The day when comic book publishers (large and small) try to tempt you to try their wares - or hook existing readers in for the next "must read" story arc - with free sampler comics at your friendly local comic store.
Remember, the books may be free to you - but the store still pays for them, so don't be greedy!
Saladin Ahmed presents a tale set on a planet that’s already succumbed to Xenomorphs! And in Jordan Morris’ story, a Yautja warrior stalks one of Earth’s greatest fighters. All this and a return to the Planet of the Apes!
This free comic will be available in participating comic book stores on May 2 (which is also Free Comic Book Day).
My best friend - and fellow crappy horror movie aficionado - Paul popped down from London the other day for one of our semi-regular film nights.
His viewing suggestion, 1987's Creepozoids, turned out to be an hilariously awful, low-budget, Alien mockbuster-style B-movie treat.
Set in a "futuristic" 1998, six years after a nuclear apocalypse, war is still raging and five of the most useless military deserters find themselves hiding out in a mysterious, abandoned laboratory, unable to leave because of a sudden downpour of acid rain.
Remember when "acid rain" was ubiquitous in sci-fi and post-apocalyptic movies, as shorthand for manmade environmental destruction? Ahh, those were the days!
The "big name star" of Creepozoids is the delightfully scruffy Linnea Quigley (of The Return of the Living Dead and Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers fame) as Blanca, who pairs up with a walking slice of ham called Butch (Ken Abraham).
They are accompanied by the nominal leader of the pack, Jake (Richard Hawkins, who would go on to play an air traffic controller in Close Encounters of The Third Kind), his girlfriend, Kate (Kim McKamy aka adult movie star Ashlyn Gere, whose character quirk appears to be an inability to sit down during meal scenes), and anxious, tech "wiz" Jesse (Michael Aranda). You know he's the "brains" of the group because he wears glasses... and looks a bit like Shane Black's Hawkins from Predator.
Except for a short spell of exterior work to get the characters into the underground bunker, Creepozoids is shot entirely in a warehouse, with a budget of around of £15 (none of which, seemingly, went on the script).
Very quickly our heroes realise they are trapped in the laboratory complex with a large humanoid monster that is clearly a man in a bargain basement xenomorph Halloween costume.
As amusing as that creature is, it's nothing compared to the giant rats that are obviously oversized stuffed toys which the poor actors are having to shake around to simulate the vicious attacks from these killer rodents.
Impressively plotless, what passes for a story in Creepozoids (and, no, I don't know why that's the title) is a series of random encounters that rapidly whittles down our protagonists without really explaining what the creature actually wants.
Bizarrely for a film that barely clocks in with a 72 minute runtime, there's also a lot of padding in writer-director David DeCoteau's film (co-written with Dave Eisenstark
under the pen name of Burford Hauser).
Paul and I lost count of the number of times various characters crawled up and down the same, short, piece of gunge-splattered passageway.
Then the final showdown between the last man standing and the big bad monster just felt interminable.
This climactic confrontation also took a strange turn when the monster was injected with a randomly acquired syringe of something-or-other, seemingly killing it only for - moments later - a freakish puppet baby to sprout from its head and continue the aggression.
To add insult to injury, Creepozoids doesn't even deign to have a proper conclusion - instead just suddenly ending on a freezeframe of the mutant baby. Presumably this was to set up the proposed sequel that never materialised.
Perversely, this isn't the worst film we've ever seen - that honour belongs to either Shark Exorcist or the entire Camp Blood franchise - Creepozoids almost gets a pass because it's really an extended vignette rather than an actual movie.
And you can't really knock anything that stars Linnea Quigley.
As well as a taste of what's to come (see above), here's a clip from last week's Alien: Earth along with a "how did they do it" look behind the scenes.
Two episodes in (both dropped this morning on Disney Plus in the UK) and Alien: Earth is already looking like the best new show on the streamer since last year's Shōgun.
And so we come to the end of the Friday the 13th canon with the chapter I have seen the most times, Jason X.
A savage slice of solid pulp sci-fi served with a soupçon of satire.
In the early 21st Century, Jason (Kane Hodder) has been captured (presumably some time after his return in Freddy vs Jason) and is being held at a specially constructed Crystal Lake research centre, where project leader Rowan (Andromeda's Lexa Doig) has been investigating ways to permanently execute the mass-murdering zombie.
