Deja Boo: Event Horizon

An eye-gouging good time!

It’s an odd thing, watching elements of your childhood, particularly ones that you didn’t even know were remarkable, fade into legend. Ask [extremely old guy voice] kids these days, and they will be incredulous at what us ‘90s kids did, and were allowed to do. What do you mean, you just… went out? How did your parents know when to pick you up? How did they know you were safe? How did they even know where you were? (We just did, friends’ parents or a quick collect call message*, they didn’t until we got home, they didn’t). We roamed all over the small, country town I grew up outside of with just bikes and the confidence that none of the (disturbingly high number of) serial killers known to be active in Western Washington were targeting teenage boys. Probably. As far as we knew.

My neighbor growing up either contributed to this vagrancy or helped protect us from it. He was an ideal neighbor, his kids were grown, he had way more money than us, and used it to collect classic cars, for which he build a massive garage/shop, in which he put a home theater—doing so in the ‘90s was no small accomplishment. He was obsessed with movies, buying literally every single movie that came out every single week. His DVD* collection was enormous. Best of all, he allowed us to go in there whenever we wanted, provided we didn't make a mess or steal too much of his beer.

All this is to say, I had unfettered access to a lot of R-rated movies at a young age. Combined with my love of scifi, I was very excited to watch this very grown-up scifi movie called Event Horizon. I’ve written all this without having seen it since that day, because ~12-year-old-me was traumatized. I wanted to do this part of the writeup because I honestly don’t know if it’s a good movie or not, or if it’s scary or not, or if my younger, squeamish self was just too shocked by someone ripping their own eyeballs out. It seems to have enjoyed a resurgence lately, with comics explaining backstory, Sam Neil passing and his brilliance getting the appreciation it has always deserved, and the idea of it being a Warhammer 40k prequel all having brought it back into at least some level of public consciousness.

So now it’s time to face my fears and rewatch it. Hang tight, read a magazine in the lobby or something.

Still here? Good. Before we get to the (literal) gory details, I have to say that, for a mid-‘90s movie, Event Horizon holds up remarkably well. Some of the effects, mostly those related to zero gravity, look somewhat dated, but not terribly so. The opening and closing credits have some very ‘90s electronic music which Trent Reznor would have improved upon, but that’s not present in the film itself.

This movie provided the epiphany that apparently my favorite genre is lost in space** or at sea. I read way too many books about shipwrecks, I love Alien, I will defend Sunshine until my dying breath, so this is right up my adult alley. Did it scare me out of my mind, like when I was a kid? Of course not; I’m old and jaded now. However, it was brilliantly tense and did an amazing job of building suspense all throughout. Despite a brief text intro, it immediately gives us the feeling that something isn’t right. One of the very clever ways this is done is by transitions. They’re never slow fades, or wipes, but smash cuts that seem to occur right as something is about to happen. It creates these mini-jumpscares that create a sense of unease. When the action happens later, and there are really scary things happening, we are primed for not knowing what is around the corner—especially since a key component of the characters’ horror is their deteriorating mental state, as they hallucinate and can’t be sure what is real or not—in a way, neither can we.

At the center of all this uncertainty is Dr. Weir, played brilliantly by Sam Neil. When we meet him, he is ostensibly there to help a rescue crew, as he tries to humbly ingratiate himself to them. The film doesn’t tell us when, exactly, his descent into madness happens (more on this in a sec), but it clearly happens earlier, and more willingly, than his shipmates. His actions become more unnerving as the film progresses, and his motives are more and more in question, and he clearly knows more than he initially let on. Neil plays this part so perfectly, his voice always level and sinister—but somehow disarming.

The recent comics that are a prequel that follows the journey of the Event Horizon spell out his motives—which we do see in the movie, having essentially driven his wife to suicide with his obsession with his work—as well as going into what happened in the seven-year period the ship was missing. While I enjoy this, and it adds to the mythos, one of the strengths of the film is that it doesn’t show us all this. There’s a fair amount of gore (not as much as I remember!), but their trip into the Chaos Realm/hell is only shown in brief flashes. Just like Weir’s embrace of Chaos is not pinpointed, this contributes to the overall unease of the setting, instead of just splashing gore all over the walls (although that does literally happen).

