When an oil tycoon and a famous adventurer vanish into the harsh winter of remote northern Alaska, a hand-picked rescue team endeavours to bring them home.
What they don’t know is that they are trespassing on The Yeti’s territory, and the elements are the least of their worries.
A blood-spattered survival horror featuring a towering beast and gruesome practical effects, The Yeti hearkens back to a time when monster movies were king.
Directed by William Pisciotta & Gene Gallerano, The Yeti will be in cinemas Stateside and on digital on April 10.
I welcome its aspiration to harken back to the age of classic monster movies but let's wait and see if it lives up to such lofty goals.
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.
I know George RR Martin has fallen out quite publicly with House of The Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal. He's also pretty much disowned the show for all the changes that have been made to his original story.
Yet, as a viewer who's not deeply embedded in Westerosi lore, I'm quite happy to simply enjoy House of The Dragon as its own thing.
Matt Smith and Emma D'Arcy are never less than magnificent on screen, and are delightfully mischievous as the faces of the fascinating and twisted Targaryen family.
If I have a problem with the series, it's the epic wait between seasons (Season two ended on August 5, 2024, and this next season doesn't debut until June, so that's the better part of two years. It was a similar gap between seasons one and two, which certainly does the show no favours).
The latest issue of the ever-brilliant Judge Dredd Megazine
This week issue 2470 of the weekly 2000AD sci-fi comic anthology comic, along withissue 489 of the Judge Dredd Megazine - the monthly Dredd-centric spin-off - popped through my letterbox just in time for 2000AD's 49th birthday celebrations today (February 19).
I can't recall if I purchased the first issue of the Megazine when it was launched in 1990 (I suspect not), but I certainly remember picking up the very first issue (prog) of 2000AD, back in 1977, when I was 10.
One of my few remaining vivid memories from that age is of sitting in the back of my parents' car, eagerly reading this comic that was unlike anything I had seen before.
I suspect mum and dad were taking me somewhere "fun", but I was more interested in my copy of 2000AD.
Early issues often came packaged with gifts, such as "biotronic" stickers with the second issue, so you could emulate John Probe (the star of the comic's Six Million Dollar Man clone M.A.C.H. 1)with the illusion of robotic parts peeking through your skin!
It's weird now to think that the big selling point of 2000AD initially was its Dan Dare strip (which, despite some striking visuals, ran for less than two years), and Judge Dredd - now a pop culture icon - didn't even appear until prog two.
2000AD was gritty and darker than my usual fare at the time, and thus felt more 'grown up'.
There are stories from those early days that have firmly cemented themselves into my psyche: such as Flesh (about time-travelling cowboys harvesting dinosaur meat), Shako (soldiers versus a man-eating polar bear in the Artic), and some of the more twisted of Tharg's Future Shocks (self-contained Twilight Zone-like stories with an inevitably bonkers surprise ending).
I read the title weekly for a long time, but, as is my wont, eventually found something else to hold my attention (probably American comics, roleplaying games... and girls).
Judge Dredd's debut in prog #2
I can't pinpoint exactly when I stopped reading 2000AD regularly.
However, I do remember devouring several of the early, important, Judge Dredd story arcs, such as The Judge Child, Judge Death Lives, and the Apocalypse War, which would have taken me to at least prog 270.
Sláine, Pat Mills' mythical Celtic berserker,first appeared in prog 330, and I know I followed his early adventures in the magazine, as I immediately grokked the fact that the ideas presented there could be ported over into a redefining of the "berserker/barbarian" character class in Dungeons & Dragons.
So that's six or seven years of loyal reading.
There was one aspect of the magazine that I never really bought into: the fact that it was supposedly edited by an alien called Tharg (a pseudonym adopted by all the actual editors), who arrived on Earth with his arsenal of "cool" alien slang.
He was an extraterrestrial Stan Lee, but gregarious Stan was always 'The Man', whereas, for me, Tharg was a pale imitation.
I've mellowed rather now and the cringe I felt as a teenager about this whole idea now simply makes me smirk a bit.
