Movies & TV Star Trek: Strange New Worlds A Commander of Mars — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Valles Marineris” It’s season four and we’re so back. By Emmet Asher-Perrin, Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on July 23, 2026 Image: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ Strange New Worlds is back, both literally and figuratively. The literally part is obvious: the fourth season debuted today with “Valles Marineris.” The figuratively part is much more encouraging: after a hit-and-miss third season, the fourth season debuts with a truly superb episode. One of the landmines that SNW has had to deal with is the fact that it’s a prequel to a beloved show, and all too often the writers have stepped on those landmines to poor effect, focusing way too much on goofing around with fan theories and hey-this’ll-be-cool moments and sub-referencing over and over again and not enough on telling stories about a starship exploring space. “Valles Marineris” is one hundred percent about a starship exploring space, and it’s fantastic. The Enterprise is assigned to examine a rare phenomenon, an interstellar squall. It has appeared around a star with no explanation, and the Enterprise is to study it for as long as it lasts (they’re usually, according to Spock, gone quickly). Pelia is the only person on board who has seen one before, and she says she may have been in a phone box when it happened. (Okay, I know I said it was one hundred percent about a starship exploring space, but I should’ve said ninety-nine percent, because that was totally goofing around with fan theories, as this is the latest unsubtle hint that Pelia has traveled with the title character from Doctor Who.) Of course, things go horribly wrong, because if things didn’t go horribly wrong, we wouldn’t be interested in watching a TV episode devoted to it. They detect a distress call from a buoy, and they go in to investigate. The field chooses then to expand, of course, keeping them from making it out—and then when they do come out, the ship is rendered almost completely powerless. Even if they can fix the warp engines, they don’t have any uridium to ignite the engines. Worse, they have no idea where they are. There are three M-class planets in the system they’re in, at least, and one of them has uridium, so Number One, Ortegas, and La’an take a shuttlecraft to that planet to collect the uridium. Image: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ Meanwhile, on the Enterprise, repairs are interrupted by a ship snagging them in a very sophisticated tractor beam and announcing that they’re salvage. Pike tries to reason with Battle Commander Cassell (superlatively played by Saffron Burrows), and he eventually convinces her to come on board to talk.  One of the more tired complaints about the current crop of Trek shows is that the producers of same don’t understand Star Trek. One of the things I’ve tried to make clear in my reviews of those shows is that that particular complaint is utter nonsense. With this episode of SNW, we have another piece of evidence to support that they understand Trek just fine, thanks, as we see some magnificent exchanges between Anson Mount’s Pike and Burrows’ Cassell. Throughout those exchanges, Pike is constantly putting forth the Trek ethos of communication over conflict, of understanding over violence. Cassell’s people—who look very Vulcanoid—are in conflict with the Dol’Drm, an insectoid species from a neighboring planet. While Cassell’s people have a lot of impressive technology—for example, they can phase through solid matter—they don’t have faster-than-light travel and they don’t have universal translators. Pike offers to help them communicate properly with the Dol’Drm, something they’ve never been able to do. It might lead to peace. But there’s a wrinkle to all this: Spock determines the Enterprise’s location in space—and, unfortunately, in time. They’re in the Sol system, 65 million years in the past. The planet Cassell came from is Mars and the planet on which the landing party is fetching uridium is Earth. Which means that the very large creature that the landing party is trying to get past is a dinosaur. Image: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ So now we get some fun cutting back and forth between Pike trying to convince Cassell not to salvage his ship on the Enterprise and Number One, La’an, and Ortegas trying to be careful not to step on any butterflies. (They don’t actually mention Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” but you can tell that all three of them have read it.) The stuff on prehistoric Earth is tremendous fun, as they try to figure out ways of dealing with the dinosaurs that don’t involve killing them. (Solutions they wind up using including Number One firing a phaser on stun to the soft palate inside a Tyrannosaur’s mouth and La’an punching a raptor in the head, which impresses everyone with its effectiveness, especially La’an herself…) Unfortunately, Pike’s attempt at helping mediate a peace between the Martians and the Dol’Drm fails when Cassell learns that the Enterprise is from the far future, something Pike goes out of his way not to mention. And in that future, Mars is a dead world that Pike’s own people only made habitable by terraforming. The giant crater known to us as Valles Marineris was created by a Dol’Drm weapon that killed millions, and left a permanent scar on Mars. Cassell wasn’t entirely sold on communication, and finding out that Pike lied to her burns out any interest she had in doing so. Instead, they steal the Enterprise’s antimatter containment unit, intending to use it to destroy the Dol’Drm homeworld. The landing party returns with uridium—which came from a crashed Dol’Drm ship, as it happens—and is able to power up the Enterprise.  (Brief digression: the Enterprise is still able to power up because they have a backup antimatter containment unit, and I wanted to dance a damn jig when that happened, because something that has driven me crazy about so many science fiction shows, the various Treks among them, is ships that are on allegedly long-term missions far from home, yet don’t have spare parts for important things. So it was extremely gratifying to see an actual spare part, and nobody even makes a fuss.) With sensors back at full bore, Spock is able to determine that the Dol’Drm come from the fifth planet—not Jupiter, rather another planet about the same size as Mars that is between Mars and Jupiter. The Enterprise moves to try to intercept Cassell’s ship to stop her from using the antimatter to blow up the Dol’Drm homeworld.  