fabious is joined by his foul-mouthed, feckless and irreverent brother Thadeous (Danny McBride) to "make a man of him".

After an unfortunate, early betrayal, the brothers  - and Thadeous's page Courtney (Rasmus Hardiker) - team up with lethal, no-nonsense warrior Isabel (Natalie Portman) who saves them from an acid-spitting hydra - and manages to look utterly gorgeous throughout the movie.

The dialogue is a hearty cocktail of cod-dramatic, almost Shakespearean, seriousness and jaunty slang - with the only true anachronism in the story being the appearance of a plate of fishfingers!

The marketing for Your Highness was so intent on pushing the "edgy" drugs angle - which is such a small part of the humour anyway - that it failed to even hint that this was a film with magic and monsters in!

In fact, this is everything I had hoped for from Kröd Mändoon And The Flaming Sword Of Fire (remember that?) and failed to get.

Old School gamers, in particular, will get a kick out of this because Your Highness is basically a true representation of "in-character" dialogue between participants in a Dungeons & Dragons adventure - swearing, banter, crude jokes, sexual innuendo and a lot of laughing - while slashing their way through a "rescue the princess" scenario.

There's a chance this could become the gamer's 21st Century go-to movie for "at table quoting" - alongside earlier classics such as Monty Python And The Holy Grail and Army Of Darkness.

It also made me think: there aren't enough "rescue the princess" scenarios in gaming these days. It's all about finding a special treasure (which Thadeous does) and averting prophecies (which they do), but Your Highness is a great example of how you can blend the classic dungeon-crawl, hack'n'slash mentality with a genuine romantic story as well - and not let the latter get so soppy as to overwhelm the former.

This sort of adventure is heightened by giving the player-characters a personal stake in their quest - which is why it's always good, eventually, to find out a bit about a character's backstory or try to inveigle them into some kind of in-campaign romance or relationship.

SHOW ME: Lee Cronin's The Mummy (2026)

Who's The Mummy? Katie (Natalie Grace)
Mummy's Love? n/a
Where? Egypt (Cairo/Aswan) & Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
How Long? 134 minutes

Television reporter Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) is stationed in Cairo, Eygpt, with his pregnant wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), and their two young children, Katie (Emily Mitchell) and Sebastian (Dean Allen Williams).

Just as the family is preparing to move back to their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Charlie has a new job offer, Katie is kidnapped from their back garden by a mysterious woman known only as The Magician (Hayat Kamille).

The police investigation, led by a suspicious detective (Husam Chadat) and his English-speaking assistant Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), gets nowhere.

The story jumps ahead eight years and the Cannons are settled back in Albuquerque, sharing their house with Larissa's mother, Carmen (Veronica Falcon).

Katie's bedroom remains a shrine to her, while the other two kids, Sebastian (Shylo Molina)  and Maud (Billie Roy) still share a room.

However, in Egypt a small plane crashes outside of Aswan and in the wreckage is a 3,000-year-old black, basalt sarcophagus.

When opened by a pair of archaeologists, they are very shocked to discover it contains the mummified body of Katie (Natalie Grace) - still very much alive.

A brief aside here, because this issue crops up several times in Lee Cronin's The Mummy, but if the police had investigated the two men who had died in the plane crash, the story would have been a lot shorter. But, for some reason, this obvious angle is never pursued or even really mentioned again until the final act revelation of what's been going on this whole time.

Katie is, unsurprisingly, in a very bad way, and apparently in a locked-in state, yet her doctors in Cairo - without any real medical justification or investigation - tell her parents that the best "medicine" would be to take her home to Albuquerque!

Clearly that serves the movie, but - like ignoring the inconvenient aspects of the plane crash - makes no logical sense.

Determined not to rely on actual specialists or anything sensible like that, the Cannons bring their traumatised daughter back from Egypt and Carmen insists on caring for her daughter, pretty much on her own.

Meanwhile, journalist Charlie is determined to get to the bottom of what happened to Katie in those missing eight years.

However, as Katie begins to wake up it very quickly becomes clear that she is not the Katie her family remember.

There is something very wrong with her. And it starts to spread to other members of the family.

As Lee Cronin had written and directed one of my favourite horrors of recent years, Evil Dead Rise, I cannot express just how excited I was to learn that he would next be tackling my favourite classic monster archetype, the mummy.

