The Big Bang Spin-Off We Didn't Know We Needed

Stuart Fails to Save The Universe looks wild, and totally not what fans of the largely-grounded Big Bang Theory were expecting. Even Rachel's looking forward to this one.

ONLY TEN DAYS UNTIL SCI-FI SHENANIGANS!

Geekgasm moment: Rick and Morty meet Dungeons & Dragons onscreen!

Clear Your Schedule! New Rick and Morty Is Almost Here!

Another Tasty Horror Treat From Apple

Matthew Rhys stars as Mayor Tom Loftis in Apple's Widow's Bay

Widow’s Bay is a quaint island town 40 miles off the coast of New England. But something lurks beneath the surface. Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) is desperate to revive his struggling community. There’s no Wi-Fi, spotty cellular reception and he must contend with superstitious locals who believe their island is cursed.

He wants these people to respect him. They don’t. They think he is soft and cowardly. And he is. But Loftis is determined to build a better future for his teenage son and turn the island into a tourist destination.

Miraculously, he succeeds: tourists are finally coming. Unfortunately, the locals were right. After decades of calm, the old stories that seemed too ludicrous to be true, start happening again. Widow’s Bay blends genuine horror with character-driven comedy.

From these teases, it would appear that Widow's Bay is a delicious blend of dark humour, Stephen King, HP Lovecraft, and Twin Peaks. Possibly. Or it could be something completely different... but I look forward to finding out.

Hailing from Apple Studios, Widow’s Bay is created, showrun, executive produced and written by Katie Dippold.

Director Hiro Murai executive produces alongside Carver Karaszewski, Claudia Shin and Rhys. Murai directs five episodes this season, in addition to directors Ti West, Sam Donovan and Andrew DeYoung.

Apparently the story of Widow's Bay began as a spec script Dippold wrote for - of all things - that greatest of sitcoms Parks and Recreation. Which makes me want to watch this even more!!!

The first two episodes of the show drop in three weeks, on April 29, then the remaining eight episodes of the series will appear on subsequent Wednesdays through to June 17 (with a second double-dip on May 27).

Plan 9 From Outer Space (1957)

Aliens seek to stop Earth residents from creating a "doomsday weapons," and so they implement their "Plan 9."

The plan involves resurrecting the dead on Earth to cause just enough chaos to force the humans to listen to the aliens.

And if the Earthlings aren't listening? Well, the aliens can always invade.

Commonly thought to be the "worst movie ever made," Plan 9 from Outer Space has gained a large cult following, as has director Ed Wood.

Huge thanks to Film Masters for sharing this free, HD copy of Plan 9 from Outer Space.

New and Upcoming Western Movies and TV Shows

There's a lot of optimism (wishful thinking?) in Just Westerns':

"...preview of 40 new upcoming Western films and TV shows heading are way in 2026 and beyond, including Young Guns 3, Lonesome Dove remake, Blood Meridian, A Fistful Of Dollars remake, Horizon: Chapter 2, The Dark Tower TV Show, Butch & Sundance, Flint, The Magnificent Seven TV Show, Wind River 2 and many more, as well as new Westerns starring Tim Blake Nelson, Kevin Costner, Scott Eastwood, Kiefer Sutherland, Wes Studi, Samuel L. Jackson and Chris Pine."

For my personal tastes there are a few too many "neo-Westerns" here (although I love Yellowstone... and there's an abundance of Yellowstone-adjacent projects on this list) and, maybe, not enough classic, period Westerns.

Red Dwarf Returns In A Novel Format

Cult British sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf is getting a prequel this summer - in the form of a new novel (the first in three decades) from series co-creator Rob Grant and the creator of the '90s sitcom 2Point4 Children, Andrew Marshall.

The 400-page hardback of Red Dwarf: Titan is due to be published on July 16 and will focus on Lister and Rimmer's infamous shore leave on Titan before they ended up on the deep space mining ship Red Dwarf.

Speaking to the Radio Times, Rob Grant explained that the novel is set:

"... one universe to the side, so we can have familiar characters but we can do different things with them, because the difficulty was writing something that was going to be original and fresh and using the same characters without breaking the canon."

He added that in this story Lister and Rimmer would:

"... get a message from the far future warning them that all realities are going to collapse unless they do something about it."