Image: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ And then at the last minute, Pike orders everyone to stand down. The presence of a fifth planet changes everything, and Pike realizes it just barely in time. It’s an awful, horrible decision. It’s one that visibly affects everyone on board. But it’s also the only decision possible. Because he knows that 65 million years in the future, there is an asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. Which means that everyone has to watch as an entire world—an entire civilization—is destroyed before their eyes. As is a ship full of Martians, as Cassell’s was a suicide mission, her own ship caught in the wake of the explosion.  However, the explosion also provides the energy the Enterprise needs to get back to the twenty-third century, and they do so, creating the very squall they were sent to investigate. (Also the distress buoy they picked up was their own, sent after they lost power.) Spock confirms that the Dol’Drm homeworld is now the asteroid belt, but also that one piece of debris from the explosion struck Earth and created the extinction-level explosion that wiped out the dinosaurs. In addition, Mars’ orbit was changed, which resulted in destroying the planet’s atmosphere. The episode doesn’t softpedal the awfulness of the decision Pike has to make here. Oftentimes, doing nothing can be the worst thing to do—but in this case, it’s necessary. Pike of all people knows the inevitability of the future. And yet, these are also all people who, from their perspective, have been dead for 65 million years, and would be regardless of Pike’s actions. Truly, this episode has everything. There’s the cool CGI adventure with Number One and the gang fighting dinosaurs. There’s Pike’s very Trekkish pleading for Cassell to try to talk to her enemies. There’s Cassell’s obvious desire to try peace swimming upstream against the long, dreadful war that she’s spent a lifetime fighting—and ultimately losing that fight thanks to Pike’s lie-by-omission. (I can’t say enough about the dignity and gravitas that Burrows imbues Cassell with, aided by a superlative script, credited to executive producers Akiva Goldsman & Henry Alonso Myers, off a story bv Myers and co-executive producer Alan B. McElroy.) And there’s even fun with space cowboys, as the opening has Pike, M’Benga, and La’an riding horses on an alien planet, where they’re delivering supplies covertly, which is mostly there to put the time Mount spent on Hell on Wheels perfecting his equestrianism to good use. There are some lovely little touches here, more subtle than Pelia’s phone-box line. The Martians are Vulcanoid, and in the early concepts of Star Trek, Spock was supposed to be Martian. On top of that, M’Benga points out that the DNA he detected in Cassell and her people can be found in many Alpha Quadrant species—which is a continuity hit, believe it or not! In “Return to Tomorrow,” Spock mentions the Vulcan theories that their species might have originated on another planet. In that context, he thinks it might be Sargon’s people who did it, but it could be the Martians, also. (For that matter, Cassell’s descendants could possibly be Sargon’s people also.) Image: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ And we continue to see that this is a younger Scotty, as he’s been putting in alert lights whenever Ortegas pushes the engines beyond their specs. I love the fact that Scotty was conservative in his younger days. Just in general, the show has done an excellent job of showing us younger versions of the characters we know, and seeing the process by which they evolve into the ones we’re more familiar with from the show that aired sixty years ago. The story is very pulp-y, it’s true. The notion of the asteroid belt being a planet that was destroyed in a war with Mars (or with another solar planet) is one that has whiskers on it, as is the notion of life on Mars. Indeed, the episode itself calls back to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, the novel that introduced John Carter and chronicled his trip to Mars (or Barsoom, as the locals called it).  Speaking of tired tropes, we also have April offering Pike a promotion to commodore at the top of the episode and Pike refusing it at the end, which is one of Trek’s more boring clichés. Although it does result in Number One getting a promotion to full commander, which is good to see. In addition, Uhura is mentoring a Vulcan cadet who is spectacularly snotty even by Vulcan standards, and I spent pretty much every scene she was in waiting in vain for Uhura to upbraid her for speaking out of turn to an officer, which a properly trained cadet would never do, yet which she did constantly. Still—SNW is back! And in both senses, it’s about damn time…[end-mark] The post A Commander of Mars — <i>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds</i>: “Valles Marineris” appeared first on Reactor.

News Resident Evil Resident Evil Trailer Looks Nothing Like the Games, But Feels Exactly Like Them The trailer for Zach Cregger’s next movie shows why he was drawn to this project By Matthew Byrd | Published on July 23, 2026 Photo Credit: Columbia Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Photo Credit: Columbia Pictures Early reactions to the news that director Zach Cregger’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning Weapons (MADIGAN!!!) will be a film based on the Resident Evil games were, understandably, mixed. A movie based on a video game in a franchise that has…oh, let’s say varied wildly in quality over the years? It was an unexpected choice, to say the least. However, this new trailer for Resident Evil makes it a little easier to understand why Cregger chose this project. After all, it looks almost nothing like the games except in the ways it very much does. Confused? That’s understandable. As Cregger has previously stated, he’s largely interested in using this film to capture the feeling of playing the Resident Evil games rather than the strict lore of the games themselves. He wants the movie to feel like a kind of prolonged panic attack starring someone who isn’t very good at playing those games and is therefore most susceptible to their frights. This preview certainly does an excellent job of conveying that sensation. As we watch our protagonist Bryan (Austin Abrams) scrounge for resources and information after a strange incident on an isolated road sends him on a slow descent into Hell, it’s easy to recall the first time you played a horror game only to find yourself throwing the controller across the room in a panic. Callbacks abound (I know that shotgun hanging on the wall), but that’s not really the focus. Those who have seen the movie’s other previews (or played the games) know that there are worse things in store for Bryan, but this effective tease certainly sells the premise’s underlying terror. For what it’s worth, Resident Evil has been described by those who have seen earlier cuts of it as a kind of prolonged chase reminiscent of a horror version of something like Fury Road. If that sounds like more of your thing, then be sure to keep an eye on Resident Evil as it nears its September 18 theatrical release date.[end-mark] The post <i>Resident Evil</i> Trailer Looks Nothing Like the Games, But Feels Exactly Like Them appeared first on Reactor.

