Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: Get in the holiday spirit with these horror anthology films, which offer several scary stories for the price of one.
Tales From The Darkside: The Movie (1990)
Tales From The Darkside is the middle child of horror anthology series, coming a decade after Rod Serling’s Night Gallery and ending one year before its punny younger sibling, Tales From The Crypt. (Amazing Stories is more like a cousin.) But its horror roots are strong: Created by George Romero as a serialized spin on his Creepshow films, the TV series featured scripts from a who’s who of horror writers like Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Michael McDowell.
The film version, 1990’s Tales From The Darkside: The Movie, has a similar pedigree, including screenplay contributions by Romero and McDowell. Director John Harrison began his career as Romero’s assistant director on Creepshow; like his mentor, Harrison was heavily influenced by ’50s EC horror comics, although the visual references here are less explicit than the comic-book animation used to frame Creepshow. Instead, we get a glossy, retro-styled wraparound story starring Debbie Harry as a perfectly coiffed cannibalistic housewife with plans to roast snot-nosed brat Matthew Lawrence for dinner. In classic Arabian Nights fashion, the resourceful youngster manages to delay his doom by reading Harry three stories from her favorite book, called (you guessed it) Tales From The Darkside.
Remarkably even for a horror anthology and arranged in order of intensity, the tales themselves, like everything EC-influenced, lean heavily on ironic twists and poetic justice. The first, “Lot 249,” is based on an Arthur Conan Doyle story and drags a bit, although it’s got mummies—perhaps the only monsters a Romero-style zombie could beat in a foot race—so that’s to be expected. Steve Buscemi stars as an antiquities grad student with a vendetta against ’80s yuppies Christian Slater and Julianne Moore, who try to swindle him out of a scholarship. (If you’ve ever wanted to see Julianne Moore fight a mummy, this is your best—and possibly only—opportunity, unless her career takes a weird turn in the next few years.)