Grounding the whole affair is Lawrence Fishburne’s Captain Miller, who is delightfully hard-assed, and really just wants to do his job and go home—even when that job turns out to be trying to stop a literal portal to hell from opening in Neptune. His stories and interactions with the rest of the crew actually make me think that the “normal,” lived-in part of the Event Horizon universe would make for more interesting story fodder than the prequel/sequel comics that explore, ya know, literal hell. Or maybe all of that is what ultimately leads to humanity as we know it in the Warhammer 40k universe? I stand by that fan theory, because it’s awesome.

In conclusion—if you haven’t seen Event Horizon, I highly recommend it. If you watched it at way too young of an age like me, I recommend it even more.

—DESR

Dean Smith-Richard is the author of 3204AD, and will definitely publish something again one day, probably. He loves to cook, play baseball, and is way too much of a craft beer nerd. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, and likes the rain, thank you very much.

* I have to explain this too, don’t I?

**Ironically, it is apparently impossible to make a decent modern version of Lost in Space.

Deja Boo: The Gate

A surreal '80s horror gem aimed ostensibly at kids is like if Dario Argento directed The Goonies

This is the scary movie for me—the one that has stuck most vividly in my mind since I was a child. Released in 1987, The Gate is a Canadian horror film that features a tiny Stephen Dorff in his pictorial debut. It's my first entry in our new Déjà Boo series, where we'll be revisiting the movies that made us squirm as kids.

The '80s were fertile ground for horror films, but this movie really has nearly every trope you could possibly want: monsters, demons, Satanic panic, body horror, zombies, minions, and rockets. It's jam-packed with spooky action that somehow landed only a PG-13 rating, though we all know that the censors were a bit looser back then.

The plot

Glen (Stephen Dorff) is a typical '80s kid—shy, uncool, but sweet—who wakes one morning to learn that the giant tree in his backyard has been struck by lightning. He and his friend Terry, a young metalhead, dig around in it and find geodes. Slowly, the hole starts getting bigger, and weird things start happening.

Glen's parents go out of town for the weekend, leaving him and his friend with Glen's big sister, who in true '80s fashion throws a house party. Unbeknownst to the kids, they speak the existence of a hellmouth into existence when words appear on a magnetic notepad. This, accompanied by the accidental sacrifice of the family dog into the hole, unleashes ancient gods that begin trying to escape.

The rest of the movie, I'll be honest, doesn't make a ton of logical sense. The kids battle off demons and ghosts that appear in the house, before Glen uses a toy rocket to defeat the final big bad.

I'm still not quite sure who the audience for this one was. Having the parents go away for the weekend is classic '80s kids-in-charge energy, and it's in good company with other movies like The Goonies and The Explorers.

But there are scenes and themes that are way too over the top for young folks, and I don't think it's cool enough for teenagers. Adults then? I'm still not sure. If it was aimed at kids, it's sort of an introduction to horror, in a sense. Nothing becomes repulsive to the extreme, but as a 10-year-old watching this, I was definitely microdosing body horror and Giallo vibes.

What scared me then

There are a few major scenes that have stuck with me over 30+ years, and they are honestly still creepy as hell. One is the scene in which Glen, having demonically grown an eye in the middle of his hand, has to stab it out with a shard of glass. I wouldn't have such a visceral reaction again to body horror until I was 13 and watched Nicholas Cage's character in The Rock stab a syringe straight into his heart as a poison gas antidote. These things stick with you, apparently.

The other scene(s) revolved around the animated/claymation minions from Hell. They gasp and run and claw and grab, all while being about 8 inches tall. Several scenes are gruesomely creepy, and evoke a more macabre Lilliputian from Gulliver's Travels.

Somehow I forgot completely about the scene where Glen, faced with an attacking, demonic version of his best friend, is forced to defend himself with only a Barbie doll. He manages to gouge out Terry's eye with the legs. Wild stuff. Sometimes The Gate is like Evil Dead 2, just absolutely insane but also kind of funny. See also: When Glen's sister straight-up yeets a boombox at a zombie to knock him down.

Another interesting thing I noted on this rewatch is how the film has two modes when it comes to sound: It's either complete silence, or foreboding instrumental dirges. The atmosphere, as a result, is always menacing, and it really serves to underscore the unease throughout the runtime.

What I noticed now

I can totally see why a young me found this movie scary, and I'm not sure any kid today could handle it any better. What struck me most now are the things that were a little quieter in the film. For one, the fact that the family dog dies and they don't even call their parents on their vacation to let them know. I find this near sociopathic-level behavior, and I say this as someone who adores Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead.

Not only does the dog die, but Glen's sister's wannabe boyfriend is tasked with taking him to animal control(!?!!?!). When he finds out it's closed, he simply returns to the house and dumps it into the hellmouth. Absolutely not.