I realise I'm probably in the minority (I was always more enamoured of the idea of Red Dwarf than the actual TV show itself) but my favourite part of the whole Red Dwarf franchise was the first two spin-off novels: Red Dwarf - Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (from 1989) and Better Than Life (from 1990).

Not only are these genuinely hilarious books - with just the right amount of humanity and pathos - but they also present a parallel vision of the show's story that isn't restricted by budget.

So, it sounds like there's a chance that the upcoming prequel possibly takes place in the same universe as those original novels, which is good enough for me.

CHAPBOOK REVIEW: Meet The Shrivelwoods (Kek-W)

 

Meet The Shrivelwoods is a 40-page Gothic horror-comedy written by fan-favourite 2000AD scribe, musician and artist Kek-W, available through his Bandcamp merchandise page.

The publication contains two text stories about the creepy Shrivelwood family, wealthy and decadent maple syrup magnates who bear a superficial similarity to The Addams Family but with the darkness dial turned up to thirteen.

Chapbooks are somewhere between a novel and a fanzine, an easily digestible booklet with an affordably low page count; a format with a rich and fascinating history.

The Old Dank Manse, the first story in Meet The Shrivelwoods, tells of a contemporary, failed romance writer seeking solace in the bosom of her rich Vermont extended family, at their "crumbling Gothic mansion", but finding something much stranger than she expects.

The second, Christmas With The Shrivelwoods, takes the form of a late 19th Century letter from Minnie Shrivelwood to her uncle, Heinie, who is currently restrained in the Hartford Retreat For The Insane. It's a bonkers - matter-of-fact - recounting of the family's preparations for the Christmas holidays.

Both tales blend surreality and slapstick with leftfield black humour, shock revelations and general absurdity, as should be expected by those who have read Kek-W's Dark Judges: Fall of Deadworld work in the universe of Judge Dredd.

I was also reminded of the Wojciech Has's very weird The Hourglass Sanitorium for the short stories' occasionally unsettling, nightmarish narrative logic and potentially disturbing imagery.

Rambling - by design - the chapbook's two stories are delightful, amusing, and quick reads that most definitely leave you wanting to hear more about the different generations of this peculiar, and freakish, inbred family of maple syrup-obsessives. 

SUPERB OWL LX MOVIE TRAILERS

SUPERGIRL

THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU

DISCLOSURE DAY

SCREAM 7

MINIONS & MONSTERS

HEALTH UPDATE: Looking Good For 2026

It's so clever 'cos it works on two levels 😉

While Biscuit Club has been on a break for the holidays, my various back-related problems have continued to improve - thanks to continued exercise.

On New Year's Eve, I was both signed off by the NHS physio I had been seeing and (finally) got the call from the hospital to fix a date for my steroid injections. 

These will be in a few weeks at The Pain Clinic, providing none of my other medical issues prevent this from going ahead. This was discussed during the call and hopefully will just be a few routine checks on the day.

Biscuit Club resumes soon, but we're in the home stretch now and only have a couple of months to go before we are all released into the wild.

The subject of "walking football" again came up as the "next step" along my road to recovery, this time while chatting with the physio, although Rachel let slip the possibility of getting me a personal trainer! 

The main takeaway from all this - barring unforeseen backsliding - is that 2026 is looking like a more positive year, health-wise, for me. 

Pertinent to the strip above, one of the early things I want to tackle, once my back is feeling better, is sorting out my overwhelming overflow of comic book back issues.

Jumbled piles of comics line the edges of the office and have filled every gap under the bed. I need to decide which to keep (this requires numerical filing by title on the shelves in the office) and which to either try and sell or consign to charity.

• The comic panels at the top of this piece are from Bite Sized Archie. You can find the rest of the series here on the Archie Comics website. Two paperback collections are currently available (hopefully there will be more) that include behind-the-scenes extras.

MUSICAL MONDAY: All I Want for Christmas - A D&D Christmas Carol (Ginny Di)

MUSICAL MONDAY: A TPK Carol - D&D Parody (Ginny Di)

MUSICAL MONDAY: Carol of The Spells (Ginny Di)

Thank you so much to the amazing Ginny Di for this classic track, taking my favourite carol and giving it a Dungeons & Dragons spin!

"You've Got To Laugh, Haven't You?"

I made this!