Column Anime Spotlight The Unfailing Optimism of My Neighbor Totoro In a hundred different ways, this movie teaches both children and adults how to hope. By Leah Thomas | Published on July 23, 2026 Credit: Studio Ghibli Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Studio Ghibli All too often, I look at any given scenario and assume the worst will happen. I am not alone in this sentiment, and you can attribute it to an anxiety disorder, or *gestures at everything*, or perhaps the mindset that became borderline prophetic during the pandemic: “Hope for the best, expect the worst.” We’re six years out from 2020 but the negativity inherent to that old aphorism feels undiminished. For years we all made plans that we assumed would be cancelled, hoped for outcomes that would not happen, told ourselves that times were hard. And hell yes, they are and have been. Optimism has gone from seeming like a novelty—a trait my less medicated friends had managed to cultivate under circumstances and genetics unfamiliar to me and my ilk—to something more sinister. Optimism feels like ignorance, while cynicism is our sole tried-and-true defense against modern life’s seemingly endless onslaught of bullshit. I am currently visiting my hometown in the American Midwest for the first time in three years, and I can’t say much is happening in this neck of the woods to push back against this sense of careworn negativity. We arrived at my nephew’s birthday party at the state park to discover that we could not see across the lake due to an eerie toxic haze. While annual smog from fires is unfortunately pretty familiar in the PNW, the yellowed air and dystopian orange sun made for unique conversation around the grills and picnic tables yesterday. “It’s the fires in Canada,” my uncle said. “Supposed to be even worse tomorrow.” My brother and sister-in-law told us they’d debated cancelling the picnic or holding it indoors, but it seemed too late with all the coolers in tow. We drove back to my dad’s place after the party ended, with the lackluster alien sun still trying to pierce the haze. My father lives in Midland, where Dow headquarters have long stood. We joked that, hey, at least the locals were closing their windows because of a fire rather than a chemical disaster. How novel! Credit: Studio Ghibli That reminds me that things have never been rosy in Michigan, and while I love visiting this place and its lakeshores and forests and chipmunks and stubborn turkeys, and have a twisted nostalgic fondness for its stupid big Chevy trucks and questionable jerky outlets, I am grateful to live elsewhere. Like so many places in America, Michigan has long been subject to the whims of the wealthy and the ravages of environmental destruction. My brother, who is a police chief, tells me that two people have died this summer from trees falling on them, and how unusual that is. When even the trees are turning on you, optimism is a fool’s territory. But then, in a movie the other day, I was reminded that people and trees used to be friends. I watched two little girls from the city befriend the woodland denizens and nurture the seeds of a new forest and ride a Catbus to the hospital to visit their consumptive mother, and I thought to myself, “Maybe the worst won’t always happen.” Of course a classic ‘80s animated movie about moving to the Japanese countryside will not fix the woes of the world. And I thought I was so familiar with Ghibli films that watching one with my father during a Fathom event would be more about nostalgia than gleaning life lessons. But as is so often the case when revisiting a masterpiece, I left the theater feeling something I did not expect. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the woes of the world, heed a simple recommendation: rewatch My Neighbor Totoro. Magical Mundanity Credit: Studio Ghibli “The umbrella is crying,” Mei says in Japanese, and for the first time I am irritated by the English translation in the subtitles: “There are holes in it.” The umbrella does have holes in it, but that is not what the little girl said. She expressed something much more childish and more beautiful and observant, lost in translation. One of the platitudes I hear weekly in Japan is “Simple is best.” But sometimes when distilling an idea to its simplest form, we lose the wonder of it. It occurs to me now that while simplicity serves us well in adulthood, imagination is essential to growing up. Maybe, then, this translation perfectly mirrors what most impressed me during this Ghibli rewatch. My Neighbor Totoro manages to tell a convincing story from two perspectives simultaneously: it teaches not only children, but adults, to hope.  It does this for children directly, by telling a magical little story. Two sisters, Satsuki and Mei, relocated with their father from Tokyo to the true countryside of Saitama in the 1950s in order to be nearer to their ailing mother, who is staying in a rural hospital with perpetually open windows. Far from bemoaning the move, the city girls are enamored by the delights of the collapsing akiya, with its decaying pillars and dust-filled rooms and overgrown grass. This house is definitely (hopefully!) haunted, and there are critters in its crevices. The girls tell their father that they’ve glimpsed scuttling black creatures in the cobwebbed rooms, and he does not say, “You’re lying.” Instead, he suggests that perhaps they’ve seen a yokai, or Japanese spirit. “No, nothing so scary as that,” the ancient housekeeper and local grandmother tells them. And it’s true—for all the monsters and spirits that populate My Neighbor Totoro, Miyazaki deliberately avoided relying on any real folklore and its connotations. The story he is telling is intended not to rehash old stories, but to suggest that there are stories we have yet to hear, embedded in the environments that adults so often forget to seek wonder in.  