Anyway, moving on. The subtle background aspects that permeate The Gate are quite spooky—bugs flocking to a windowpane at night, up close chainsaw noises, eerie mists. Even the shadows your own toys cast in the moonlight can be unnerving. I experienced this many times as a kid even with the most benign of playthings. I remember getting a 6-foot tall cardboard cutout of C3PO and being scared to death waking up to him for the first few weeks.

I also found that seeing a kid’s perception of their own house being haunted is especially upsetting. It's supposed to be a place of refuge and love, so when demons start attacking it, you can feel vulnerable. Glen is interesting because he's not a bland and angelic Carol Anne, but he's also not incredibly self-assured. He’s a Final Boy, except everyone else lives—they just don’t contribute to their salvation as a group. Only Glen gets them out of their demonic jam.

The movie ends on a high note, with all evil crises avoided. The house, of course, is utterly wrecked, and as an adult now, I am annoyed by how much I kept wondering what it would cost to completely redo a living room wrecked by Satan.

Highlights:

• A young Stephen Dorff's film debut
• It's basically microdosing body horror for kids
• Great depiction of Satanic panic and heavy metal
• The Goonies if Dario Argento directed it

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

TV Review: Lanterns

Is this the kind of hero you should want to be?

The Guardians of Oa could have avoided a lot of misunderstandings if they had watched the Disney/Pixar movie Inside Out, where we all learned that it’s very unhealthy for humans to try to ignore one of our basic emotions. In order to become a Green Lantern, you must be fearless. I don’t know how other species in the galaxy deal with that requisite, but it’s easy to imagine how it wouldn’t sit well with humans. We need the information that fear gives us. When balanced with the rest of our emotions, fear protects us. It helps us prepare for the unknown. It motivates us to care for one another. It keeps us humble.

So when the first Green Lantern from Earth is selected, and the same rule of fearlessness is imposed on a species that needs fear to survive, what can you expect, other than terribly messed up people being chosen for the job? The TV miniseries Lanterns dares to question a fundamental rule of its own lore, a view of heroism that breaks something precious in the hero’s soul. You shouldn’t have to renounce the fullness of your humanity in order to be heroic. Fear can be heroic. And pretending to be fearless makes you a danger to those you want to protect.

Lanterns integrates these abstract preoccupations with the specificity of its characters: Hal Jordan, a white Boomer who embodies the “men will join the space police rather than go to therapy” meme, and John Stewart, a Black Millennial who was raised to be the perfect poster boy for respectability politics. The show uses extensive flashbacks, which usually is a problem for pacing, but somehow these flashbacks are thematically coherent with what is happening in the present plot.

Learning what makes these men tick reveals the inadvertent cruelty of the Green Lantern Corps. Hal qualifies to become a Green Lantern because of unexamined toxic masculinity. He has a family history of suicidal depression that he suppresses beneath a mask of toughness. As for John, he qualifies to become a Green Lantern because his parents committed years of severe emotional abuse to purge him of fear. He experienced the equivalent of growing up in a cult that indoctrinated him for an otherworldy mission he never asked for.

john’s case is even more complicated by the fact that a Black man in the US has countless daily reasons to exist in a perpetual state of fear. John‘s parents aren’t innocent of the horrific way they raised him, but they were pushed into that choice by the unequal circumstances that allow an average shmoe to declare he’s fearless just because he lucked into playing the game of life on Easy Mode.

With all these heavy themes dominating the story, the actual events seem almost secondary. Setting aside the flashbacks, the plot consists of a hunt for an alien assassin hiding in a town in Nebraska, followed ten years later by the mystery of who has just killed Hal Jordan. In the first part of the plot, John has been appointed by the Guardians of Oa as Hal’s apprentice, which Hal resents at every step. In the second part, John has been trying to build a life that isn’t defined by the purpose his parents chose for him, and ends up finding his own reasons to become a hero.

This would suffice for an interesting setup even if it didn’t also include tons of delightful banter between its two main characters. Matching Hal’s smug, entitled condescension with John’s obsessive adherence to rules creates a volatile friction that soon enough explodes in satisfying manner. The show plays with this dynamic by reversing it in the scenes set ten years later, when John has outgrown his ingrained urge to obey and has to team up with a less jaded version of Hal.

