Krishna
The title should have warned me. Never mind.
It is the film based on the series of the same name by Alvin Schwarz. However, it is of the same nature as the TV series Tales from the Crypt. If you are a ten year old, you may have liked the stories here or if you were a TV watcher of the 1960s, you would have liked to see this but in 2019, movies have progressed to such a large extent that this looks totally childish.
The special effects are laughable – you recognize faint echoes of what Guillermo del Toro has done in the past in the makeup of some of the monsters but it is too juvenile overall. The horror meter is set low enough to win this a PG certification but that also takes away from the main purpose of the film. What is the point in going to a horror movie that does not even move the fear factor an inch?
In order to tie it down, they have this overarching stories of four friends who remove a scary story book from a haunted house and the stories start writing themselves as they happen to each one of the friends. Then at the end there is a story about how they stop the horror from happening when most of them are dead already.
The stories are children’s stories but even so they are very simplistic. Look at this – an abused scarecrow taking revenge, a boy who eats a big toe of a giant with the giant taking revenge, a small red spot like a spider bite erupting into unspeakable hordes of spiders, a pale lady, who is a gigantic woman stalking and ‘absorbing’ a boy.
Enough said. Childish, insipid and neither comical nor horrific.
1/10
– – Krishna (September 2019)