But his daughters are not afraid of the unknown, ancient things in the grass. They are smitten by the enormous sleeping forest god that the youngest, Mei, discovers while following spectral critters through the grass, in the very same way that they are smitten with the charms of a secret staircase or fish in the river outside. To them, every part of country life is worthy of excitement and exclamation. Whatever fears they have can be dispersed by hollering exuberantly into darkness or laughing. But their cheerful approach to big, frightening changes does not feel like foolish optimism or even naïveté. It seems more like a reminder that we should not take the world, be it mundane or magical, for granted. In the film’s most iconic scene, Mei and Satsuki wait for their father in the sort of June downpour typical of Japan’s rainy season. He is not on the first bus, and the second bus is running late, but the girls keep waiting, observed by a single nosy toad. When Mei nods off on her feet, her big sister scoops her up onto her shoulders, balancing her umbrella so that she can loop her arms safely around Mei’s galoshes. When the looming gray not-cat-not-tanuki-not-bear that is Totoro approaches, we see only what Satsuki does from beneath the brim of that umbrella—sloth-like gray claws and thick gray fur. Forest gods, it seems, are not exempt from daily mundanities like bus stops and rain. And the palpable joy the monster feels when a little girl lends him an umbrella is comparable to the relief the girls felt earlier in the day, when the shy neighborhood boy Kanta did the same for them, or when, after Totoro departs, beaming, aboard his many-legged Catbus, their father arrives on the next bus. “We met Totoro! The girls exclaim, joyous in the rain, and their father, while bemused, never disbelieves them. The world as they see it is never dismissed or belittled. They are allowed to find beauty in situations others would find miserable. They are allowed to be children. And so the umbrella is crying, and the big-toothed forest monster is a friend-to-be, and Dad will be on the next bus, and Mom will get well soon and come home to enjoy corn from Nanny’s garden. Through the Eyes of an Adult Credit: Studio Ghibli The first time I watched this movie, I was somewhere between Mei’s and Satsuki’s ages and experienced their emotions with them. But now I am watching it at their father’s age, and the movie is no less magical. The source of the magic has shifted, however, into something more unspoken. It is the magic of addressing the worst outcome and, time and again, avoiding it. It is the magic of reeducating a cynical mind, a reminder that sometimes it is okay to embrace a daydream. Because so often, it is easy to foresee the worst in this film. But just as Totoro is a friend, so many potentially awful scenarios in My Neighbor Totoro turn out all right. Let me count the ways… Satsuki and Mei’s mother does not die. Yes, she is sick with what appears to be a very terrible disease of the lungs, and she has been hospitalized for so long that we can watch the calendar behind her change from June to July and August. Time and again, the girls are told or repeat the sentiment that she will be home in just a few days. Again and again, her return is delayed, or her sickness resurges. It would be so easy to believe that while the movie ends on a positive note, their mom surely dies after the credits roll. Instead, the credits show the events that occur in the months after, and we see snapshots of Mom returning home and reading to her daughters in bed and even having another baby. More fool me for assuming the worst. On that note, Kanta’s father isn’t dead, either. When we see neighborhood boy Kanta, he is almost always wearing a sailor’s cap. While these are sometimes included as part of the school uniform, especially in the Showa era, we can’t help but notice that his rundown country home is occupied by his mother and grandmother. For the majority of the movie, not a word is spoken of his father, and context clues from an adult perspective would lead us to a suspect a loss or a tragic backstory. However, when Mei goes missing near the climax of the movie, Kanta is told to fetch his dad to help. More fool me, once again, for assuming the worst. Credit: Studio Ghibli Mei does not drown. Perhaps the darkest moment of the film is a harrowing scene that results from Nanny finding a small sandal floating in a rice paddy. The neighbors trawl the water with poles and fearful expressions, expecting to find a body. It is not until Satsuki confirms that the sandal is not Mei’s that the adults feel some measure of relief. Instead, Mei is shown crying by herself at the foot of a row of Jizo statues along a country road. In Japan, Jizo is the friendly deity, often mistaken for Buddha by Westerners, who keeps watch over travelers and guides the spirits of dead children into the afterlife. Jizo is a good omen, not a bad one, and Mei, while crying, is far from dead or alone. There are endless echoes of this—potential threats cheerily defused, raised hackles immediately smoothed, worrying plot bullets dodged: the monsters are friendly, and so is the weird old lady next door. The girls love the countryside despite their city roots. When Mei shows up, crying, at Satsuki’s school, the teacher does not get angry; instead, she lets the little girl sit in on the class. Time and again, Dad is lost in his work while his girls play outside unsupervised. But nothing ill befalls them. The dust sprites in the attic flee rather than attack. The wind that barrels into the house does not bowl it over. Dad gets off the bus late but in good spirits. Mom’s cold is only a cold, and not a death knell. All these giant-toothed grinning creatures never bite. All these unspoken concerns an adult might have when watching the story unfold do not come to pass. Instead, the best outcomes unfold again and again. For so long, it has been entertaining for people—myself included—to speculate on urban legends about My Neighbor Totoro, including ones linking the movie to real-world tragedies. A common internet theory suggests that Totoro is a death god. Internet forums have long pushed a fridge-horror narrative that Satsuki and Mei both die halfway through the film. According to the theory, Mei does drown, and when Satsuki boards the Catbus to chase down her missing little sister, she’s actually agreeing to die. After all, the Catbus destination marker briefly flashes cemetery as an option.  