Some viewers have complained that this plot is too mundane and doesn’t do justice to the colorful variety of alien weirdness that is typical of Green Lantern adventures. That may be so, but it’s not a point against the show. This is the type of science fiction that considers the inner space of the human mind as vast and fascinating as outer space. Planet-hopping romps can wait. This story is about the mismatch between the Guardians’ idea of heroism and the basic facts of human nature. It’s about what being a Green Lantern does to you. I’ll take such deep analysis over flashy pew pew any day.

This is the kind of reexamination of core assumptions that legacy franchises need from time to time to avoid feeling stagnant. Green Lantern has existed since 1940. It didn’t always center on John Stewart, or on Hal Jordan. It didn’t always feature space cops. It didn’t always associate superpowers with emotions. This new take on Lantern lore may not necessarily lead to a complete reinvention, but if it does, it should be welcomed.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Verity

It’s a bad sign when it doesn’t matter whose truth you will accept

Best-selling author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) has suffered a car accident. Her condition is so serious that she can’t finish writing her popular series of murder mystery novels. So her publisher hires a ghostwriter, Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), to complete the remaining books in the series. Lowen will need to spend some days at Verity’s secluded mansion in rural Vermont to study her copious notes and prepare the plot outlines that will follow. The problem is that one can’t enter Verity’s world without becoming tainted by it. The mind that created those sinister fictions has some real dark corners of its own, and in getting to know it from the inside, Lowen will be dragged into a labyrinth of half-truths and destructive obsession.

The biggest factor that works against the success of the film Verity is that it follows the source material, Colleen Hoover’s 2018 novel, too faithfully. Verity the novel has many chapters that are made of second-hand narration, and Verity the film translates them into extensive voice-over sections where events are told rather than shown. The result is that we spend half the movie hearing Hathaway narrate her character’s manuscript, so the experience is more like sitting for an audiobook than sitting for a movie.

The manuscript in question is a memoir that Verity wrote shortly before her accident. Lowen finds it hidden in a flash drive inside a cigarette pack, and the revelations it contains paint a horrific picture of what kind of person Verity is in private. Lowen came in knowing that Verity’s daughter had accidentally drowned in a lake; Verity’s secret memoir gives an alternate account of events, starting with revulsion at her pregnancy and moving on to contempt for her children. One hallmark of Verity’s novels is that they’re narrated by the villain; this document establishes that Verity was capable of mastering that technique by being herself a villain.

So we follow two parallel timelines: Verity’s backstory and Lowen’s present in Verity’s house. Both have problems, plotwise. As I said above, the parts where we follow Verity’s manuscript consist of voice-over narration, which is the opposite of a cinematic approach. And when we’re in the present, not much actually happens. From the trailers, and from the story itself, it’s a given that Lowen will end up embroiled in an affair with Verity’s husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett). But apart from that, Lowen’s role in the movie consists mostly of sitting and reading. Instead of watching a story unfold, we’re learning a story that already happened.

The actors’ wonderful performances do the heavy lifting that the plot can’t. Johnson draws from her prior experience in the Fifty Shades franchise to easily switch between innocent and predatory, while Hathaway, who has had a spectacular 2026 (see for example here, here and here), exudes a mesmerizing malevolence in the scenes set in the past, as well as an ambiguous quietude in the present. Verity’s accident, we’re told, left her immobilized and unresponsive. But this movie is fundamentally built on unreliable narration, so no fact can be taken for certain.

The trick that Verity attempts, but falls well short of accomplishing, is to juggle multiple unreliable narrators and leave the viewer questioning which version is more trustworthy. What (or who) caused Verity’s car accident? What is the extent of her physical impairment? How did her daughter die? Is Verity really the author of that hidden memoir? Is Lowen’s judgment impaired by her abuse of sleeping pills and alcohol? How much of all this might have been orchestrated by Jeremy?

That last part should not be ignored. The movie (as well as the book) introduces a last-minute reveal that is intended to changes how we perceive the character of Verity, but isn’t much of a surprise given that she’s a mystery writer and her memoir sometimes feels hyperbolic. However, this reveal does have massive consequences for how we perceive Jeremy. In the movie (but not the book), Verity’s hidden memoir is discovered in a pack of cigarettes in her office, but Jeremy is the only character we ever see smoking cigarettes. It should also be pointed out, as another clue unique to the movie, that Dakota Johnson looks very much like a younger version of Anne Hathaway. In a story of duplicities and mirrored perspectives, it can’t be coincidence that, when searching for the author that would replace his wife, Jeremy chose one that resembled her so much.