Add to that the fact that during pre-release promotion for Lee Cronin's The Mummy he teased that he considered this to be - unofficially - set in the same world as the Evil Dead movies.

However, I was still expecting a "mummy" movie, not an in-your-face (albeit "unofficial", I guess) addition to the Evil Dead mythos.

Sure, mummification processes are involved - and mentioned once - but Lee Cronin's The Mummy is not a "mummy" movie as such, but way more a mix of Evil Dead with a side order of The Exorcist thrown in for good measure.

This is a film with demonic possession, levitation, telekinesis, corpse defilement, bodily transformation and decay, ceiling scuttling, and creepy voices, with quite a bit echoing Cronin's brilliant Evil Dead Rise.

For a pulpy horror the 134-minute runtime is too long and The Mummy starts very slowly and juddery, despite an intriguing pre-credit sequence.

However, it does gains momentum as the horrors escalate within the Cannon home.

The narrative then gets slightly confusing as it jumps all around the place, between America and Egypt, with different avenues of investigation being pursued, while the demon within Katie gradually spreads its evil to her young siblings.

I also found the prevalence of video cassettes and - more tellingly if this was all taking place in (as it appears) a contemporary, 21st Century setting - VHS players rather jarring.

Perhaps Charlie needed one for his job, but I do think - if that's the case - a passing comment might have it made it stand out less as a plot convenience.

Not as convenient, though, as Chekov's morse code: when we first meet Katie and Charlie he is testing her on morse code, apparently for a badge with the Egyptian eagle scouts or something. It's really obvious that this is IMPORTANT. Again, it's never explained, it's just some heavy-handed foreshadowing.

While the film is disappointing in general, with plot holes that if addressed could have shortened the movie, at least when it gets to the horror parts Cronin doesn't let us down, delivering twisted gore and putrescent body horror of the finest kind.

Not that I mind having my expectations subverted - this the horror genre after all - but when the subversion changes the subject into something else completely, it becomes rather bemusing.

I just wish, rather than saying he's making a "mummy" movie, Cronin had been allowed to make another Evil Dead movie, introducing the indestructible, family-hating,  Nasmaranian demon into that canon if he so wanted.

Because I really can't help feeling that's where it belongs. Kinda like Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday.

When I come to file my Blu-Rays, Lee Cronin's The Mummy will be sat next to my Evil Dead collection, rather than my Mummy movies.

A WESTERN NOVELLA BY BRUCE 'ASH' CAMPBELL!!!

A new arrival for my "to be read" shelf has immediately leapfrogged to the head of the queue, and will be the next book I crack open once I've finished Mark Finn's Fight Card: The Adventures of Sailor Tom Sharkey .

So, what is this tome of great literature, I hear you ask...

It's only a freakin' Western novella written by the B-movie legend Bruce Campbell.

That's Ash from the Evil Dead franchise, Autolycus from Xena: Warrior Princess, Pizza Poppa in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Winkie Gate Keeper in Oz the Great and Powerful, and countless other roles: the most pertinent of which is, possibly, the titular lead in all 28 episodes of the weird western The Adventures of Brisco County Jnr.

This isn't Campbells first book, as he's written a number of humorous autobiographical memoirs, as well as a couple of satirical works and a political thriller.

But this is a Western! 

Released just at the tail-end of the month-long window for the annual June On The Range event, sadly, I didn't learn of Reconcile until too late for that reading challenge.

But, never mind, the 105-page novella is now in my greasy mitts.

The back cover blurb, which is also the promotional text for the book, reads as follows:

"My mother, Joanne, loved the Western genre. She read every Zane Grey novel he ever wrote. I know because I drew stick-figure cartoons in the margins of her massive paperback collection.

"Westerns, by nature, are riddled with clichés – the steely-eyed, unshaven hero protecting innocent pioneers from brutal, unforgiving savages.

"With Reconcile, I tried to sidestep many of the cliché elements we've read or seen in Westerns for a generation. Reality isn't tidy or reliable. Reality has unpleasant circumstances that don't always resolve themselves like they do in the movies. In the heat of battle, the "good guys" and "bad guys" aren't so easily defined.

"In the sprawling history of the American West, I'd like to think a different kind of story was possible, and I hope you enjoy it."