In subsequent decades, it was primarily Sláine and Judge Dredd that brought me back into the 2000AD fold, picking up either single issues from newsagents or graphic novel collections of stories from bookshops (or later, Amazon).
Although, for many years, there wasn't the same frisson of excitement picking up and reading the odd prog here and there compared to when I was 10.
It felt as though so much geeky media - and society in general - had shifted in that similar ("don't talk down to young readers") direction, even though 2000ADwas the trailblazer.
However, in the last year I have resumed my subscription to 2000AD, paired with my longer-running one to the Megazine, as I'm now finding the various stories - on the whole - in the anthology title are gelling more with my tastes.
I also love the fact that 2000AD's still going strong, and that new readers are discovering the joys of its gritty, British adventures every week.
Can't wait to see what the publishers, Rebellion, have lined up for 2000AD's 50th anniversary next year.
Issue 29 of Titan's run of top-notch Conan The Barbarian comics is due to hit stores next Wednesday (February 25) - which means it'll probably arrive over here in the UK a week later.
This is the start of a new arc and is being touted by Titan as a perfect jumping-on point for new readers.
Scribe Jim Zub tells us:
"A new foe hunts Conan the Barbarian, tracking his spirit wherever he travels – a killer with keen blade in hand and teeth from old prey strung ‘round his neck. The Black Stone cult wants revenge and the Son of the Tooth is their weapon of choice."
Line art for the issue is by Doug Braithwaite, with colours by Diego Rodriguez, and letters by Richard Starkings and Tyler Smith.
You can see some sample pages below, as well as variant covers for the issue.
Experience an unnerving Gothic tale of horror reuniting Game of Thrones stars Sophie Turner and Kit Harington and featuring the Academy Award-winning actress Marcia Gay Harden.
Set in medieval England, Anne and her domineering mother-in-law Morwen struggle to survive on the outskirts of society. But when a man from Anne’s past returns from war, a curse begins to take shape through a mysterious knight and threatens to destroy them all.
A Medieval horror starring two leads from Game of Thrones sounds like it should be square in my wheelhouse, yet I keep bouncing off the trailer.
There's something about this movie - maybe the way it's shot or the trailer is cut - that makes me wonder if The Dreadful might end up being an unfortunate choice of name for this work.
After the gonzo epicness of Uwe Boll's first In The Name Of The King movie, the sequel, Two Worlds, is a strangely low-key affair (presumably for budgetary reasons).
Ex-special forces officer Granger (Dolph Lundgren) is whisked away from our world to the war-torn Kingdom of Ehb (where the original film took place) by the sorceress Elianna (Natalia Guslistaya).
Time has moved on since the first movie, Farmer is dead and a new king sits on the throne, Raven (Lochlyn Munro). He needs Granger to fulfil his role in a prophecy and slay the leader of his enemies, The Dark Ones.
Accompanied by the court physician, Manhatten (Natassia Malthe) and a small detachment of soldiers, Granger heads off into the wilderness to assassinate The Holy Mother (Christina Jastrzembska) - belatedly finding out everything isn't quite what it seems.
Two Worlds is an enjoyable, if not wholly original, romp that doesn't overdo the "fish-out-of-water" shtick (Granger actually adapts to his new situation very quickly, although never makes any effort to blend in with the locals).
Hampered by an unnecessary, and thankfully infrequently used, voice-over from Lundgren (which I mistakenly took at first as the 'audio description track' as it was just telling me what I was seeing on the screen) and odd lines of clunky dialogue, Two Worlds nevertheless reinforces my belief that the fantasy genre is the much maligned Uwe Boll's strongest.
There's also a sad lack of monsters (only one - a CGI dragon - makes an appearance) and The Dark One's costumes are remarkably unremarkable, little more than fancy dress ninja suits.
While the "earth-man saves alien world" aspect works surprisingly well with the clever plot twists sown into the story, and the ending is clearly left open for a sequel (it was very John Carter-esque in that sense), I hope that when Uwe returned to this well for a third time in 2014 the next In The Name Of The King movie - this time with Dominic Purcell headlining - would be more akin to the original. Two Worlds is fun but reminiscent of so many other low-budget fantasy flicks, while the first film at least had a flair of eccentric exuberance about it.
