Netflix Summer 2015: Wizards vs. Aliens

Sixteen year old Tom Clarke is a wizard - like his late mother and his grandma Ursula but not his father Michael who disapproves of his son using magic to help his school football team. On a field trip to standing stones Tom and his friend Ben find a magic ring,dropped by father and son wizards abducted by the Nekross,aliens who have come to Earth to extract magic from its practitioners. One of the Nekross,Varg,arrives on Earth and captures Tom and Ursula,imprisoning them on their space craft.

Tom manages to teleport himself back to Earth and,accompanied by Benny,enters Ursula's secret magic chamber,where they meet Randal Moon,a hobgoblin attendant on Ursula. Randal casts a spell which takes the boys and Michael to the standing stones where the space ship landed and transports them to the Nekross craft. Although wizards can only cast three successful spells in one day the ship has orbited the Earth and arrived at a new dawn,allowing the group,along with the captive wizards,to magic themselves back to Earth.

Ursula and Randal cast a shrouding spell to shield earthly magic from outer space but the Nekross send a ferocious cat-like creature - the Grazlax - to hunt down Tom when he is at Benny's house. They lock it in the shed whilst Tom casts a spell to divert Benny's parents but when it escapes they force it to retreat,using a hair dryer which kills it.. Unfortunately three more Grazlax babies are released.

The boys are besieged by the new crop of Grazlaa who multiply with heat and seem likely to reproduce into millions. Whilst Tom gets rid of school-mate Katie,who has come to the door as a charity collector,Benny works out that the creatures are allergic to high pitched noises and destroys them with his violin playing - spattering the house with their insides. They bring Ursula in to effect a magical clean-up,which also turns the reproduction ornaments into valuable originals.

Desperate to learn more exciting magic and feeling nagged by his father Tom is happy to befriend the older Jackson Hawke,who uses magic to strip a gang of youths out to mug Tom and who has successfully eluded the Nekross. He is a very powerful young wizard but he uses his magic to play cruel practical jokes,which alarms Benny. Then Benny himself is caught by the Nekross Varg.

Jackson persuades Tom to unleash his hidden depths of magic which blows Varg away. However Benny reports what has happened to Ursula,who tells him that Jackson uses 'grim' or dangerous,provocative magic and is anxious to find the other boys. Jackson lures the Nekross into abducting him and Tom onto their ship to destroy them but Benny is taken too and Tom is perturbed that Jackson is so keen on obtaining victory that he has no regard for Benny's life. It then transpires that Jackson used his powers to make his parents vanish when they annoyed him and Tom prevails upon Jackson to use his deep magic for good - which he does,using it to get the trio back to Earth. Ursula and Michael offer Jackson a home but he sets out to regain his parents.

Lexi,the Nekross king's daughter,puts on a necklace which transforms her into a human woman and,calling herself Lucy, travels to Earth and befriends Tom. A cautious Benny,however,is suspicious and realises who she really is. Stephanie Gaunt,a fabulously wealthy woman,has been observing Tom and kidnaps him for his powers,along with Lexi,whom she eventually unmasks as an alien. Benny persuades Ursula to form an alliance with the Nekross to free the pair but Varg and his father plan to renege on the deal as soon as the rescue is effected.

Gaunt tells Tom and Lexi that she wants them to combine their powers to steal her the Crown Jewels. Blocking her security system, Lexi tells Tom of her plan for them to escape and they even establish a rapport, getting to understand each other. Ursula contacts Varg and, along with Benny and Michael, transport themselves to where the prisoners are being held, though they are also captured. By getting Varg to take on Stephanie Gaunt's appearance, her henchmen are sent away and she herself held captive in the room where she kept Lexi and Tom. The alliance was over when Varg was about to disintegrate the humans but Lexi sends him back to the Nekross ship.