So, do I have a clue what it's about? Nope. But it's a Western... written by Bruce Campbell. That's all I need to know. And that's why it's at the top of my TBR list!

PS. I know the cover looks like AI, but I have read that it is genuine art from a friend of Bruce's that has been "modified" by AI (I guess to put his head on the main character?).

Yes, I think it's disappointing if AI was involved in the production of this cover, even in an apparently, "small" way. Perhaps future editions will feature real, untampered, AI-free art? That would be nice.

The Deadites Are Coming To Swallow Your Soul!

Evil Dead Burn lights up cinemas from July 10 and with the ever-expanding Grand Guignol franchise batting a thousand, I have high hopes for this latest gruesome offering.

N.B. This is not a trailer for the squeamish!

Down in one, down in one, down in one!

The Originals Were Great, The Remakes Even Better!

For this video, I had to leave out some very solid options, including 2013's Evil Dead, 2006's The Hills Have Eyes, and 2004's Dawn of the Dead. But five means five, so today I’m saving the remakes that, for me, really proved why the story was worth telling again.

In this video from Luminism, five remakes of old horror movies are chosen as the superior versions!

CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON!!!

In lieu of the traditional "character posters", the promotional campaign for Evil Dead Burn has taken a more martial approach, profiling household items that will find alternate uses in hardcore horror flick.

The eagerly-awaited latest entry in the Evil Dead franchise is due to arrive in the UK on July 9.

Jabberwocky (1977)

A Dark Age kingdom is being terrorised by a mysterious monster, driving much of its populace to seek shelter behind the walls of the main city.

Eventually doddery, old King Bruno the Questionable (comedy legend Max Wall) decides to organise a brutal jousting tournament to find "a champion" to slay the beast.

This is despite appeals by his equally aged Chancellor, Passelewe (the always excellent John Le Mesurier of Dad's Army and the Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy radio plays) who would rather the search was conducted in such a way as to not keep killing off the land's knights.

Meanwhile, upon the death of his father, clueless and clumsy Dennis Cooper (future national treasure Michael Palin) decides to leave the village where he grew up and move to the city, to start afresh.

This leads to a series of chaotic, often slapstick, set-pieces as he bumbles his way through every encounter from trying to get into the city to being mistaken for a prince-in-disguise by Bruno's daughter, the princess (Deborah Fallender).

Her hand-in-marriage and half the kingdom are being offered by the king to whoever kills the troublesome monster.

After his only friend, Ethel the lusty squire (Steptoe and Son's Harry H. Corbett), is accidentally killed, Dennis ends up as the squire to the eventual champion of the joust, Red Herring (Dave Prowse aka Darth Vader), and the two brave men set out into the mist-dappled lands, looking for the fearful monster.

However, the church and the rich merchant-nobles of the city aren't so keen to see the creature murdered because it is surprisingly good for business, as people are buying and praying more.

Therefore, they engineer an ambush by the Black Knight (also Dave Prowse), and his small gang of thugs, to take out Red Herring - and Dennis - before they actually reach the monster's lair.

I can't believe I was halfway through my sixtieth cycle around the sun before I made time to see Jabberwocky, a wonderfully, very British, dark comedy with smatterings of gory Grand Guignol.

While strictly not a Monty Python movie, it is written and directed by Terry Gilliam, stars Michael Palin and features several Python regular collaborators, as well as a host of British comedy faces of the era.

There's also the visual, grimy Medieval verisimilitude of 1975's Monty Python and The Holy Grail (which Gilliam co-directed) and a similar picaresque throughline to 1979's Life of Brian.

The monster - which may be the Jabberwocky of the title, but is never directly called that - remains unseen until the climax, with Gilliam instead employing canny, low-budget camera techniques as would be used in Sam Raimi's 1981 Evil Dead (and then the rest of that gore-drenched franchise).

Once we finally see it, the Jabberwocky (a man in a costume) is more Classic Doctor Who era alien than glorious Sir John Tenniel illustration, but that just heightens the surreal craziness of the film.

The film's title, and monster's possible name, comes, of course, from the famous nonsense poem in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.

Snatches of the poem are heard, Greek Chorus-like, throughout the film, recited by an unseen - and unidentified - Punch and Judy puppeteer, heightening the mythological - or fairy tale - nature of the adventure.