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.
Pete modelling this year's bold shirt choice for turning the tables on our player-characters
After their successful treasure hunt last time, our heroes - Buck (my explorer), Freya (Clare's photojournalist), Dick (Kevin's former G-man), and Onyx (Mark's aviatrix) - are gathered in the ornate office of their paymaster, Professor Kasper Wieloch.
We are in Austria, in a very stately home on the banks of Lake Wolfgang (which is a real lake).
The professor was delighted that we'd found the cypher and shares with us a copy of the document he believes is the necessary element to crack it and find the co-ordinates of the lost island of Atlantis.
It's a word puzzle that eventually Onyx and Freya solve, allowing Kasper to correctly jiggle the dials on the ancient cypher we'd brought back from Greenland, revealing to him just what he wanted to know.
[Of course, we - as players - had seen massive red flags, since the start of this session, about this gathering, This started with Pete setting up miniatures on the table to show where we all were for what should have been a simple debriefing. Secondly, he dropped in that we'd all been made to surrender our weapons - by the professor's staff - on the way in, much to Mark/Onyx's chagrin].
Wieloch's lakeside mansion
Wieloch's understated office
With a manic grin on his face, Wieloch shrugged off his lab coat to reveal a Nazi uniform underneath as he spoke into a microphone on the desk - dictating the co-ordinates.
Behind us, his butler, Hans (who Onyx had failed to seduce to persuade him to fetch her weapon back) drew a pistol, as doors on both sides of the room swung open and eight Nazi thugs burst into the room, pointing guns at us.
Buck charged the nearest thug to him, barrelling him over and subsequently hoisting him up and using his body as a shield to absorb the bullets fired in his direction. He then threw the corpse at two of the others, bringing them down and dived at the final minion on his side of the room and engaged him in a drawn-out slugfest.
Professor Kasper Wieloch (left) and Hans The Butler
Onyx dived over Wieloch's desk and proceeded to stick her fingers in his eyes, in an attempt to blind him and bring him to heel. Unfortunately their bloody tussle ended with the Nazi scientist staggering blindly out of one of the doors and clattering down stairs to find the rest of his men.
Freya and Dick took on the other four Nazis - as well as Hans the nefarious butler - in a surprisingly one-sided fight, as the thugs seemed as accurate in their shooting as Star Wars stormtroopers.
Once we were victorious, we saw out the window that the wounded Wieloch was being helped into a small zeppelin that had docked in his garden; his escape being covered by a number of rifle-bearing soldiers who kept us pinned down as they got away.
Freya was able to get an impression of the co-ordinates off of Wieloch's desktop notepad, then we bolted down to our seaplane... only to discover it had (unsurprisingly) been sabotaged by the villains.
Onyx was quite confident her aircraft would be quicker than that of the bad guys, but we had to trust that her legendary repair skills were up to the task of undoing whatever damage the Nazis had done.
TO BE CONTINUED...
CAST:
Buck Hannigan - Me
Freya Larson - Clare
Dick Tate - Kevin
Onyx Jones - Mark
DIRECTOR:
Pete
Buck & Dick (top) and Onyx & Freya (bottom)
MY NOTES: While it was great to have Mark back at the table again, the first time we'd all been together for the better part of nine months, Outgunned Adventures is currently reinforcing my long-held dislike of dice pool systems.
I know we're still getting to grips with a new system, and trying to grasp all its nuances, but for what - at first glance - appears to be a simple system (much like Hollow Earth Expedition's Ubiquity mechanicsbefore it), seems almost randomly fiddly.
Dice pools also make everything slow - as was demonstrated by the fact that almost the entirety of this session was our fight against the bad guys.
Conversely, I would point out that I appreciated the fact that the thugs we were fighting were incredibly lousy shots. It's not exactly cinematic (and that's the style the game is seeking to emulate) for a larger-than-life pulp hero to be offed by a random goon!
My pop culture Odyssey: a slice of super-powered geek life with heavy emphasis on pulp adventure, horror, comic books, westerns, superheroes, sci-fi, giant monsters, zombies etc
