Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990)

Every horror anthology TV show should have its place in the silver screen sun, so the movie gods gifted us with this one, directed by John Harrison. In the framing story, a witch (Debbie Harry with line delivery that makes me cringe) is just about to bake a little boy (Matthew Lawrence, whose line delivery is not much better than Harry’s, but what the heck, he’s a kid). To distract her, little Timmy tells her stories from her favourite book – obviously called “Tales from the Darkside”.

The first of the stories turns Arthur Conan Doyle’s seminal mummy tale “Lot 249” into an EC revenge story. It’s an effective one at that, seeing as it is paced very sprightly (nothing kills EC style horror easier than dragging), does feature a cool looking mummy murdering its victims by bad imitations of the mummification process, and confuses the viewer with what to today’s eyes looks like a preposterous cast for the sort of thing it is – Christian Slater (!), Steve Buscemi (!!), and Julianne Moore (!!!).

The second tale is a (George Romero-penned) adaptation of Steven King’s “Cat from Hell”. An old rich man (William Hickey) hires a professional killer (David Johansen, because someone involved here apparently did like his New York New Wave and Punk scene) to get rid of the cat that killed all of his relatives. At first, the segment mostly recommends itself through the cool and stylish way its (blueish) flashbacks to the cat’s killing spree and the old man relating it flow into each other, but soon, we not just start off on the duel between the killer and a rather small and cute black cat but can also enjoy a hilarious scenes of an obviously fake cat imitating the face hugger from Alien to smother someone before the segment finishes on a special effects bit that is as gruesome as it is absurd – and it’s very, very absurd.

Last but not least, the film comes to “Lover’s Vow”, a segment that doesn’t directly adapt a literary source but places a variation of the traditional tale wherein a man encounters a supernatural creature, is spared his life in exchange for never telling of his encounter to anyone, and then unwittingly marries the supernatural creature in female form in contemporary New York. Usually, they’ll have children, but in the end, the man will tell his wife of the supernatural encounter in the end, most often losing her and only getting away with his life because the wife doesn’t want to rob their children of their father. Because this is Tales from the Darkside, there’s rather more blood involved in the tale, and the ending is pretty gruesome, but otherwise, this effectively puts its old tale into a still grubby New York, using a gargoyle (turning into Rae Dawn Chong) as its monster (and given that it introduces itself with a decapitation, it is a monster), and James Remar as the poor stupid bastard who marries her.


So, even though there certainly are more artfully made horror anthologies (as well as a bunch of very inferior ones), Tales from the Darkside: The Movie is a good time for the discerning horror fan. If nothing else, it is surprisingly well directed given that Harrison is mostly a TV guy from an era when TV directors really weren’t allowed to do much, and that rare case of an anthology film without a weak segment. Unlike your usual bro horror anthology of today that generally has only one segment that isn’t weak.

In short: Puppetmaster (1989)

Four psychics of varying type – even the stuffed dog owning one – (Paul Le Mat and his lucious hair, Irene Miracle and said stuffed dog, Matt Roe and his leer, and Kathryn O’Reilly and her breasts) are drawn by dreams of their deaths to a closed down hotel somewhere at the coast of California. There, they learn their old partner in psychical research Neil Gallagher (Jimmie F. Skaggs) has committed suicide, leaving an unexpected wife (Robin Frates) behind.

When they were still a team, the group was after the ancient Egyptian secret of bringing inanimate objects to life. They traced this secret to the old puppet master Toulon (William Hickey), whose death the audience gets to see before the main plot starts up. Things seem to have stopped there for our psychics for some reason, though. But wouldn’t you know it? The hotel just happens to be the place where Toulon killed himself in 1939. Not surprisingly, Toulon’s coterie of living puppets is roaming the place, and quite a few psychics will end their stay just as dead as Neil.

David Schmoeller’s Puppetmaster is, of course, a milestone in producer Charles Band’s rule of an increasingly decaying empire of direct to video movies featuring some kind of living dolls as their monsters or heroes. However, it was made when Band still had a modicum of money reserved for the act of actual filmmaking, and when people with a degree of talent and experience like Schmoeller hadn’t jumped ship for less doll-obsessed and impoverished shores yet. So, depending on your tolerance for cheese and utter silliness, Puppetmaster is quite a bit of fun.

Of course, if you shy away from killer dolls who puke leeches while moaning lasciviously, or those who have a drill built into their head, you’ll hate this one as much as later, crappy, outings in the mighty franchise. I can’t say I’d blame anyone for that, but I also think it means missing out on a well-shot movie that just wants to have a bit of fun dancing on the line where the grotesque, the silly, and the gruesome meet.

I for my part find it difficult to resist a film containing said killer dolls, or a cynical female psychic who travels with an unexplained (and probably inexplicable) stuffed dog, or a psychometric who uses her powers mostly for kinky sex with her lecherous husband. It’s as if everyone involved had thought: well, we might not have much money, and we don’t have much of an idea what our film’s actually about, but by Cthulhu, we have a pretty imaginative special effects crew, and we know our ways around a movie set, so we’ll have as much fun with this thing as possible, and just hope our audience will have some too.

Which is pretty much what happened.

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