Ultimately, the 105-minute Jabberwocky may not be as laugh-out-loud funny as much of Gilliam's other work, but it still manages to be subversive and smart behind its veneer of blood, guts, and toilet humour.

Horror's Heating Up In Evil Dead Burn Taster

START OF A NEW FEATURE: Tim Does Film Posters!

Cheers to your family... your perfect flesh and blood. 🔥🔥🔥

Watch this new clip from Evil Dead Burn, only in cinemas July 10.

Evil Dead Burn unleashes the franchise’s most savage and terrifying ride to date, blazing onto big screens with an all-new chapter of carnage and demonic mayhem.

After the loss of her husband, a woman seeks solace with her in-laws in their secluded family home. 

As one by one they are transformed into Deadites - turning the gathering into a family reunion from hell - she comes to discover that the vows she took in life... live on even in death.

Little-Known Stop-Motion Monster Movies

Rare VHS oddities. Forgotten fantasy films. Handmade monsters hiding in places you’d never expect.

Today we’re digging into some obscure and little-seen movies that delivered surprisingly great stop-motion creatures, from demonic vultures and clay dinosaurs to cyberpunk war machines and prehistoric monsters.

Thanks to the excellent SirBootis Flicks channel for this selection.

Every Family Has Demons - Some More Literal Than Others

Evil Dead Burn unleashes the franchise’s most savage and terrifying ride to date, blazing onto big screens with an all-new chapter of carnage and demonic mayhem.

After the loss of her husband, a woman seeks solace with her in-laws in their secluded family home.

As one by one they are transformed into Deadites—turning the gathering into a family reunion from hell—she comes to discover that the vows she took in life... live on even in death.

Evil Dead Burn in cinemas July 10, directed by Sébastien Vaniček, and featuring Souheila Yacoub, Tandi Wright, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan, Errol Shand, Maude Davey, George Pullar, Greta Van Den Brink.

I Love That Deadites Are Getting This New Lease of Unlife

Evil Dead Burn unleashes the franchise’s most savage and terrifying ride to date, blazing onto big screens with an all-new chapter of carnage and demonic mayhem.

After the loss of her husband, a woman seeks solace with her in-laws in their secluded family home. As one by one they are transformed into Deadites — turning the gathering into a family reunion from hell — she comes to discover that the vows she took in life... live on even in death.

Directed by Sébastien Vaniček, and starring Souheila Yacoub, Tandi Wright, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan, Errol Shand, Maude Davey, George Pullar, and Greta Van Den Brink, Evil Dead Burn will be in theaters July 10.

Still Looking More Evil Dead Than Mummy, But...

While the trailers are still making Lee Cronin's The Mummy look more Evil Dead than Mummy, that doesn't mean I'm not rather excited for the possibilities of what this film has to offer.

Lee Cronin's The Mummy is poised to unwrap itself in British cinemas from April 17.

DEATHSTALKER WEEK: Deathstalker (2025)

Warrior and scavenger Deathstalker (Daniel Bernhardt) is pulled into the "machinations of the gods" when he steals a magical amulet from a dying prince on a battlefield.

Teaming up with goblin-dwarf wizard Doodad (Laurie Field, voiced by Patton Oswald) and thief Brisbayne (Christina Orjalo), this trio of rogues have to first undo the curse on Deathstalker that has bound the amulet to him.

Then they have to find an (impractical) four-bladed magical sword and thwart the apocalyptic plans of the evil sorcerer Nekromemnon (Nicholas Rice), his right-hand goon, the undead Jotak (Paul Lazenby) and their legions of monstrous Dreadite soldiers.

Written and directed by Psycho Goreman's Steven Kostanski (who was born three years after the original Deathstalker was released) Deathstalker (2025) is a loving tribute to vintage, low-budget, swords-and-sorcery flicks.

It is set in a land awash with Hawk The Slayer mist, and our heroes fight their way through a never-ending onslaught of Power Rangers (and Psycho Goreman) style rubber-suit monsters and Evil Dead-style stop-motion creations.

And, yes, the infamous porcine-faced humanoid makes a return appearance, although he's had a bit of a glow-up since the original movies. You may call him a pig-man, but to me he's a Gygaxian orc.