All of this is wrong, but maybe it’s how we react to a movie that seems so impossibly pure. Totoro acknowledges darkness and overcomes it, again and again, and it’s such a rarity in cinema that we recoil and make up myths that make things darker. It would feel cloying or sentimental, perhaps, if the movie were not so firmly rooted in realism. These characters feel like real people in a real setting, kids growing up shielded from the elements by a mosquito net and a father’s support and the belief that mom will come home soon. The belief is that things will be alright. And for once, they really will be. Planting Seeds Credit: Studio Ghibli Now that I am visiting northern Michigan, I am looking forward to seeing some white-tailed deer. I have always loved deer, though they plagued my mother’s daylily beds for years and are a known menace on the roads. Around dusk every day around here, you have to keep your eyes peeled for the flash of stares on the roadside. In my family, only my sister and I have not hit a deer. It’s a known consequence of life in the woods. The deer in the headlights are not stupid: the world has changed too quickly for their brains. Like them, we’re all caught in the beam of a rapidly changing world with no biological context for how to respond in time to the endless inventive disasters incoming. The forests will burn, and we will know we should take action, do something to stop it, but instead stand frozen, eating Walmart cookies and cream cake on the grass. Does that make us foolish, or is clinging to these small moments of comfort essential to surviving as a human being? Every time something magical happens in the vicinity of Mei and Satsuki’s father, we do not know whether he’s aware of it. He smiles at his desk with the sliding door open when he hears the sound of his girls laughing outside or the ethereal flute music of forest creatures. He closes his eyes and listens, and then gets back to work. Perhaps he does not actively engage in believing in magic, but he does not discount it, either. It is enough to know that his daughters believe in it, and their belief can sustain them and him and allow him to hope for the best, too. In the countryside, things grow green and tall, and a forest may even sprout overnight, and the bus does not go to the cemetery. Instead, it takes you and your loved ones home safely.[end-mark] The post The Unfailing Optimism of <i>My Neighbor Totoro</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Column 80s Fantasy Film Club Sorceress: A Low Point in Sleaze-and-Sorcery Sexploitation Roger Corman presents the male gaze at its most jaundiced and bloodshot. By Tyler Dean | Published on July 23, 2026 Credit: New World Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: New World Pictures In this column, we’re looking back at the 1980s as their own particular age of fantasy movies—a legacy that largely disappeared in the ’90s only to resurface in the 2000s, though in many ways, the fantasy films of the Eighties are far weirder and less polished than what we got in the aughts. In each of these articles, we’ll explore a canonical fantasy movie released between 1980 and 1989 and discuss whatever enduring legacy the film has maintained in the decades since. For a more in-depth introduction to this series of articles, you can find the first installment here, focusing on 1981’s Dragonslayer. Last time we looked at John Boorman’s flawed but enduring sword-and-sorcery epic Excalibur. This time we’re lowering our sights quite a bit in order to discuss the 1982 Conan-inspired cash-in Sorceress, produced and distributed by Roger Corman. This is another film which I watched specifically for this column, having somehow missed it during my college days spent seeking out intentionally schlocky dreck. Basically, all I knew about it was its utterly fantastic poster. The poster has it all—a second-rate attempt at a Boris Vallejo-style illustration of a scantily clad woman, a phallic snake poised to strike at her genitals, what feels like a vaguely racist caricature of an ape-man wielding an axe, and a winged lion roaring in from above. It’s the perfect decor for any dorm room wall or the side of a stoner’s van.  The evil sorcerer Traigon, who is said to possess three lives, each of which must be taken in turn, attempts to sacrifice his firstborn child to the goddess Caligara only to be thwarted by (1) the steely resolve of the infant’s mother, (2) the timely intervention of the wizard, Krona, and (3) the fact that there are, in fact, two infants—twins!—and it would spell disaster if he killed the second-born by accident. Traigon mortally wounds the twins’ mother, but she manages to impale him with a spear before she dies, ending the first of his lives. Krona imbues the infant girls with magical powers and leaves them with a goatherd to be raised in secret. Twenty years later, Traigon is resurrected and the twins have grown into mostly nude young women, Mara and Mira, who possess the powers of illusion and fighting prowess. When Traigon’s soldiers kill their adoptive parents and Krona sacrifices himself to the pyre, they set out with the help of Viking warrior Baldar, handsome barbarian prince Erlick, and a perpetually horny Satyr named Pando on a quest to kill the evil wizard and fulfill their destiny. There are bizarre misadventures along the way: Delissia, the sultry Queen of Kshaltriya and Traigon’s ally, promises that the second-born twin will be given as a reward to Hunnu, one of her trained apes; there are exploding fruits that get you high and an attempted execution by rectal implement; at one point Baldar explains the birds and the bees to the twins, and later the twins’ psychic connection to one another is explored during one of the cringiest sex scenes in cinematic history.  