Eventually, she realises the only course of action is to cryofreeze him, but then interdepartmental shenanigans - and a misguided desire to monetise Jason's supernatural regnenerative abilities - leads to the monster's escape.
This ends up with both Jason and Rowan being accidentally frozen... and then forgotten about.
Jump ahead to the year 2455, and a student field trip to the wastelands of the dead Earth comes across the two frozen bodies.
Bringing them back to their ship, The Grendel, for study, the researchers use nanotechnology to bring Rowan back... unfortunately, at the same time, they also accidentally reawaken Jason.
It maybe the future, but teens are still horny and that's motivation enough for Jason to start hacking away again.
You can guess what happens next.
Todd Farmer's script, directed by James Isaac, wears its Alien influences on its sleeve, with Jason substituting for that franchise's iconic xenomorphs.
The Grendel has its own cadre of marines, led by Spartacus's Peter Mensah, bargain basement clones of the beloved characters from Aliens, and their hunt for Jason through the bowels of the ship (while the civilians listen in, from relative safety) is an obvious homage (rip-off?) of the sequence in Aliens where the colonial marines first meet the xenomorphs in the tunnels under the colony on LV-426.
It's then left to the civilians - and their android (Andromeda's Lisa Ryder) to escape Jason's machete long enough for the ship to reach safety.
Unfortunately, just when they think they've got him beat, he gets a new lease of life - an upgrade - thanks to the same nanotechnology that brought Rowan back.
Also, the hull of the Grendel is deteriorating and is likely to collapse before the rescue ship Tiamat can reach them.
Silly, thrilling, and inventive, for me Jason X is a perfect example of how you keep a long-running franchise alive.
Through out-of-the-box thinking that takes the overarching narrative in a totally unexpected direction, yet remains true to its core principles, Farmer and Isaac have created a genuinely unique blend of old school slasher and pulp sci-fi.
Sure, it's obviously not the first blending of sci-fi and horror tropes, but as an extension of a franchise like Friday the 13th, it's inspired.
I would have loved to have seen a sequel to this where Jason vents his wrath on the horny teens of Earth Two, but sadly it was not to be.
Underrated cult sci-fi horror flick Event Horizon is finally getting some well-deserved comic book love this August - 28 years after it began terrifying audiences.
IDW will be publishing a five-issue prequel miniseries, Event Horizon: Dark Descent, revealing the horrors that unfolded in the lead-up to the start of the movie.
The comic is written by Batman: City of Madness's Christian Ward with Alien: Defiance's Tristan Jones on art duties.
According to IDW:
Embracing the hard-R rating of the shocking movie, Event Horizon: Dark Descent #1 (of 5 issues) will lightspeed jump into comic shops this August.
Taking place before the events of the film and completely accessible to new readers, this is the unbelievable story of the final fate of the original Event Horizon crew.
What really happened to Captain Kilpack and the first crew as their ship journeyed across a nightmarish realm of torments beyond imagining?
Abandon all hope as demonic forces - led by Paimon, the eyeless King of Hell - unleash agony and pure evil upon the crew in a gripping story.
I'm low-key obsessed with Event Horizon, so much so that several years ago - when contemplating an ALIEN RPG campaign - I wove it into my headcanon for the near-future Alien Universe.
Once again, it's also one of those Lovecraft-inspired horrors that isn't based upon any particular part of his mythos but feels like it is.
Christian Ward's variant cover artwork for issue one
Journey back to London in 1993 - when two friends with a love of the Alien movies, a lot of ambition and a little bit of madness - set out to create the world's scariest walkthrough attraction with a little help from Sigourney Weaver.
With its release marking this year's Alien Day, Beneath London - The Story of Alien War is a wonderful, nostalgic documentary that takes me back. I went through Alien War at least once, possibly twice (back in my late 20's when I used to train it up to London solo to buy comics).
Although my memory is shot to pieces these days, I don't recall Alien War being scary per se, rather it was an incredibly exciting experience.
Let's clear one thing up right from the start: writer/director Alexandre O. Philippe's Memory - The Origins Of Alien is not a "making of" documentary about Alien, and anyone picking this DVD up thinking that is going to be very disappointed.
The clue is in the title, if people could be bothered to think about it. This hour-and-a-half documentary is a a film studies course thesis on a reading of the influences that fed the original story and shaped - consciously or otherwise - the visual iconography of key moments, which have made the film so enduring in the collective psyche.