Ursula casts a spell to send the Nekross into deep space but only succeeds in making them travel a very short distance but Benny comes up with a detailed plan - which blows up all the school computers - to gather all the exobytes in the universe to defeat the aliens and sends it to them via an email. However when they switch it on it immobilises all the ship's life support systems,dooming them to die within the hour. As the wizards and their friends are celebrating Benny's victory the Nekross appear on his computer and Lexi appeals to Tom to save them.

Whilst Ursula and Michael rightly think the Nekross should be allowed to die Benny inexplicably feels compassion and he and Tom head for the stone circle where Tom uses very strong magic to teleport his friend onto the Nekross ship. This knocks him unconscious but Ursula casts a spell to revive him. Benny saves the Nekross who inevitably show their gratitude by trying to kill him but he transports himself back to Earth and joins the others at the stone circle.

Tom is having nightmares of the night,ten years earlier,when,on Halloween,his mother Helen died after protecting him from an alien force. Soon afterwards he starts to see her and Randal explains that she is a 'pale shadow',come to warn him of danger. Eventually he meets her but she has no memory of who she or Tom are. She directs him to a warehouse,which was her most recent memory but the warehouse is occupied by Nekross,who are making clones of Helen to obtain her magic.

The Nekross explain that when Helen died fighting their probe ray they extracted part of her DNA in order to synthesize clones and recreate her magic. However Helen casts a spell allowing her and the boys to escape home. Randal gives her an amulet which restores her memory but she and Ursula know this cannot last and,after the family has returned to the factory and used magic to destroy the Nekross cloning factories around the world, sending the aliens back to their planet, Helen disappears again,happy in the knowledge that her son will be a powerful wizard.

Chloe Martin is an Internet sensation, a street magician due to appear on a Hex TV show. Tom and Benny realize that she is a wizard but when they visit her she tells them that she was orphaned as a baby and, brought up in a children's home with no parents to explain her gift to her, believes her special powers are actually telekinesis. Many other wizards have, like Tom and Benny, cottoned on to the real nature of Chloe's powers, and a hundred of them have turned up at the television studio to stop her from performing and revealing to a hostile world that wizardry exists in the twenty-first century. But the show is a fake, a ploy devised by the Nekross and its producer is a disguised Varg, who has succeeded in bringing all the wizards to one place to steal their magic.

The wizards are trapped in a force field but Michael destroys the machine to extract the magic so Lexi summons a mother ship to beam up the wizards. Chloe and Tom head for the roof and create a storm, which delays the ship whilst Benny gets rid of the force field and frees the captives. With a hundred angry wizards summoning all their energy to protect themselves the Nekross are forced to retreat - but later return to claim a victim.

Ursula and the boys visit a sinister house to get rid of an unknown entity, which turns out to be Squiggley, a verse-spouting hobbledehoy. Whilst he sees off the intrusive Varg he also effects a switch whereby Benny becomes a wizard and Tom a geek. They seek to find him again to reverse the process - as does Varg, now imbued with Ursula's magic and fearful that his family will extract it from him. Unfortunately the Nekross reach Squiggley first and destroy him for his magic.

The Nekross have destroyed Squiggley but Tom learns that Hobbledehoys exist in pairs, one to cast a spell, the other to retract so they find the second one, though he is very reluctant to cooperate. Ursula teleports Varg into the lair to change powers with him and eventually Tom, thinking like Benny, tricks the creature into putting things back to normal. The Hobbledehoy even likes the lair so much he decides to stay.

Whilst conducting an experiment in magic requiring aggression Tom is injured and Ursula discovers that the only cure lies in the cave of Menla-Gto in Tibet, to which she transports herself, Michael and Tom. Meanwhile Randal creates a spell which will allow him to leave the lair for the first time, rendering himself invisible, and, along with Benny, he leaves to find the 'magic mirror' which will thwart the Nekross. However the aliens have already honed in on Tom and his family and confront them outside the cave.