Finally, Traigon (rather inscrutably) attempts to orchestrate Mara’s impregnation by Erlick so that they can produce a child of royal blood, giving Traigon another infant to sacrifice this his dark gods. When the rest of the party shows up to rescue them from his nefarious, still very opaque scheme, Baldar fights some mummies in the crypts, and the twins save the day at the last moment by invoking the name “Vital” and summoning a winged lion-centaur monster from space. Traigon sacrifices Delissia in desperation and summons his goddess, who fights the lion, while Pando leads a peasant rebellion by summoning the goats of the local shepherds. Traigon is finally killed by his daughters (apparently he only had two lives?). Erlick announces that he and the twins are in a throuple, everyone has a hearty laugh, and the film ends. Sorceress made a paltry 1.3 million dollars at the box office, allegedly ended director Jack Hill’s friendship with Corman, and quietly disappeared into the back-alleys of cinema’s red-light district. But does it accomplish anything beyond its lurid premise? Is there anything of value here? The film is, by almost every metric, unrecommendable. The production looks cheap and lazy. Hill apparently wanted to work in Italy but Corman had a deal with a much cheaper studio in Mexico. Hill explained that the team “worked their hearts out… [but] this production had the most problems of any movie they had ever been on—all kinds of things went wrong. The Mexican film vault on the studio lot even blew up.” Given that the majority of the cast was also played by local actors (likely because they were non-union), the whole film has been redubbed by Americans, lending every scene a veneer of bad ADR.  But by far its biggest sin is the fact that the film is a rape-y, horny sleaze-fest. The twins are introduced swimming nude while Pando spies on them from the bushes. Traigon tortures their mother with a device called “the talons” that appear to just be spiky metal bird talons used to rake at her pelvis. The twins wear what looks to be a Spirit Halloween version of a Cossack costume. Erlick stumbles through orgies as he flees city guards. The film also features one of the more graphic on-camera sexual assaults I’ve ever encountered. Look. I’m no prude. There is room for the titillating and erotic in cinema, and I’m sure soft-core pornography keeps a lot of hard-working folks employed. But this is bottom-of-the-barrel dirtiest-old-man worst-taste grotesquerie. It’s the male gaze at its most jaundiced and bloodshot. Sorceress is the kind of film that gives rise to thoughts like “Maybe Valerie Solanas had a point!” Towards the end of the movie, Traigon turns to Hunnu and chastises him, saying “Filthy beast, I have no time for your disgusting desires now.” He might as well be talking to Corman, Hill, and everyone in the audience.  In its occasional fun moments, Sorceress is campy and silly. Traigon reappears from the void, sauntering and throwing back his shoulders with all the misguided, queer-coded menace of Rob McElhenney’s Nightman. Caligara looks like a cheap fright-mask version of the Norse goddess Hel. A man walks a very confused-looking jaguar through the background of a crowd scene then bends down to pet it. The lion-monster, who may or may not be named Vital, flaunts one of the weirdest and most baffling foam rubber suits ever devised. And, if rumors are true, Jack Hall wanted horror film icon Sid Haig to play Pando; when Corman refused to pay Haig’s requested salary, Hall appears to have simply crafted a prosthetic mask that vaguely looks like a mean caricature of the actor. If not for everything mentioned in the previous paragraph, this so-bad-it’s entertaining absurdity might have been reason enough to watch. Alas.  So what is Sorceress’ legacy? Despite causing a rift between Corman and Hill, there was just enough of a market for Corman to make two more sleaze-and-sorcery epics: Deathstalker (1983) and Deathstalker II: Duel of the Titans (1987). And, alongside other pop culture low points like Fire & Ice, it feels like part of the inspiration for some of the squirmiest, cringiest excesses of early 21st-century patriarchy: booth babes at E3 and Comic-Con, petitions for Korgoth of Barbaria to get a full season order, Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, etc. Its existence detracts from the otherwise delightful schlocky legacy of campy ’80s fantasy. Cannon Films are bad. The Beastmaster is bad. They also feature women in bikinis and awkward flirting and dumb dick jokes. But there is also charm to be found there, which explains why audiences have a certain amount of affection for those films. Movies like Sorceress give them all a bad name.  But what do you think? Am I being a killjoy in finding Corman’s late-career midnight movie output too gross for human consumption? Am I giving this film too much of a hard time? Can anyone tell me why the film is called Sorceress when there are two sorceresses in it? Tell me what I’m missing or agree with me wholeheartedly in the comments, and be sure to join us next time when we go from chauvinistic dreck in the mystical past to charming dreck in the near future when we take on Cannon Film’s American debut: 1980’s sci-fi musical The Apple!  The post <i>Sorceress</i>: A Low Point in Sleaze-and-Sorcery Sexploitation appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Horror Read an Excerpt From Tapeworm by A.P. Thayer A group of friends must confront questions of identity, aging, and desire during a vampire infestation in an isolated Californian desert. By A.P. Thayer | Published on July 22, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Tapeworm by A.P. Thayer, a body-horror vampire novel publishing with Evil Twin on August 18th. We’re thrilled to also include an excerpt from the audiobook edition of Tapeworm, read by Lee Osorio. Click here to jump straight to the audio excerpt! After the recent separation from his wife Trish, Victor hopes his friends’ annual weekend retreat to the Californian desert town of Superstition will loosen him up and reforge the group’s fraying bonds. But something is waiting underneath Superstition, crawling its way into their group, and feeding into their desires. Victor knows too well what it means to repress his desires. He’s always attempted to be the perfect partner, yet often found himself lacking. With Trish skipping the trip, he begins falling into the wild underbelly of Superstition in new ways. When the leader of the town’s Welcoming Committee approaches him with a romantic, sexually charged offer, Victor wonders if it’s too good to be true.But the Welcoming Committee expects a price to be paid for its services. One that cannot be fulfilled by willing bodies alone. By the end of the weekend, group bonding will have developed a whole new meaning. Because something is hungry for Victor and his friends. Buy the Book Tapeworm A.P. Thayer Buy Book Tapeworm