These details make movie Jeremy look a lot less innocent than book Jeremy, while movie Lowen is less a victim of circumstance than book Lowen. I think these changes make for a stronger adaptation, but they’re not enough to save a disappointingly anticlimactic ending. This part is taken straight from the novel, and lands as almost a surrender on the filmmakers’ part. Lowen stumbles upon the final reveal after she’s already made an irreversible choice, so this new information doesn’t have a chance to create the dilemma it’s meant for. Once people have died, it makes little difference whether they were nice or not. Verity feels too satisfied with its own cleverness, but its narrative structure fit the book format better, and its ending robs the resolution of its impact. There are powerful ideas contained here, which neither the novel nor the movie seemed to know how to use.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Video Game Review: Wolverine by Insomniac Games

Not quite the best there is, but more than good enough

Dr. Nathaniel Essex is trapped in a heavily guarded compound by rival scientist, Bolivar Trask. Against his better judgement, Logan comes out of retirement to help rescue the man who once rescued him. But exploring Trask’s compound reveals some deeply disturbing scenes: mutants dissected and experimented on, mutilated and discarded. Can Logan save his old friend while also avenging those so brutally exterminated? Perhaps… but is it for the best?

Wolverine has been quite the discussion piece on many a gaming forum and social media site as of late, the game receiving notoriously bad press before even releasing into the world. As with most media, I did my best to avoid the news beforehand so I could give as unbiased an opinion as possible. These games cost seventy to eighty dollars nowadays, and there is only so much time and money each person has, and I want to respect that. After playing the game, completing it to one hundred percent (story beaten, all collectibles found and unlocked, all challenges completed up to Adamantium level), I then followed up by reading into the discourse about the game. I can confidently say that, while I believe there is plenty of merit to some of the Wolverine criticisms, most of it is just noise and nonsense.

Wolverine looks fantastic. Sure, there are some imperfections with the art style here and there, but most of the time I was wowed by the visual effects, the animations, and the consistent quality on display. This is still Insomniac, and they know how to make a game look damned good. From the creases in Logan’s face to the tears and rips in his suit after a fight, to the gore all around, the game is incredibly detailed. Every so often I found something of lower quality that would stick out, but I had to search for it, or be off the wrong track searching somewhere out of bounds before I encountered a low-quality LoD that had yet to load properly. Overall, however, Wolverine is a very linear single adventure, and the game’s detail reflects that from almost every animation to all the characters and environments.

Alongside stellar animations, the voice performances accompanying them are top tier. Liam McIntyre is an engrossing Logan; his snarls and rage-fueled shouts contrast his tenderness and encompass the character’s range with passion. Nicole Pacent’s Mystique and Krizia Bajos as Jean Grey offer great performances as well. Troy Baker is always a star, though it is odd to see his exact likeness in a game. I know movies have been doing it forever, with the audience having to be hypnotized by an actor’s performance before suspending disbelief enough to accept an established actor as a character on screen. In a game, I am still not used to it. This, however, is a personal thing. Most people who play Wolverine probably won’t know what Troy Baker looks like, and to others, it may not matter.

Wolverine’s writing is decent. The story is easy to follow, even if it stumbles or doesn’t always hit the mark with all its big moments. The game tries to do a bit too much, with characters feeling like they’re included for the sake of being included (it’s a superhero game; we must have another villain!) with weak story cohesion. We got a bit of that in Spider-Man 2, but it’s more noticeable here in a shorter, linear narrative-based game. A lot of the tropes and clichés that follow a superhero game are present here, and while some of it works, sometimes they feel out of place. There is a grittiness to Wolverine and his storyline that shouldn’t get the more jovial Spider-Man treatment. I know they’re all comic books, but some of those comic book-isms just felt out of place. This can be a criticism of the superhero genre, however, and not just Insomniac’s effort here.

The story jumps around, exploring locations the world over, from Canada to Japan, each place richly detailed. The narrative sometimes feels too quick, with various moments feeling unearned. Not necessarily just emotional beats, but story beats as well. Wolverine could have used more padding on the story front. The moments that do hit, however, are great and remind of Insomniac’s excellence. The sometimes breakneck speed of the narrative makes me wonder how the leaks affected development. That said, I enjoyed the overall story that Insomniac tried to tell here. Logan’s personal struggles shone. With his near-immortality—living lives long forgotten, his inability to get close to people, and his fight with his inner nature, the game nails Wolverine as a character, hitting on the different aspects of what makes Logan who he is.