"It's not the girl, Peter, it's the building! Something terrible is about the enter our world and this building is obviously the door. The architect's name was Ivo Shandor. I found it in Tobin's Spirit Guide. He was also a doctor. Performed a lot of unnecessary surgery. And then in 1920 he founded a secret society...

"After the First World War, Shandor decided that society was too sick to survive. And he wasn't alone. He had close to a thousand followers when he died. They conducted rituals up on the roof, bizarre rituals intended to bring about the end of the world, and now it looks like it may actually happen!"

Not the introduction to a Call of Cthulhu adventure, but some of Egon's dialogue from the original Ghostbusters and highly pertinent to what I want to try and say here.

Speaking as someone who has entertained the idea of running both a Red Dwarf RPG and a Ghostbusters campaign, I have strong feelings about the intersection of comedy and roleplaying games.

Where I feel the old Ghostbusters RPG went wrong - although I fully understand why they did it - was to establish a game world more inspired by the cartoons than the movie, full of bad puns, books with silly names, aliens in sports cars etc

The original Ghostbusters movie (a horror-comedy) worked because it was a seriously scary situation (just read the backstory, above, again) being handled by humorous characters (i.e. players in an RPG).

The humour comes from the approach of the characters (and their wildly variable skill checks) rather than the situation per se.

For me, that's where roleplaying game comedy comes from.

Why do you think there are so many memes about Ravenloft campaigns featuring Leslie Nielsen's vampire from Dracula: Dead and Loving It?

When a module (or game) tries to be funny, it has to take the simplest approach, and that's the most universal. Which usually means bad puns.

And, I don't know if it's my British "stiff-upper-lipness" but I'd be too embarrassed to read out a NPC's dreadful pun name (Ivor Clue, anyone?) to my group.

Humour is very personal, what's funny to one group may mean nothing to another.

I'd rather listen to me and my movie buddy Paul riff on a naff horror film than ever listen to something like Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

Not because I think we're better at it than MST3K, it's just we've developed our own in-jokes over years of watching crap movies and have our own points of reference that probably wouldn't mean anything to anyone else unfortunate enough to be listening in.

And it's the same for comedy in roleplaying games.

Of course, there are extreme comedy games, like the delightful Toon and Rocky & Bullwinkle, which are all about slapstick and establishing a cartoon verisimilitude, but they really lean into the craziness and are a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

However, take the set-up of Red Dwarf: the last surviving human (a bloke) who will never, ever, meet another human being in his life, have a family etc and knows he's doomed to die alone; a hologram of his priggish nemesis; an insane supercomputer; and an amoral creature evolved from a feral cat.

Ghostbusters

In different hands, and depending how lenient the gamesmaster was, that set-up could unfold into a grimdark tale of Lovecraftian cosmic horror and existential anxiety.

But, in the hands of most roleplayers, it's almost certainly going to degenerate into wonderful silliness, knob gags, and banter.

A good gaming group, especially one that has been together for years and knows each other's senses of humour, can - sometimes too easily - turn any "serious" gaming set-up into a comedy.

I'm not talking about totally taking the piss and trashing the campaign setting (that's just childish and idiotic behaviour), but having a laugh within the confines of the game can be very therapeutic.

There's always room for witty word play and the occasional actual joke written into the setting, but the players don't need to meet "NPCs with funny names".

They're gamers. Having fun.

If they have the imagination to play a roleplaying game, the chances are your players have a good sense of humour, so give them free rein to crack wise occasionally.

Sometimes, of course, this isn't appropriate for the setting or mood that the gamesmaster has carefully crafted, and he's quite within his rights to put his foot down, and remind the players that (imaginary) lives are at stake.

It's just telling the group that they're playing, say, a Ghostbusters or Red Dwarf campaign gives players licence to relax a little, not take their characters' serious jobs so seriously, and relish in their screw-ups.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: The Wicker Man (1973)

To balance up the sins of that awful Nic Cage rehash, I thought this was as good a time as any to revisit the peerless 1973 original of The Wicker Man.

Dour, puritanical, West Highland Police sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) receives an anonymous letter, telling him about the case of a missing girl - Rowan Morrison.

She was supposed to have disappeared on the secluded Summerisle, a remote Hebridean island famed for its popular and unusually abundant fruit produce.

However, when he arrives there, the islanders claim never to have heard of the girl. Even the woman Howie believes is her mother, post mistress May Morrison (Irene Sunter), denies that she's her daughter.

