Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on the new portable.
At least this time I knew it was going to be an anthology, so I’m not going to go through my normal rant about how horror movies seem to be in a symbiotic relationship with anthologies. Tales from the Darkside: The Movie is the big-screen spinoff of the 1980s television series started by George Romero. The show was a darker, more violence-tinged version of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. Rather than being bent toward psychological thriller, Darkside was generally straight horror, with monsters and supernatural beasties abounding. And so, the movie is going to lean in that same direction.
The good news is that there are just three stories here, plus the short framing story. Our framing story involves a woman (Debbie Harry), who is preparing for a dinner party. It’s soon evident that her main course is Timmy (Matthew Lawrence), a young boy she has captured. Timmy, hoping to delay her, tells her scary stories Arabian Nights-like from a book she has put in his cage. After each, we jump back to the framing story for a moment as Timmy’s fate gets closer and he starts to narrate his next tale.
