Tarot

dirs.: Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg

2024

What makes me even angrier about this movie is that when I heard that there was a horror flick called Tarot which was presumably about tarot cards, or something, I was actually excited about it?

What a fool I was! What was I thinking?

This will probably be the strangest thing I’ve ever admitted to in a review, in any review, but I actually adore tarot cards. I’ve always loved them. I’m not joking, I collect tarot card packs and have always loved them.

But don’t confuse a hobby / predilection / interest with agreement with the whole fortune-telling / divination bullshit – not for a second have I ever believed in the predictive power of the cards, nor have I ever desperately done a reading looking for Tattslotto numbers or as to where I would one day find my One True Love (turned out it was down the pub).

What I have always loved about the cards is the cards themselves, the images on the cards, the history behind them, the major arcana and the minor arcana, and that, depending on the pack, you can get images filled with explicit or subtle imagery and symbolism, or minimalist ones, or ones that err more on the side of purely aesthetics.

I love them all, from the traditional like the Rider-Waite pack to the more esoteric.

This flick, based on a book I’ll never read, takes tarot cards, the idea and the image of them, and just basically takes a huge dump over their whole existence.

A group of (mostly) young and hot youths go on a trip to some mansion in the Catskills. It’s not a Cabin in the Woods, it’s a Mansion in the Catskills. I don’t know what the Catskills are, but Americans always assume we know where these places are, because they’re Americans, and can’t conceive of a world where everyone isn’t either American or aspiring to be.

I tell a lie, I know they’re mountains south of New York city. It’s never explained as to how college students could afford to AirBnB a two story mansion in the Catskills for a weekend, but this isn’t or shouldn’t end up being an economics lecture.

Maybe they’re all trust fund babies.

The young people are all young, attractive and thin, as is required, except for the annoying friend, who is obligatory in every one of these movies, a role faithfully carried out by Jacob Batalon as Paxton. If Paxton hadn’t been played by Jacob Batalon, he would have been played by Julian Dennison, of that I am certain, but that’s another matter entirely.

Jacob Batalon is what used to be called, in the before times, a character actor. Character actors used to fulfil a role / are generally typecast based solely on their looks. Previously he was what we would call “of Andrew-like proportions”, as in, he was a hearty, comfortable lad when he played Peter Parker’s best friend in the recent Tom Holland Spider-Man films. He was the guy in the chair! You know, the guy who gets into the computer networks and security cameras for whatever reason?

Now, having tasted success, he’s thought: I can afford the personal trainer and the nutritionist, no longer will I be the doughy best friend to the main character, if I get fit, I too could be the main character!

Instead, sorry to say, they made you the annoying thorn in the main group’s collective side.

The other people in this are fine, I’m not meaning to imply anything about attractive people, as if to say that they don’t have to try as hard or work at it like the less physically gifted. The actors in this are actually fine. It’s the filmmakers who should be tried at the Hague (alongside Netanyahu and, I dunno, Kevin Spacey?).

What an awful fucking premise, what a waste of actors who can act their way out of wet paper bags. Usually in dumb horror flicks like this the actors are bad and their line deliveries are painful, and you actively want them to die just so that you don’t have to listen to them again. But in this flick the acting is perfectly serviceable; it’s the script that’s horrendous.

After one of the characters happens upon the ugliest deck of tarot cards I’ve ever seen, she’s compelled by her friends to do readings for everyone. She had a keen interest in the cards before, but lost her mother to cancer, and has not wanted to pick up a deck since then.

And this isn’t even the dumbest thing in the script, but there’s talk of her combining a tarot reading into a horoscope reading, which is forbidden, don’t you know, which means everything she says is going to happen to the characters does happen, as a vengeful angry gypsy woman has cursed the fucking cards.

As was frequent in 18th century Hungary, a woman gave a tarot card reading to a baron, which indicated that his wife and child would not survive childbirth. It’s pretty grim, but the cards don’t lie. So incensed is the baron that he has the woman’s husband and child killed after he loses them both.

In a fit of pique, the unnamed tarot card aficionado (referred to only as The Astrologer, which, honestly, fuck you, you terrible screenwriters) performs some ritual and kills herself cursing the cards, so that anyone who uses the cards curses themselves and everyone around them. As revenges go, it’s pretty stupid. I mean no doubt the cards somehow destroy the baron, I get that, but mostly the ritual makes the cards look uglier (plus they’re in English, with the English names for the major cards, like The Empress, or The Hermit or The Devil, or, inevitably, Death, despite all that nonsense transpiring in Hungary), and doesn’t really do anything that novel.

When Our Kids get their readings, and go home, the evil Hungarian woman in the cards starts killing them in the order in which they received their readings. So the first girl unworthy of a name gets bludgeoned to death with a ladder. A fucking ladder. Is there a The Ladder card in the standard tarot deck? No, but, you see, the evil Hungarian woman likes to improvise with whatever dull thing is at hand.

Yes, they get picked off one by one, yes, it’s ages before they figure out what to do to stop it, yes, someone appears that can explain all this bullshit to the dwindling group of kids (Olwen Fouéré, one of Ireland’s most famous actors of longstanding, who I only ever see in terrible horror movies), and naturally she has to die just after divulging the last piece of the puzzle.

I don’t actually want people to die. Even as a fan of horror flicks, knowing that people often die in them, I don’t actively yearn for heads to be lopped off or chainsaws to run amuck in people’s innards. But when it does happen, at the very least I demand that it either be funny, shocking, inventive or interesting.

A character whose name I have no reason to remember being killed with a ladder or a train or by a literal hangman, when the actual card itself in tarot is called The Hanged Man… well, no-one involved in making this exhibits any imagination or wit whatsoever. It’s so unimaginative, such a waste of what could have been an interesting premise.

It essentially exists, as many horror flicks do, as a copy of a copy of a copy, so derivative as to be barely memorable. And the original thing they’re trying to rip off is really the Final Destination movies, only nowhere near as innovative, no matter how many years have elapsed since then.

I mean, despite terrible reviews and probably poor box office, I’m sure everyone involved did okay out of this. They got paid. They consoled each other with “it wasn’t your fault”, hugs, and pats on the back. The two dull directors will certainly go on to direct Scream 9 or some other tired franchise. And all will be well in the world.

Except that stupid Hungarian woman is still probably out there, somewhere, wondering when she’ll get to kill trust fund kiddies in a sequel, with The Star card meaning, uh, she kills them with ninja stars, or the Temperance card, means she kills them with, um, alcohol., slowly, over several decades or…

With great stupidity, the possibilities are endless. Deathly dull, but endless.

3 times who needs AI to generate terrible screenplays when humans have been doing it so easily for so long out of 10

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“I read your cards. It's over. In readings, Death can mean the end of something or the start of something new. But in your case, it just means death. Fate doesn't have to be a curse. We can choose to let go.” - Tarot