But what about the gameplay, you ask? It’s great! I played on normal, and while I wouldn’t have minded even more difficulty, I think the main difficulty setting has enough balance to please the average gamer. The gameplay is brutal and visceral, with each fight ending in gore-covered claws (which Logan insouciantly flicks away after a fight). While they have the option to turn gore off, the default setting is just what a Wolverine fan should want.

The gameplay focuses on building a rage meter during each engagement. Rage isn’t carried over between fights; any residual after a fight is instead used to fuel special moves that are on a cooldown. The fighting has a rhythm, much like Batman and Spider-Man, but instead of a notifier over Wolverine’s head, the player has to watch each enemy to get a good parry in. Parrying, stunning, and managing Wolverine’s location are key to succeeding in some of the more challenging fights. It’s easy to get surrounded and pummeled by un-blockable moves, though there are a few special abilities that can get the player out of a jam. Once the fighting ramps up and Logan hits his rage, the combat notches up to another level, the gameplay getting even more gore-filled and instantly satisfying. In this mode, you become the Wolverine, tearing into enemy flesh with greater ease and commanding the battlefield like a true superhero. Leaping around from target to target like a feral beast is satisfying, and so is the buildup to filling the rage meter. I wouldn’t have minded more depth to the combat, but for a game of this length, it stays fun the entire run, and that’s key.

Wolverine features challenges through Nightmare Doors, which are scattered throughout the world. These challenges vary from surviving hordes of enemies to reaching a goal within a certain amount of time. While I enjoyed these little distractions, I found the final payout to be a bit of a disappointment. I don’t think the game should have offered an alternate ending by any means, but perhaps a more influential bit of backstory would have been a better reward than what was on offer. That said, the actual challenges were a good time, and I thoroughly enjoyed the ones that made me survive as many enemies as possible. The game felt best when I was killing things.

Exploration is straightforward, sometimes too direct, not giving players too much freedom to discover things for themselves, because a lot is placed right in front of them, but this helps to set the pace and keep the story moving along. The player characters will also vocally nudge the player in the right direction if they take too long, which can sometimes get annoying. One of my pet peeves is leaving an area open to exploration, only to be told to go back to the mission area when you approach it. It can be quite the immersion breaker, and Wolverine is guilty of this.

When all is said and done, though, Wolverine is a very good game that feels great to play. It’s no masterpiece, but it doesn’t need to be. If this is the intro to Insomniac’s X-Men, they’ve got my attention. If they can deepen the combat experience while maintaining better story pacing (either through a longer linear game or by opening it up a bit into more of a hub world), I can see their future X-Men games reaching the heights of their Spider-Man franchise. As is, this game does what it means to and does it well enough, but is that enough? It is for me. But for someone with less disposable income, ask yourself if a very good (not quite great) linear narrative game that runs approximately fifteen hours with little replay value is worth the price. I’m happy with my purchase and the quality on display, but if you are not specifically a fan of Wolverine and/or Marvel, there are better, deeper action experiences you can get at a fraction of the price. If you are a Wolverine fan, then get to killing, bub; the world’s mutants need your help.

The Math

Objective Assessment: 7.5/10.

Bonus: +1 for frenetic, visceral combat. +1 for high end visuals and animations.

Penalties: −1 for narrative pacing. −1 for some linear handholding.

Nerd Coefficient: 7.5/10.

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

New post series: Déjà Boo

Join as we head once more into the breach to face the spooky movies that terrorized us as children

Spooky season is upon us, and this year we’re launching a new series of reviews sure to frighten and delight. Following on the heels of 2024’s First Scare, where members of the flock dove into films of the horror canon they’d somehow managed to avoid thus far, Déjà Boo will send us back to revisit the movies that scared us as kids.

For some, this will mean movies that have since become comfort watches, as growing up often enables you to put things in perspective and recognize that boogeymen and monsters are creatures of the imagination more than anything. Grownup life has a way of bringing other, more mundane frights to the forefront—things like cancer, job loss, and broken hearts.

For others, though, it will be the opposite. Sometimes, scary moments experienced at an impressionable age can get installed in the software of your soul, forever leaving a trace of fear and squirminess that even decades as a rational adult can’t shake.

My family was very much a movie family, and growing up, I had a rich education of sci-fi classics, ‘80s action, and the regular rotation of HBO contemporary hits. When Halloween came around, we enjoyed the usual seasonal favorites and spooky comedies, but classic horror wasn’t really on the menu. Think Monster Squad, My Best Friend Is A Vampire, and Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. Those cult gems were more my speed.

