Excellent review of Elvis, Nordy. If you're an Elvis fan, you need to see John Carpenter's superb made-for-TV film, with Kurt Russell deserving particular praise for his central performance.

I hope you give this another go, Mr B. I love Mary Poppins and was sceptical about this and whether it would be anywhere near as good as the 1964 film.

It didn't take me long, probably while she was singing 'The Place Where Lost Things Go' for me to relax and fully accept Emily Blunt as Mary Poppins. I think I even cried a couple of times, the first time during that song. I really liked Lin Manuel Miranda's lamplighter and thought his songs were excellent.

If you're wondering why Emily Blunt has 'a prim and proper English accent ', it's because that's an exaggerated version of she sounds when she isn't acting with an American accent – I think she sounds almost exactly the same as Julie Andrews" portrayal of the English nanny. :)

The highest praise for the film probably came from Mark Kermode, an uber-fan of Mary Poppins (1964) who had a similar reaction to me and loved Mary Poppins Returns.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=904DUjtfeeI

ASYLUM – The last time I watched any of those old Amicus anthology movies must have been literally decades ago, back when they were fixtures on UK TV in the eighties and nineties. I guess they, along with Hammer and creaky Universal-era type stuff, were all part of my nascent horror geekdom, so it’s interesting to me that these days I have virtually no optical media belonging to that side of the genre. The scratchy second hand dvd that I got the other day in a moment of ‘why not’ still beat hands down any black and white TV memories (most of which were half buried under swathes of static). As for the film itself, it all came flooding back – the ‘EC meets Pan’ vibe of those crawling paper-wrapped limbs, the weird golem-like mannequin in his glowing suit, the strangeness of the Lom segment with its runaway action man, all topped by Geoff Bayldon’s epic mad laughter at the end there. Quite enjoyable.

THE JAR – Well, this a strange one. I think I’ve seen it before, perhaps even reviewed it on here, can’t quite remember, which is odd in itself considering the film is off-kilter enough to lodge within the memory banks. A man ends up in possession of a mysterious jar after nearly running over a guy who seems to be in the film just so that he can 1) leave said jar in the protagonist’s apartment, then mysteriously disappear only to 2) reappear fleetingly in the corner of a mirror much later in the film in what is admittedly a fairly haunting and perplexing moment. ‘The Jar’ is full of said moments. It's pretty much a landslide of them; they don’t really connect up or make sense, just hover like a cloud of flies around the central thread concerning a lukewarm ‘will they / won’t they’ romance between main man and his neighbour. It’s one of those films where the viewer has given up asking themselves “is this bit a dream?” because, well, the above. They’re more likely to ask “is this bit shot really badly because it’s a student film with high art pretensions, or because it’s just bad? Or both?” Its artiness merges with potential incompetence, but it’s full of subtext and symbols, though what’s behind them, besides a rubbish blue-glowing troll puppet in a jar, is less than clear. A less fx-heavy ‘Beyond Dreams Door’ springs to mind as a partial comparison, and I would like to see this given a restoration and makeover as the only available format seems to be VHS, but it would make a sensible inclusion on one of those VS or Arrow seventies / eighties regional horror focussed boxsets.

WITCH STORY – AKA ‘Superstition 2’. It pleases me that the well of twilight-era (late eighties / early nineties) Italian horror never seems to quite run dry. I don’t know why I like that stuff so much; all the highs were in the history books well before then. Still, there’s something about seeing the Filmirage logo that leaves me dewy eyed. ‘Witch Story’ is not a Filmirage flick I don’t think, but it bears a similar mark – Floridan locales and a soundtrack that veers between bad soft metal and plinky synthesizer ‘sinister’ cues. The usual college kids turn up at the usual abandoned house with the usual back story and etc. There’s a ghostly little girl with a white ball (again) and a few fairly grisly stabbings. Interesting that they made the connection with the original ‘Superstition’, that high-octane early eighties American regional horror which, beyond a vaguely similar set-up, doesn’t have much of a relationship with ‘Witch Story’ from a production point of view (might be wrong, I’m not a historian). Anyway, ‘Witch Story’ should satisfy any cravings you might have for the likes of ‘Witchery’ or ‘Ghosthouse’, being a typical entry with a few enlivening moments.

I actually watched John Carpenters Elvis after last night and yes it was a great as i remembered and i did enjoy it much more than the new Elvis film.

I will try again Nos I always give a movie a second time go

Street Smart. 1987.

A journalist looking for a story on prostitution and pimps of New York fabricates a story that has the police interested and a pimp who believes the story to be about him.

This shows how journalists can be creative with a story and let it blow out of proportion and not think of the aftermath, the Man Of Steel just does that, takes a story and twists it around that leads him to the attention of a pimp Morgan Freeman who can be calm and charming then ferocious and bitter. The time the two leads appear on screen shows how good of actors they are with a good creative director. Mimi Rogers lays the calm girlfriend who is caught in the crossfire but still stands by her man and his paper.

The film that Christopher Reeve wanted the Cannon Group to fund after Superman IV which they did and as usual they tried to cut corners, instead of filming it in New York they decide to do it in Quebec and somehow managed to save some money but didn't really advertise the movie well that it slipped through some audiences and poor box office sales. This is certainly worth a look.

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Contamination (1980)

I enjoyed this a lot more on Blu-ray than i did my only previous watch on dvd.

Directed by Luigi Cozzi, this certainly capitalizes on the success of Ridley Scott's Alien from the year before even if the only thing it really directly lifts are alien eggs, which explode and kill anyone nearby in increasingly gooey ways rather than alien creatures that appear from the eggs and inhabit the bodies of humans. In fact there's as much a homage to Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters as there is Alien. Watch it and spot the similarities early doors. There's several, not including star Ian McCulloch.

It's as much a pseudo Bond style hi-tech espionage thriller as sci-fi horror film - the fact it's set on Earth adds to this - and works well as an amalgamation of both genres thanks to a moderately pacy script and flashes of directorial flare by Cozzi.

Is That on the Arrow Blu-Ray?

Savage Weekend (1979, David Paulsen)

Let's go into the wild blue yonder, us big city folks know all there is to know about survival of the fittest .... hmmm ... who ordered the giant side of hubris then?
Too well made to be real regional horror, it none the less ticks several boxes.
William Sanderson pops up as a gopher type. Which was nice.
The ST was the requisite slurry of Radiophonic vomit and twee balladery.
Recommended!

Hereditary. 2018.

A grieving family are haunted by disturbing occurrences.

Second time seeing this and it had me more gripped and intrigued than it did the first time round, yeah this film may seem like a slow burner but it does build up the characters well that we are slowly finding out and see the tension that you can slice it with a knife. Toni Collette and Gabriel Byrne play the grieving parents that there is hostility with them that rubs off their kids, what seems like a normal ghost story gives out twist and turns right up to the climatic ending.

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