Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
Anthology horror has had a bit of a resurgence as of late
with the V/H/S movies becoming
pseudo-cult favorites, they’re pretty fun to watch, there’s no doubt there, but
they are far removed from the awesome anthologies we used to get in the form of
Creepshow, The Twilight Zone: The Movie, and
the subject of this article, Tales from the
Darkside: The Movie. Set in the standard format of three short stories
surrounded by one enveloping story Darkside is easily the most memorable of all
with all four stories succeeding on some level of scaring the audience or at
least making you feel a bit uneasy while still remaining fun.
The story opens with a woman (Blondie’s Debby Harry)
preparing a dinner. What we find out very quickly is that she is not just a
woman, but a witch, and the main course for the dinner is to be Timmy (Matthew
Lawrence), a young boy whom she captured earlier. Easily the weakest of the
four stories the wraparound tale really only serves as a similarly themed
delivery system for the core stories that it presents. It’s not completely
without merit though as there is a satisfying twist in the epilogue, but we’ll
get to that later, back to Timmy. Not ready to resign himself to this tasty
fate Timmy stalls by telling the woman three stories. Starting with a not so
average Mummy tale in ‘Lot 249’. 
A young but still very odd looking Steve Buscemi stars as
Bellingham, a smart but poor University student. When he’s framed for theft and
thusly disqualified for a scholarship by two other students, Susan (Julianne
Moore) and Lee, Bellingham decides that his only recourse is revenge. Luckily
for him a recent shipment to the University contained an ancient mummy and
accompanying reanimation curse. You can see where we are going with this….two
dead bodies (well, three if you’re counting the mummy) later Susan’s brother Andy
(Christian Slater) shows up with a score to settle. After capturing Bellingham
Andy realizes he can’t murder someone so instead decides to just burn the mummy
and the parchment containing the curse. What he doesn’t know is that Bellingham
switched the parchment, we find out later in the twist ending that Bellingham
still holds the reanimation parchment. How do we find out? Well, when Andy’s
dead sister and her equally dead boyfriend show up at his door with a message,
”Bellingham sends his regards”. Not so much scary horror as interesting, this
one is lifted to another level by its soon to be all-star cast and the bomb
dropping twist. Have I ever told you guys that I hate cats? I know, it’s not
exactly a unique fear but my particular brand of felineaphobia developed soley
from the next story “The Cat from Hell”.
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Maybe I was extra sensitive to this one, cats are to me like
clowns are to so many others. I know they aren’t all evil, but the ones that
are come with the force of a thousand demons. This story starts with an old man
named Drogan hiring a hitman for a rather odd job, kill the black cat living in
my house. Drogan explains to the hit man that he made his fortune in
pharmacuticals, and the cat is there to exact revenge for the cats he killed in
testing his drugs. Next we get some awesomely gruesome death scenes while
Drogan recounts how the other three inhabitants of the house were murdered by
the most sinister of pets and Drogan is next. What follows is probably one of
the silliest, yet most awesome, death scenes in history when the cat takes out
the hitman by crawling down his throat, choking him to death. Drogan return s
to find the hitman dead on the floor when BOOM the cat jumps out of the hitman
right at Drogan, giving the old man a heart attack and thusly finishing his
task. Admittadley, if you don’t already have a healthy fear of cats then this
story may seem a bit silly, but there’s the beauty, even the silly moments of
this movie are that special good kind of silly that you’re glad you saw.
Without further ado I bring you my favorite of the bunch, “Lover’s Vow”.
I’ve often said to myself, “Self, why aren’t there more
gargoyles in cinema…America NEEDS more Gargoyles”, okay…maybe not often but I’m
pretty sure I had that conversation once or twice. Gargoyles are scary things,
meant to protect the buildings on which they perched from evil spirits these
little concrete dragon men were supposed to be scarier than any evil that would
come that way and damn did they succeed. I preface this storyline with that bit
of rambling because “Lover’s Vow” starts with what I can safely assume is the
most gore filled murder by Gargoyle ever shown on the big screen, granted the
sample size is small. Preston is heading home from the bar when he witnesses a
friend get decapitated by a 9 foot gargoyle. The monster approaches Preston and
tells him that he will spare his life if he never utters a word about what he
saw to anyone, obviously the choice is easy and Preston agrees. The next day he
meets a beautiful woman (80’s hottie Rae Dawn Chong) and falls deeply in love.
The couple is as happy as two people can be; they marry and eventually start a
family. All is going perfectly in Preston’s life, even his art career has hit
an upswing but he is still plagued by nightmares of that fateful night…needing
to tell someone, he confides in his beloved wife what he saw. She immediately gets
upset, though we think it’s because she suspects he’s lying. We find out
otherwise in one of my favorite twist endings when she turns into the gargoyle
from that night and murders him. She then goes to collect her two children, who
are now adorable baby gargoyles, and return to their place on top of the
building.
The epilogue finds us in a surprising place, unless you’ve
ever seen any story about a witch preparing to cook a child…if you have then
the ending isn’t really surprising at all. Timmy has been setting himself loose
the entire time he was telling the stories so when the witch opens the cage to
put him in the oven he is able to break free, turn the tables, and push the
witch right into the awaiting oven. This movie is such a blast, if you haven’t
seen it then it’s certainly worth the rental fee and should be a part of your
Halloween preparedness kit from here on out.
