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This creepy 1979 British horror import gets a standalone standard-def presentation....
Acorn Media / 47 Minutes / 1979 / Unrated / Street Date: July 17, 2012
Probably Acorn's most curious release of the summer, Casting the Runes is a bizarrely slight TV horror tale. This episode from ITV Playhouse is short - running time is under an hour - and it really doesn't add up to all that much. I'm not sure what kind of iconic cult following the show has, but while it's always intriguing to see this kind of British programming liberated from the vaults, I doubt this title has legs as a bestselling DVD edition.
The drama within Casting the Runes follows a TV producer in the late 1970s (Jan Francis) who becomes the recipient of a weird note replete with Runic font from a witchcraft expert (Iain Cuthbertson) after interviewing him for a documentary she's working on. Turns out that if she doesn't search him out and return said note to him, she'll be toast, a victim of an ancient, misty curse.
So, like a Twilight Zone episode as seen through the filter of a Doctor Who series, Casting the Runes provides a predictably eerie forty-five minutes of horror entertainment. If you're not already a devout fan of the show, a DVD edition like this one might not have rampant appeal, but the fact that material like this is available at all is a testament to DVD's waning power. Keep throwing us wildcards, Acorn....