A.P. Thayer Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Prologue The earthquake that shakes Superstition Valley is uncharacteristic, not because quakes are rare there but because of the aftershocks that plague the valley for so long afterward. As the region eventually returns to baseline seismic activity, one final echo reverberates deep beneath the ground. One final rumble, and then the earth shifts and cracks. From this wound, It oozes, a formless mist of yellow, awakened to a new world and new sensations. A prisoner no more. Alive once again. As it shakes off the millennia of sleep, it delights in the sensory input of this new world. Temperature and the passage of time. Thoughts and emotions. Pain. That of others as well as the pain of its own hunger. The land was dead and desolate when it had been bound. Not a single plant grew in that desert basin. No life called it home. It was little more than a forgotten corner of the world in which to be exiled. Not so anymore. Hungrily, it stretches toward the sandy surface with its twisting cacti and blooming wildflowers, a basin surrounded by mountains crowned with jagged peaks. Above, the fiery orb of the sun, its ancestral enemy, burns bright, harsh, and deadly. The creature will have to wait until the sun sinks below the horizon and the valley falls into shadow. Only then can it truly be free. Near the center of the desert basin, a victim—human, female, flesh—slams a sliding glass door. The shockwave rolls over the creature’s body, through its near-interminable coil of muscled segments that writhe beneath the surface, flexing, contorting, and growing. It births tendrils that stretch out through the packed clay and loose sand, inching toward the woman. She has deep brown hair that shines in the dying light of day. A breeze rolls across the valley and pulls loose strands free, whipping them behind her in a way that makes the creature salivate. The woman’s emotions are a heady mixture, too. Complex—tainted by grief and weighed down by longing. The creature recognizes an echo of its own centuries-old anger within the woman’s pain and an overwhelming feeling of being trapped. Her maelstrom of emotional carnage is a vessel to inhabit. A new home, even, perhaps. Sadness, frustration, a life lost. Lives. Understanding continues to grow within the creature beneath the sands, understanding of the woman as well as the world to which it has awakened. Voices are coming from inside the house as others prepare to depart. They have just spent a long weekend together. There is embarrassment, feigned joy, and annoyance pulsing off them. There is a gulf between her and them that is growing wider with every beat of her heart. Something within her is calling out to be rescued. “Fuck,” she whispers, and the creature wriggles a little closer, as if that one word is an invitation. A hundred feet below, the creature’s ancient young finally wake and pour from the cracks in their prisons, awakened by their mother’s return. The remains of the creature’s prison—the vast underground lake, the unending cavern, the impenetrable darkness—fill with the old young. The wardens, ageless hummingbirds, flitter about, dive-bombing the water to feast on the squirming young, preventing their escape. There is no way out for the spawn, though. Not that way. But their sacrifices are only a distraction. The creature, in the meantime, extends itself farther through the new crack. The hummingbirds do not hear the creature’s escape. They are unaware of its new freedom, too busy destroying generation after generation of young. No matter. There will be more. The door slides open again, and another human—male, mate, prey—steps into the late autumn chill of the valley. The wind is picking up, and what heat the sand collected during the day leaks away like blood from a wound. “Trish.” The man’s voice is strained. Half annoyance, half exhaustion. He has a duffel bag gripped in his hand, the cloth twisted in his fist like it’s the only thing keeping him from losing control. The woman, Trish, ignores him. Her eyes are shining and unfocused, her lips pursed and trembling. Her heart hammers within her chest, pumping hot, sweet blood through her veins. The creature groans out in hunger. It has not eaten in so, so long. He sits down next to her and stares into the desert, too. Their relationship is a bloated dead thing, waterlogged and expanding with gas as they struggle to keep it ambulatory, even as the flesh sloughs away. Flies swarm thickly on the putrid cadaver, eager to glut themselves on the sweet rot of what could have been and what might have been. An exquisite corpse, swollen with maggots. A mound of decayed hope and necrotized dreams. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he says finally. A lie. He did. “It’s fine,” she responds, and it isn’t, but that’s okay. They have both made up their minds about the other but are too cowardly to do anything about it. Instead, they gather with friends in attempts to recapture the youth they once had. The yearly vacation is over, though, and the charade didn’t even last the weekend. He slides his hand into hers, but there’s a lifelessness in their touch that has become them. He squeezes, and she shudders. Involuntary revulsion. Anger flares in him, and he lets go. Neither of them is in control anymore. The sun sets lower. The day has grown long, now. The shadows of the distant peaks have almost reached them, jagged peaks crawling across the sandy floor, history’s slowest charge. The creature stretches out and… Its flesh sears in the light of the sun, and it recoils into the safety of the ground. Too soon, too soon! It must be patient. Patient. What is a few more moments after so many millennia? “Let’s go home.” Beneath the anger and barely contained judgment, there is a hint of an apology that will never come. It is too choked with the oily residue of his ego. “We’re tired. We don’t drink this much anymore.” Excuses. Lies. The creature savors the falsehoods. Trish scoffs at the “we.” He swallows. A sore subject, but what isn’t these days? They sit in silence, unwilling to retread that particular argument, unwilling to move forward. Time dribbles past. Almost there… The shadows finally reach her bare feet, and the creature’s corpse-white tendril darts out, stabbing beneath the cuticle of her pinky toe, hungry for the warmth of her flesh, where it pulls itself beneath her skin with hooked barbs. She gasps. “Something bit me.” He sighs and lifts her foot, his treatment roughened by exhaustion