Realising that this investigation isn't going to be an open-and-shut case, Howie takes a room at the island's Green Man Inn, where he meets the landlord's lovely daughter, Willow (Britt Ekland, dubbed by Annie Ross).

Struggling to come to terms with the girl's disappearance evolving into a question of semantics, humourless Howie of the 'fun police' grows increasingly frustrated with the islanders' pagan ways of public nudity, dogging, fertility rituals, singing (there's so many songs in The Wicker Man it could be classed as a musical), dancing etc.

Finding a grave for the missing girl, Howie gains permission from the island's head honcho, the charismatic Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), to exhume her body... only to find that Rowan's coffin doesn't contain her body.

As May Day draws near, Howie begins to suspect that Rowan isn't really dead, but being held hostage to be used in a pagan sacrifice to ensure that the island's crops don't fail as they did the year before.

Of course, we all know that the machinations of the islanders are far more sinister than that, leading to the classic - and well-known - climax (that doesn't involve bees).

It was my late father who introduced me to The Wicker Man and therefore it has always held a special significance for me.

I watched the director's cut, which had been shown on Film 4, so it had all the bits that had been cut out of the original release (just in lower quality, which is a shame because it makes those scenes draw attention to themselves for the wrong reasons).

Surely, there must be technology now that could restore these low-quality scenes to the standard of the rest of the film? That would be worth sacrificing a few virgins for, right?

It's been too long since I've seen The Wicker Man, despite it being one of my favourite movies (not just in this genre, but of all-time), and I was reminded just how many moments were lifted from it for the more recent remake... and yet that still managed to get so much wrong.

Not a scary horror per se, The Wicker Man is disorientating and unnerving, and its very lack of overt supernatural elements gives it a terrifying verisimilitude that makes you wonder if perhaps such events could still occur in modern times.

And it's always worth being reminded of this:

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Zombeavers (2014)

A trio of spunky college girls head into the wilderness for a weekend of girltime in an isolated, lakeside cabin - but their plans are disrupted, first by the arrival of their horny boyfriends and then by an invasion of flesh-eating, zombie beavers.

Yes, Zombeavers is as daft as it sounds and it knows it. It takes its crass premise and runs with it, resulting in a near-perfect blend of teen comedy and OTT gore-horror.

Directed by Jordan Rubin from a script co-written by himself and Jon & Al Kaplan, the humour is base (come on, they're talking about beavers nearly non-stop, what did you expect?), there's some sex and skin, gruesome beaver-related injuries, a genuine sense of spam-in-a-cabin jeopardy, decent performances from the central cast, surprising twists and delightfully low-budget special effect monsters.

The killer beavers appear to be a combination of puppets and animatronics, but it doesn't matter because the levity and general joie de vivre that clearly went into making this movie carries you through.

From the deadpan humour of the opening scene to the Sinatra-esque theme over the final credits and the wonderful, post-credits, tease of a possible sequel idea (that is so obvious when you think of it I'm surprised no one hasn't already made this movie), Zombeavers just continually knocks it out the park.

Demonstrating that he knows my tastes so well, Paul got me this DVD for my birthday back in 2014 and we watched it that very day when he popped down to hand over my presents (my birthday wasn't for another week-and-a-half, but we weren't going to pass up a chance to see a film called Zombeavers) and we were both genuinely surprised by how good it was.

Originally, I think we'd both thought from the trailers that it would fall into "so bad, it's good" category, but it's actually really well-made, a helluva lotta fun and rather clever. It is genuinely one of the best all-round low-budget, horror films I'd seen that year.

One thing that struck us, in particular, was its subtle subversion of the horror movie staple of the "Final Girl" - a character you can normally pick out within the first five or ten minutes of horror movie.

Paul even said he might have to pick up a copy for himself

And please, please, please Mr Rubin, make ZomBEES as soon as soon as humanly possible - you've got a guaranteed sale here!

SHOW ME: Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955)

Who's The Mummy? Eddie Parker as Klaris
Mummy's Love? n/a - no romantic sub-plot
Where? Egypt
How Long? 79 minutes

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello are a pair of American chancers stuck in Egypt looking to earn a quick buck and passage back to the States. They learn of Dr Gustav Zoomer's (Kurt Katch) discovery of the mummy of Klaris and his desire to hire a couple of men to escort his precious cargo back to the United States.