Ursula, Michael and Tom are rescued by Tseringma, the world-weary, three thousand year old guardian of the cave, who tells them that global disbelief in magic has weakened its potency but is relieved to sacrifice herself in order to heal Tom, whom she sees as a future champion of all wizardry. Meanwhile Benny and Randal discover the magic triptych mirror, which will triple Randal's magic powers and, although they are captured by the Nekross, Randal's combined use of magic and science enables them to escape as well as saving Tom and his family from another Nekross encounter.

Mother and daughter wizards Madeleine and Gemma Raven are in a group captured by the Nekross but in exchange for their freedom Gemma offers to cast a spell which will weaken Tom. To make it she needs Crowe blood which she obtains by 'accidentally' brushing against Ursula and pricking her finger. The spell cast it succeeds in driving a wedge between Tom and Benny, making them hate the sight of each other and turning back time so they forget their triumphs over the Nekross. Ursula realizes what has happened but, as the spell was cast using Crowe blood, fears that it cannot be reversed.

With Tom and Benny hating each other and failing to combine to outwit them the Nekross seize more victims, aiming to use Gemma as their secret weapon. Ursula believes that if she sacrifices herself she can reverse the spell and begins to do so but Tom starts to realize that he is a wizard and the memory of the boys' friendship returns. They are able to save Ursula and to rescue the Ravens, helped by Randal Moon, with a combination of science and magic and the Nekross are thwarted again. The king is angry with his children and unaware that chancellor Kooth and his chief scientist Jathro are plotting against him.

Benny is on work experience at Psyke, a computer games firm based in the Wyvern House tower block, where he meets fellow geek Alicia. There is no thirteenth floor in the building - from which, over the years people have mysteriously disappeared - but first Varg, infiltrating the block in search of magic, and then Alicia's boss Mrs Hatcher vanish after the lift stops at the thirteenth floor. Lexi, in human form, comes looking for her brother and forces Tom into the lift with her and it again stops at the thirteenth floor. Stepping out they find they are in the Neverside, a sinister wood full of dark magic, where they find Mrs Hatcher, now an old woman despite having only arrived there a few hours earlier. When Benny and Alicia ask Mervyn, the odd caretaker, where Tom might be he merely tells them that, like so many others, he has 'disappeared'.

Marooned on the Neverside Tom and Lexi form a bond as they grow older and even have a child whom they name Benny Junior and who befriends the elderly Varg. Ursula identifies Mervyn as the troll who guards the thirteenth floor, the gateway to the Neverside and overcomes him, riding in the lift with Benny to rescue Tom and the Nekross though as the troll is destroyed so is the Neverside and Benny Junior disappears as he is unborn. Lexi and Tom are told that the memory of their time together will eventually fade but Lexi is strangely wistful as the Nekross spare the wizards who saved them.

During a solar eclipse the Nekross put into effect their plan to control the moon's orbit, causing a permanent eclipse and total darkness on Earth. As wizards can only have three spells every sunrise and there is no sun it means an end to their powers. Then the Nekross announce their demand to Tom and his family that unless the world's wizards are surrendered millions will die.

As NASA prepares to send a rocket to dislodge the moon Tom offers himself to Lexi as a sacrifice if she will spare the world - a gesture which, unlike her family, she finds noble. However Benny learns that moon rocks are buried beneath the magical stone circle and takes Tom there. The power of the stones rectifies the moon's orbit and saves the Earth though its unleashing reminds both Tom and Lexi of their time on the Neverside as a happy couple. Jathro and Chancellor Kooth meanwhile plan to overthrow the Nekross king.

Tom is visited by the Jacana family, wizards who claim to have found the source of all magic in a giant diamond. However they have been forced into the visit by Varg, who has stolen the genuine diamond and replaced it with a booby-trapped substitute, which blows up, mortally wounding Ursula. Varg captures Benny and Tom, placing the latter in the magic extractor but, just as Tom's magic is drained from him, Chancellor Kooth and her son Jathro declare that they have marshalled the Nekross against the royal family and, after destroying them, will go on to conquer the Earth.