The stars fail to align for horrible horoscope horror Tarot
A cursed tarot deck leading to gruesome deaths sounds intriguing, but TAROT seems to have been dealt a lot of low cards and has little idea how to play its hand.
During an Airbnb weekend away to celebrate her birthday, Elise (Larsen Thompson) and her friends discover a mysterious box in the basement. Oblivious to the very prominent pentagram carved into the top of the box, the guileless group eagerly badger one of their number, Haley (Harriet Slater) to tell their fortune. Quite why they ask Haley to tell their fortune isn’t clear. She doesn’t seem to know her Tarot from her Zodiac and so what follows is a contrived and almost unbelievably stupid attempt to fuse familiar star signs with unfamiliar Tarot cards to create some kind of Final Predestination.
TAROT, you might be surprised to learn, isn’t the latest sausage machine Blumhouse offering and the fact it isn’t might just be enough to give you hope that there actually might be something that Blumhouse will turn down. Enter Sony, a studio so used to churning out underdeveloped crud that this tepid tarotical tale of terror lands right in their wheelhouse.
It’s one of those horror movies where the characters are frustratingly unlikeable and superficial that within moments, you’re actively rooting for them to be killed. Devoid of anything even approaching personalities, they feel crafted to fit a stereotypical teen horror roles checklist, eschewing any depth or individuality. Perhaps the paucity of character material goes some way to explaining the mediocre performances delivered by the cast, with Avantika’s portrayal (still struggling to shake off the vacant bimbo aesthetic which made her such a standout part of the recent MEAN GIRLS remake) probably the worst. Jacob Batalon’s innate likeability insulates him slightly, but even he can’t emerge unscathed from this poorly written script and abjectly stupid character decisions.
While the initial attempt to fuse Tarot and the Zodiac is pretty dumb, the movie could have overcome that handicap to deliver a smart and scary horror film in the vein of FINAL DESTINATION had the charcaters behaved with anything even approaching common sense. Nothing kills the potential of a movie to scare its audience like making the viewer angry and if the obnoxious personalities on offer don’t irritate the fear out of you, their boneheaded decisions will definitiely piss you off. It’s a crying shame too, because amidst all the dross, the creature design for the Tarot card creatures is fantastic, far better than this movie deserves.
If you’re watching TAROT, you’ve already drawn a low card and it doesn’t take a misfortune teller to know that you’re in for a bad time. The creatures are creepy, some of the lore is actually pretty interesting but the execution (and the actual executions) are so forgettable, it’s clear the stars just didn’t align for this one.