Marie Windsor as Madame Rontru

However, before they can talk to him about the job opportunity, the archaeologist is murdered and Abbott & Costello find themselves caught between the machinations of a group of criminals, fronted by the exotic Madame Rontru (Marie Windsor), and Klaris-worshipping cultists, led by led by Semu (Richard Deacon).

Our hapless heroes come into possession of a cursed amulet, which Costello finds among the dead doctor's possessions. This amulet is the key to the location of the treasure-packed tomb of Princess Ara, which the living mummy Klaris is supposed to guard.

Sadly, Abbott & Costello's 1950's slapstick shtick hasn't aged well - growing tiresome quite quickly - and the comedy of misdirection, misunderstanding, and mistaken identity has frayed round the edges worse than the mummy's bandages.

There's a restaurant routine where Bud and Lou are trying to pass off the cursed amulet to each other that comes across as really forced and a later serving of rapid-fire wordplay around "pick" and "shovel" only reminds us how brilliant Who's On First? was.

And pity poor Eddie Parker as Klaris, stumbling around like a man in a baggy onesie, a victim of the "too slow to be scary" editorial decision that blighted several earlier mummy movies.

While it's only 79 minutes long, but the limply-scripted Abbott and Costello Meet The Mummy seems much longer, almost interminable at times.

Bizarrely, although their characters are supposedly called Pete Patterson and Freddie Franklin, respectively, Abbott and Costello refer to each other as Abbott and Costello throughout the film.

This was the last movie they made with Universal, and I can't help feeling that their heart wasn't in it.

I'll admit I know next-to-nothing about Abbott & Costello, so that's pure baseless speculation on my part but as a comedy-horror Abbott and Costello Meet The Mummy is neither terrifying or particularly amusing.

I Don't Know What To Say

Doug (Jack Black) and Griff (Paul Rudd) have been best friends since they were kids, and have always dreamed of remaking their all-time favorite movie: the cinematic "classic" Anaconda. When a midlife crisis pushes them to finally go for it, they head deep into the Amazon to start filming. But things get real when an actual giant anaconda appears, turning their comically chaotic movie set into a deadly situation. The movie they’re dying to make? It might just get them killed.

Check In To Netflix's Haunted Hotel This Friday

After inheriting a hotel from her late brother, a single mom moves in with his good-natured ghost — and high-maintenance guests who will never check out.

What if The Shining was a comedy from the mind of Matt Roller, a former Rick and Morty story editor? Season one of the Haunted Hotel manifests itself on Netflix this Friday (September 19).

H.P. Lovecraft's Re-Animator (1985)

The mid-'80s were a Golden Age for schlock horror, with the boom in the home video market providing a hungry audience for low-budget thrills.

One of the many diamonds in a mostly rough field was Stuart Gordon's liberal re-imagining of one of H.P. Lovecraft's lesser works (Lovecraft is on record as saying he hated his stories of Herbert West as they were written for money; "drivel written for the masses").

Re-Animator updates Lovecraft's original to modern times (well, the 1980s) and turns a Frankenstein parody into a darkly, darkly funny Grand Guignol farce.

The simple plot follows the arrival of Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) at Miskatonic University in Arkham, after an "incident" in Switzerland, where he rooms with fellow student Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), who is dating the dean's daughter, Meg (Barbara Crampton).

Unbeknownst to all, Meg is also an object of lust for creepy neuroscientist Dr Hill (David Gale), who eventually discovers that West - with the reluctant help of Cain - has been experimenting with a revolutionary re-agent that can give a form of zombie-life to recently deceased bodies.

Events spiral out of control, as they always do, leading to a crazy, climatic, gory zombipalooza in the University hospital's morgue.

As well as a quality script that brings a surprising amount of character to a blood-soaked B-movie, the effects are very inventive - as are some of sicker elements of humour: no one will ever forget the reverse-necrophilia scene where a re-animated corpse tries to get down with blonde-bobbed Meg.

There's also, thanks to Meg, a lot more female flesh on display in this 86-minute film than I recall seeing in the sequels.

Of course, I can't really pass comment on this film without singing the praises of Jeffrey Combs.

This was the film that made him a B-movie star and while he may not have the same instant name recognition as Bruce Campbell I'd put them on very similar levels as comedy horror legends.

While Campbell has the square-jawed hero role down pat, Combs is the man to call if you want a single-minded, amoral, mad scientist.