and irritation. Like this is one more thing to deal with. There is a delightful hole in his being where patience and empathy once lived. A burrow in which to nest, if only the creature can get to him, too. “I don’t see anything,” he sniffs, confirming his own hypothesis. He can never be wrong. She rises to the bait. An explosion of anger, like the heat of a furnace when the door is pulled open. “Am I being dramatic again?” Her venom splatters all over his front. He recoils. She pulls her foot away and curls her toe to inspect her nail. There’s no mark. The creature didn’t leave a trace, after all. It salivates inside her, instead, and feeds on the anger just as it feeds on her. The male—his name is Vic—takes a deep breath to calm himself. He knows they still must drive home together. They still must live together. He thinks if he keeps everything civil, they can each go to their separate corners of the apartment, leave each other alone, and the relationship can stumble on. She catches a ripple of movement beneath her skin. The creature makes her forget. It leaks excretions into her bloodstream, spiking her cortisol and adrenaline, pumping her full of norepinephrine. It stokes the furnace of her anger and doesn’t let her move on. Go on. “Answer me,” she hisses, less in control of herself than usual. “Can we not?” He asks, his voice quiet and controlled. He relishes her loss of control. “You used—” “Used to what?” she snarls. He swallows the vicious response gurgling up the back of his throat, then speaks with deliberate pauses between the words as if speaking to a child. He thinks he is winning, so he pulls his punch. “Used to be sweeter.” “I used to be happy, too,” she spits back at him, even though what she’s really thinking is We used to love each other. “Oh, whatever,” he snaps, losing his fragile control like he lost it earlier in the weekend. This outburst hurts her less. The creature oozes free from her ear canal and stretches toward him, eager to taste him, too. Vic moves away. “Come on, we have to go.” The creature burrows back into her skull, where it drips honeyed poison into her prefrontal cortex. “I wish I still wanted to touch you,” she says, whispering, and the creature forces her to smile while she says it. His shame and anger flare white hot, but he does what he so often does. Retreats. He pushes away from her and bites his tongue. Represses and seethes. Bottles it up. When he’s a few steps away, he stops, almost brave enough to give voice to his true feelings. “Get your shit together,” he says instead. “I don’t want to be stuck in traffic.” He slams the sliding glass door hard. The creature shivers at the vibration, and therefore so does Trish. Tears form, but they are of anger more than grief. There are two kinds of pain within her. The pain of loss and the pain of rejection. Two sides of the same coin—ego. Her aching fights against the misery that is their life, their apartment, their friends… All the things that have knotted them together, impossible to separate. The creature floats around inside of her, indolent in its consumption, and slips behind her retinas. It sees their relationship play out linearly, as humans experience time. Bathes in the way they used to love each other, warms itself with the memory of their fiery need, now long dead. Altered states, flashing lights, loud music. The details have changed since its imprisonment, but the celebrations taste the same. It floats in the happy future Trish imagined for them when they first met. Vic was her salvation from a life of pain and solitude. That fantasy has almost fully slipped away, so the creature latches on, hooks into the dream, and drags it to the forefront of her mind. It forces her to relive those memories over and over and over. Makes her experience them as both the subject and the observer. It overwhelms her passivity. It drowns her denial. It suffocates her acceptance. Makes her remember without the frenetic energy of a cocktail of drugs and the haze of alcohol. Then it impregnates her fantasies with new possibilities. A lifetime together, as they once were. Joy. Love. Desire… All the things she once had. All the things she could have again. Do you want this? She hiccups. She misses who she was then. She misses who she thought they were going to be. She feels lost now. She was happy and can be once again. Right? Of course. On the other side of the house, the friend group is loading their vehicles. Their voices are carried by the cutting wind. Another weekend ritual finished, and another failed attempt at recapturing what used to be. Another step closer to the grave, but to her, they’re already dead. They can truly live, too. Her eyes are unfocused, and tears have streaked her foundation. They plummet to the ground, lost in the growing shadows. Vic drags Trish’s large suitcase from their room, past the sliding glass door, and down the front hall. This time, there is no need for the creature to manipulate. Trish remembers Vic as he was back then. Fun. Happy. Playful. She remembers the passion with which he loved her. The strength with which he fucked her. Anger and pain flare within her again as she remembers the sorry state of their marriage. Purple twilight settles over the landscape, casting the world into the purgatory between night and day. Like the purgatory she has been living in. I can make it better. She takes a sobbing breath and straightens, her head falling backward, her face up to the darkening sky, and she screams her frustration to the first glimmering stars. Her friends are saying goodbye in the foyer, ready to drive back to Los Angeles. They pretend not to hear her. “Yes,” she answers, as the echoes of her fury fade away. The creature has her now. Its voice is sickly sweet, cocooning her in promises while tendrils of itself spread and spread, taking over every part of her, settling into the new body while it waits for what will come next. A hummingbird hovers nearby, tasting the air, sensing something is wrong. The creature sends one impulse, and she moves like a snake, snatching the bird’s tiny body from the air and squeezing. She takes a ragged breath and brushes away her tears, already looking forward to next year’s trip. She does not notice herself wiping the crushed bird’s body onto the desert floor. “Everything will be better.” Listen to the audio excerpt: Excerpted from Tapeworm, copyright © 2026 by A.P. Thayer. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Tapeworm</i> by A.P. Thayer appeared first on Reactor.