I didn’t even partake of the Universal Monster series until well into my 30s. I did, however, spend a lot of time at the local video store, Video South, on Wilmington Island in Savannah, Georgia. My first real exposure to the terrifying world of horror cinema came through perusing the scary movie section at said store. There was no way on Earth that any such film would make it to the checkout clerk, but walking around and taking in the spine-chilling covers was a spooky treat in itself.

Those gruesome VHS covers were how I began microdosing horror as a kid, as I walked alphabetically down the aisle through the spine-chilling art of Basketcase, Dead Alive, Hellraiser, and Puppet Master. Back then, I couldn’t imagine a world where anyone would enjoy being horrified, let alone myself.

Fast-forward 30 years and here I am, the kind of person who goes to new release scary movies by myself and then casually analyzes the spooks and jump scares. I do not get scared, I do not leave the theater checking for ghosties, and I don’t have nightmares (well, not about slashers). Yet still I crave them and the ghastly vibes they provide.

Strangely, I can still remember the memories of actually being scared as a kid, and they are vivid and real. They’ve somehow outlasted all of the truly spooky moments from hundreds of movies since. I’m hoping that other members of the flock can articulate these types of moments in their own formative films, as well.

I’m going to kick off my viewing with 1987’s The Gate, about a group of kids who have to battle demons after a fallen tree unseals a hellmouth in their backyard. There are images and scenes in this one that have stuck with me for decades, and I’m excited to go back and see how hard they hit as a 43-year-old.

Also on my list are Poltergeist III, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Child's Play, and The Witches(which isn’t really scary but good lord did it scar me). I know a fellow flock member is doing Event Horizon, which is up there in foundational sci-fi horror that made the HBO rounds in the ‘90s.

One thing I’m eager to see is if other aspects of these movies will stand out to me now that I’m too mature to get scared by brief glimpses of body horror or unnerving scary movie-theme musical earworms. That’s the beauty of time and perspective on childhood memories, though.

At the very least, diving back into the classics will be a fantastic time to hang out with baby Haley in the best month of the year.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Book Review: They Called Her Rebel, by Jacob Dallas-Main

For justice thunders condemnation / A better world's in birth!

Sometimes we wake up mad as hell and decide we aren’t going to take it anymore, but then plod along with our days under neoliberal capitalism and do the same thing we do every weekday, pining for the two days we get off, while feeling our despair at the state of the world exacerbate as we are faced with new horrors both within and beyond our comprehension. But now and then we ask ourselves in irascible voices—can’t we just get rid of the damn thing and start again?

That instinct, that latent discontent that the world feeds as we try to survive, is the core of Jacob Dallas-Main’s fantasy novel They Called Her Rebel, published by Roundfire Books in 2025. It bills itself as “a fantasy novel about late-stage capitalism, people power, and queer love,” and it delivers on all of those.

Your protagonist is a young, working class woman who spends her days toiling away for an insurance company, living in a dorm, and spending credits only on approved goods. But during a major facilities accident, she and her closest friend end up saving the life of a rich heiress with anti-establishment intentions. From there they are whisked into the world of a covert resistance cell seeking to overthrow the corrupt empire that oppresses its own subjects and the world at large.

What I particularly appreciated in the book’s depiction of the revolutionary cell is its heterogeneity. Leftist infighting is a common internet joke, and not without reason, but that so often happens because it is the inevitable consequence of people from so many different walks of life working together for a better world. There are rich and poor, like the wealthy heiress and the main character, whose worldviews and philosophies and attitudes towards the nature of social change are so vastly different, as you’d expect from such radically opposed upbringings. One is genteel, with some respect for decorum, and the latter has only seen such niceties as the velvet glove around the iron fist. I was reminded of a book I once read about the anti-Apartheid resistance in South Africa, with the stark difference between what white and Black South Africans could realistically get away with under such a system.

You may remember that I mentioned that the book’s subtitle mentioned “queer romance,” and I cannot imagine it is terribly surprising to the reader of this review that the aforementioned romance is between the main character and the heiress. In terms of pacing, I found it odd; hinted at, vaguely, in the first third, given a fairly detailed chapter in the second, and left mostly in the background in the final. I will say, though, that Dallas-Main wrote that important chapter, their first date, the great collision of their worldviews, in a very sweet and believable way. The two of them are clearly at odds in so many ways, but you also get why they are falling for each other. There is a pervasive awkwardness there that exists when people who have become used to acting on behalf of others must then seriously talk about themselves, and credit to Dallas-Main for grokking that.