Rather than picking apart how the film was made (I'm sure there are plenty of DVD extras dealing with that topic on the many releases of Alien), it traces the development of the script by Dan O'Bannon, movies, authors (such as HP Lovecraft) and comic books that paved the way for the story, the impact of H.R. Giger's work, and then Ridley Scott's aesthetic, cultural and artistic themes that influenced the tone of the piece etc
Then, heightening the thesis approach, we have various readings of the picture, what it meant (beyond the straight horror/haunted house in space angle).
While its doesn't go quite full-on academia, Memory - The Origins Of Alien is not a documentary for the casual horror movie fan who wants to know how much blood they squirted out of John Hurt during the chestburster scene.
Rather it deconstructs subjective readings of what the film could be telling us on a deeper level and how this all ties back into archetypes found in Ancient Greek myths (The Furies), the art of Francis Bacon, and the real-world body horror of parasitic wasps.
Fascinating viewing for someone who likes that sort of thing (such as me, who would have loved to have had this while reading essays during the film studies elements of my university course), but bound to irritate those who mistakenly thought this was something else (just check some of the IMDB reviews).
However, film geeks and aspiring writers could do worse than absorbing this in-depth examination of the roots of the story that, eventually, became one of the most memorable horror/sci-fi films of all time.
If I have a criticism, it's that Memory - The Origins Of Alien is only 95-minutes long. I'm sure there's so much more to discuss on the mythological origins of Alien and what the film "means" (be it in the shot framing or the bio-mechanical design of the central creature).
It's also a shame that Scott's input is only through second-hand footage, but a lot of key people (in-front and behind) the camera of Alien have their say, even those who've passed (such as Giger and O'Bannon) are included via old interviews, complementing the many other commentators involved.
Locked into a seemingly inescapable Weyland-Yutani contract on a bleak mining colony in deep space, Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her lovable "brother" Andy/ND-255 the android (David Jonsson), a font of dad jokes, team up with some friendly rapscallions to loot a derelict space ship that has just drifted into orbit.
However, upon docking with the craft, they discover it's not a ship, but a hastily abandoned space station. The group hopes to scavenge the cryo-pods so they can put themselves into suspended animation for the nine year flight to another colony.
However, the pods aren't fully fuelled up, so they have to venture further into the station... where they accidentally awaken a legion of facehuggers that were napping there.
Unsurprisingly, chaos ensues.
Matters aren't improved when the young pickers find the only surviving member of the station's crew is the remnants of a droid called Rook.
Rook is the same model synthetic as Ian Holm's Ash from the original Alien... and just as trustworthy.
Slightly wonky CGI has been used to replicate the late Ian Holm's face which makes Rook look more like a Gerry Anderson Thunderbird than anything else.
I get that this was supposed to be a shorthand and an Easter Egg, but ultimately it comes over as a rather uncomfortable design choice.
Written and directed by Fede Álvarez (who gave us the superb Evil Dead remake in 2013), Alien: Romulus makes no attempt to conceal what it is and this is one of its major strengths, for instance there is no need to explain xenomorphs to its audience or hide the fact that Andy is an android.
The film's biggest flaw, however, is its continual blurring of the line between respecting the franchise's lore and replaying its greatest hits (Andy's quoting of one of Ripley's best-known lines was particularly egregious).
While it builds nicely on what has gone before (managing to tie its story, surprisingly, into key elements from Prometheus), the constant need for the script (co-written by Álvarez with Rodo Sayagues) chokes on a surfeit of heavy-handed homages to earlier Alien movies.
And the thing is, it doesn't need them: there's clearly a cracking slasher in space horror film here, with its cast of teenage chum ready to feed the unstoppable, acid-blooded, monsters haunting the floating house.
It is potentially, as Joe Bob Briggs would call it, a perfect "spam in a cabin" movie.
Important elements are nicely foreshadowed and the central performances from the young cast are wholly believable (and appropriate for a sci-fi spin on the slasher genre), this could have been another classic in the well-loved franchise.
And it is a fun movie, but it's let down purely by film's teeth-grindingly awkward urge to scream: "you know that bit you liked in that other Alien film, well here it is in our film!"
My pop culture Odyssey: a slice of super-powered geek life with heavy emphasis on pulp adventure, superheroes, comic books, westerns, horror, sci-fi, giant monsters, zombies etc
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