Review: Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990)

Tales from the Darkside: The Movie

Rating

Director

John Harrison

Screenplay

Michael McDowell (Story: Arthur Conan Doyle; Story: Stephen King, George A. Romero)

Length

1h 33m

Starring

Debbie Harry, Davvid Forrester, Matthew Lawrence, Christian Slater, Robert Sedgwick, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, David Johansen, William Hickey, Alice Drummond, Dolores Sutton, Mark Margolis, James Remar, Philip Lenkowsky, Robert Klein, Rae Dawn Chong

MPAA Rating

Review

Anthology horror arrives in cinema in waves. The 1980s was a particularly bountiful period, turning the television concept of shows like The Twilight Zone into big screen success. One such anthology series, Tales from the Darkside, also got a film version, albeit one in name only.

Set with the bookend of a modern Grimm fairy tale, the film starts as a young boy (Matthew Lawrence), captured by a suburban housewife (former Blondie frontwoman Debbie Harry) to feed to her coven, tells three stories from a book called Tales from the Darkside. That cheap pun effectively captures how corny that framing device is, especially with its resolution in the final act. An effective anthology is only as successful as the sum of its parts, but don’t expect much from the other three segments either.

The first portion, titled Lot 249, stars pre-fame Steve Buscemi as a graduate student who feels cheated by two classmates (pre-fame Julianne Moore and Robert Sedgwick) and exacts revenge by summoning a mummy to kill them. When their classmate (Christian Slater) discovers what’s happened, he kidnaps Buscemi and forces him to summon the mummy and destroy it. Buscemi and Slater are well cast even if a bit too on-point. The violence in the story is cheap and not terribly applicable, but some of it is surprisingly funny. It’s also, ultimately, the least memorable of the three thanks to uninspired photography and predictable twists.

The Cat from Hell takes second-billing in this four-story feature and is based on a short story by Stephen King. William Hickey plays the last surviving member of his household after the other inhabitants have died under supposedly mysterious circumstances. Believing it is an evil cat sent to torment him for having done animal testing on thousands of felines, he hires a hitman (David Johansen) to snuff out the cat who scoffs at the idea, but takes the easy money anyway. This segment employs better direction. From a cat’s point of view, the camera takes on more of a personality, while neither Johansen or Hickey’s performances add up to much. Throw in the effective use of flashbacks and you have a solid effort.

Rounding out the three interior pieces is Lover’s Vow. At the time of release, it was easy to assess this as the weakest part, but in hindsight, it has some of the strongest visuals that stay in the memory well after the film is forgotten. That said, the story is a bit slow and takes time to build up to its twist. It’s a good twist and while the delayed pay off makes some amount of sense, it could have been cut down a fair bit.

Each of these four stories have their weaknesses and range from decent (Cat) to cheap (the wrapper). For horror fanatics, this one needs to be seen, especially in tandem with other ’80s efforts like it, but on the whole, it’s not one worth catching if you have better options.