The ultimate weapon that Stalker is seeking - as I suspected the other day - is even an on-the-nose homage to Alert Pyun's The Sword and The Sorcerer.

In fact, the only thing that really differentiates this from the earlier Deathstalker movies is the total absence of sleaze. There's no nudity (gratuitous or otherwise), not even a hint of sexual tension between Stalker and Brisbayne. Instead, they are treated as <shudder> equals!

And, you know what, I didn't miss it. Deathstalker's linear plot is a blood-spattered, non-stop riot of over-the-top cartoonish violence, interspersed with some witty dialogue, subtle foreshadowing, and a cavalcade of rubbery monsters that could easily have just rolled out of an old school Dungeons & Dragons adventure.

You may recognise him as Kirill from John Wick or Agent Johnson from The Matrix Reloaded, but Daniel Bernhardt, who has a definite air of Jon Hamm in his mien, is superb as the titular antihero and the door is definitely left wide open at the end for sequels.

I, for one, would welcome further adventures with Bernhardt reprising the role.

The only nit I would pick with Kostanski's script - and this is as much personal taste as anything - is giving Deathstalker a backstory that necessitates him having a "pre-Deathstalker" name.

Honestly, this is completely unnecessary as the name could have been excised from the script and it would have read just as well if he was a "man with no name" type.

The film was part-funded by Kickstarter in 2024, but (for reasons) as there were no Blu-Rays (or even DVDs) on offer as incentives I just chipped in at the lowest level to get my name in the credits... because I'm easily pleased.

This did mean I had to import the Blu-Ray off my own back this week - thanks to eBay.

I know there are going to be those who moan about what's missing from the traditional Deathstalker formula (even though, surprisingly having now seen the film, it is front-and-centre in the comic book spin-off released by Vault Comics in the wake of the Kickstarter).

However, if anything, 2025's Deathstalker proves you can still make outrageous, trashy, dark fantasy sword-and-sorcery movies in this day and age that cater to audiences both old and new.

My "thank you" in the credits: best $10 I've ever invested in a Kickstarter 😉

What A Great Time To Be A Deadite

Dig that funky retro logo for Evil Dead Wrath

After the sheer brilliance of Evil Dead Rise (let's be honest, there's never been a bad Evil Dead movie), not one but two continuations of the saga are being worked on.

Evil Dead Burn is now due out this July 22 and now it's been announced that work has begun on Evil Dead Wrath, written and directed by Francis Galluppi.

Nothing is known about the plots of either of these new additions to the franchise, although there are rumours that Bruce Campbell may return as the iconic Ashley J. 'Ash'  Williams in Wrath.

Production has begun this week - in Auckland, New Zealand - on Evil Dead Wrath. The occasion was marked by the release of the movie's striking, retro logo (pictured above).

Are You My Mummy?

The young daughter of a journalist disappears into the desert without a trace -  eight years later, the broken family is shocked when she is returned to them, as what should be a joyful reunion turns into a living nightmare.

I wasn't sure about this iteration of The Mummy until I saw that trailer and got major Evil Dead vibes from it.

Lee Cronin, of course, directed the marvellous Evil Dead Rise, so that's not really surprising.

Archie's Battle With The Army of Darkness Continues

Main cover art by Francisco Francavilla

Following on from February's launch of the delirious crossover we never knew we wanted, but now can't live without, Archie X Army of Darkness issue two drops in March.

Written by the great Erik Burnham, with interior art by Bill Galvan, sees the Evil Dead's Ash Williams stuck in wholesome Riverdale with a horde of deadites accidentally summoned by none other than Archie Andrews himself.

IT'S A DEADITE PARTY!

Reggie's lake house soiree was supposed to be the social event of the season, but now it may prove to be the town of Riverdale's swan song! Following Archie Andrews's unwitting awakening of the Army of Darkness, chaos - in the form of an undead horde - has descended upon the shore.

With slavering evil literally at their doorstep, the gang has only one hope of making it out alive - the Savior of S-Mart, one Ashley J. Williams. Unluckily for them, the Chosen One's car currently has four flat tires!

The issue comes with a variety of variant covers, as shown here, along with a selection of black and white variants and art-only alternates (without the text).

Variant cover by Bill Galvan

Variant cover by Laura Braga

Variant cover by Craig Cermak

Variant cover by Stuart Sayger