Blu-Ray Review: Tales From The Darkside: The Movie (1990)

AUGUST 26, 2020

GENRE: ANTHOLOGY
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Confession: As a total viewing experience, I think I actually prefer Tales from the Darkside: The Movie to any of the Creepshows (at best, it's a tie with the original). The pacing of Romero's original movie is awkward thanks to the uneven length and ordering of the tales, and the sequel has a big ol' dud kicking things off that it never fully recovers from*. Darkside's framing story, on the other hand, has the rather fun idea of utilizing an old Grimm's fairy tale (Hansel and Gretel, sort of) as a vehicle to tell its other stories, which come from the likes of Stephen King and Arthur Conan Doyle. The celebration of storytelling is evident on both sides of the camera, and that unifying thread makes the film more fully satisfying to me.

It doesn't hurt that there are no dud segments, which is something that can really hurt an anthology film's shelf life - how excited can you get about watching something you already saw when there's a full chunk of it you dislike? Not the case here; the wraparound is fun and each of the three stories are both entertaining and different from each other, with no obvious, standard go-to monsters like vampires or zombies. Nope, we get a mummy (in "Lot 249"), a vengeful cat (in "Cat From Hell") and - whoa - a gargoyle (in "Lover's Vow"), and the best I can say about each one is that I could conceivably watch an entire movie about any of them, or at least something longer like, well, an anthology TV show (albeit an hourlong one like Masters of Horror; the Darkside show was 30 minutes, roughly the length of the segments here). On that note, in my original/more traditional review of the film I said the 3rd story didn't quite work for me because it wasn't long enough, but I've come around on it. The time-jump still feels a little awkward, but (maybe because I'm now a father?) the heartbreaking reveal makes up for it.

But while we're on the subject of how long things should run, I want to bring up - and praise - the full length documentary that's presented on the disc and makes up the majority of its bonus features. This used to be more common on Scream Factory's discs; sometimes they only ran 35 minutes or so, other times they'd be full length, but either way I always preferred them to the solo interviews that they have gravitated toward over the past few years. I know that it's probably more enticing to see a long list of extra features than a single/simple "retrospective documentary", but here's the thing: you'll probably end up skipping some of them unless you have all the time in the world and/or it happens to be one of your all time favorite movies. I got their Escape From LA disc a few months back, a special edition I've been hoping to exist for literal decades (the film was one of the first DVDs I ever got, and I never upgraded it even though it's non-anamorphic), and I probably only watched half the interviews, if that.

However, if they were all edited together into a retrospective doc, I would have dove right in. And in turn, if they took the usual route with this one, I can guarantee I wouldn't have been too excited about listening to the production designer talk for 15 minutes straight, but when she is adding more context to the things that director John Harrison and the KNB guys (all three of them, though Kurtzman is separate from Nicotero and Berger) are discussing, it remained interesting to hear her talk. That said, if you only like listening to actors or writers, don't bother; it's a very directorial/production-focused piece, as very few of the actors are on hand (basically only the two leads from "Lover's Vow", James Remar and Rae Dawn Chong) and except for Stephen King, who almost never does these things, all of the writers (Doyle, Romero, and Michael McDowell) are dead.

But even with those absences, it's still a very thorough look at the film's inception, production, and release. The doc is broken up into six chapters: origins, one for each of the segments, the post production, and final thoughts (sadly, SF neglected to offer a "Play All" function, but as their disc programming continues to be the low point of all their releases this wasn't a surprise. GIVE US RESUME PLAY YOU MONSTERS!), each running about 15 minutes or so and leaving few stones unturned. That said, don't look for any dirt - by all accounts it was a pretty easygoing shoot; the film was produced independently so there was no studio interference, the actors were all happy to do the work (this was Julianne Moore's first movie, and she is said to still be proud of it), and the budget, while hardly astronomical, didn't make them cut short their ambitions. The DP (who also shot Halloween 5!) and Harrison worked hard to give each segment its own style (particularly "Cat from Hell", with its crazy in-camera transitions), and hearing them break down their work alongside the clips just clarifies how fantastic the movie really looks, and makes me lament Harrison never got to do another big movie (everything else was TV).

They also break down the history of swapping the order of the segments, which was alluded to in the old commentary by Harrison and Romero (brought back here) but never fully explained. "Lover's Vow" was originally first, and "Lot 249" would be last, but test screenings showed that the audiences felt the film was peaking early, so they were reversed (with "Cat" remaining in the middle). However this resulted in some minor continuity issues with the framing segment, since Debbie Harry (!) and the kid comment on the stories that the latter is telling, so their footage had to be rearranged as well. I never noticed them, but now I know what they are - she lays down some flowers that disappear a second later, replaced with the full table of food (as she would be well along in her meal prep by the time that footage was originally meant to appear). Cue the "the more you know" gif!

The other bonus features are the aforementioned commentary (which is peppered with long stretches of silence, alas) and a new one by a co-producer that I haven't listened to yet. If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram you'd know I've been building a giant Lego haunted house while going through my Universal Monsters set, and I'm a few days late with this review as is (thanks also in part to this *other* Universal horror set, which came out the same day) so I had to skip it in order to finally get this up. But it gives me something to look forward to the next time I watch the movie and want to keep the night going!

What say you?

*There are only two Creepshow movies.

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