Another aspect of the book that I found to be very interesting, but may give some others pause: the depiction of violence. This is a book written in a radical tradition that does not view nonviolent action as the be-all and end-all of resistance. This is a book whose philosophy has a place for violent direct action directed at an oppressive state; the second act of the book is about the planned assassination of the head of the state religion (which, of course, does not go exactly as planned), something that will probably rankle those of a more liberal or centrist disposition. Readers may find it shocking to contemplate propaganda deed as an alternative to leaflets, but these are the discussions that have historically happened among these groups, and no matter what he believes, I appreciate that Dallas-Main was willing to really discuss this complexity. In our world, we had nonviolent civil rights marches of the like led by Martin Luther King Jr., but we also had the smaller rural marches where peace was asserted through guns. In this manner, this novel reminded me a lot of Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which asks the question “why hasn’t there been large-scale terrorism in light of capitalism’s omnicide of nature?” and then goes on to discuss the peculiar framing of the research that contends that nonviolent resistance is more effective, and how he doesn’t find it particularly convincing.

Another thing I found compelling about this book was the combination of classic fantasy elements with a setting that otherwise feels agonizingly current. You have elves and dwarves and other fantasy races coexisting with a form of capitalism terrifyingly close to our own; in that regard, it’s something like Fonda Lee’s Jade City brought forward a few decades. The religion here is something like modern toxic white evangelicalism under a more centralized hierarchy, something like the Russian Orthodox Church under Vladimir Putin. There is mass media that we would recognize, and a social structure that is distinctively bourgeois. The protagonist’s job in the first third of the book could be right out of David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. Like many great works of speculative fiction, this is a funhouse mirror of our world, where the differences serve to emphasize the reality behind it.

This book’s emotional core, beyond its character arcs, is ultimately a form of wish fulfillment that I don’t really see a whole lot in openly leftist fiction. Leftist speculative fiction is generally very heady, very much based on not merely dismantling the old world but also with building another. Kim Stanley Robinson has done a lot of this, like his gargantuan Mars Trilogy, or his New York 2140, the book that ultimately made me a socialist. Robinson is the vanguard of that headier sort; there is also a more romantic sort, the type that focuses on the joy of community and the strength of human interconnection. I would count in this category works such as Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway and Eman Abdelhadi’s and E. M. O’Brien’s Everything for Everyone.

They Called Her Rebel is neither of those, partially because it is a fantasy novel, and therefore in a genre traditionally more concerned with whimsy than with theorizing. The core emotional pull of this book is not the possibility of designing a better system, or living a life without the isolation and alienation of contemporary capitalism, but rather a life in the warmth of community. To the contrary, this is a novel that is selling a fantasy of revenge. This story is about being given the chance to strike a meaningful blow against neoliberal capitalism and its attendant miseries, a mode of resistance that cannot be co-opted. The book has plenty of violence, including scenes of outright warfare against the government, and they are all told thrillingly, but it isn’t exactly an intellectual stimulation there. It’s the emotion that made so many Americans cheer Luigi Mangione as a hero. On the one hand, part of me worries that this sort of catharsis may lead to hasty thinking, but on the other hand, I have to respect the fact that Dallas-Main has chosen a side, the side of messy, uncompromising zeal, and asks you to live with what that would truly mean.

I do wonder, though, if he undoes his thematic premise just a tad with the fact that the plot is kicked off by a rich reformer. Capitalism traditionally tries to defang mass movements by hyperfocusing on single individuals, as well as crediting change to the elites that responded to mass movements rather than mass movements themselves. It is the presence of this rich woman who allows the core cast (herself included) to meet, but on the other hand, it is the main character’s choice to help her that really starts the plot rolling. Taken another way, this first third is about how any spark can light a pile of kindling, and it can come from the unlikeliest of places. I enjoyed this novel enough to give Dallas-Main some grace.

They Called Her Rebel is an anguished roar against the state of the world, a novel that is doing something akin to Bertolt Brecht’s distancing effect, but with setting rather than character. The focus of most fantasy novels is to get lost in another world with characters that you have come to cherish. Dallas-Main very much wants you to identify with your protagonist, but wants you to go farther than simply immersing yourself in the world. Much as Brecht wanted his plays to start riots, Dallas-Main wants you to take a hard look at your circumstances and find the hope that you can change it. All fiction, speculative fiction very much included, is a way of making sense of the world in varying degrees of metaphor. Dallas-Main here channels what Karl Marx said: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

Reference: Dallas-Main, Jacob. They Called Her Rebel [Roundfire Books, 2025].

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.