Review: New Horror Film ‘Tarot’ Provides Few Scares On Blu-ray
by David Lewis
Tarot, which is making its debut on Blu-ray, is another mediocre PG-13 horror film and you don’t need a fortune teller to know what type of low-level thrills it provides.
While spending the weekend at a creepy old house in the Catskills, a group of college friends (including Jacob Batalon, Adain Bradley, Avantika, Humberly González, Wolfgang Novogratz, and Larsen Thompson) find a spooky old deck of tarot cards in the house’s eerie old basement. Naturally, ringleader Haley (Harriet Slater) knows her tarot, and she reads all of their horoscopes despite some hesitations about using a strange deck. What could go wrong? Well, if you’ve seen Evil Dead, Ouija, Oculus, Hellraiser, or any other movie where a group of young people find some kind of weird mystical totem in a dark place, you know exactly what can go wrong. The deck is, naturally, cursed. Soon, the friends start dying one-by-one in twisted variations of their fortunes (e.g.: the girl who gets the Hanged Man card dies by … hanging).
The film borrows heavily from the first Final Destination film with its emphasis on elaborate kills in place of plot, character development, or genuine suspense. The main difference is that Tarot is PG-13, so the fatality scenes are totally dependent on jump scares and creepy CG-assisted faces instead of splatter.
As crisply presented on Blu-ray, the low-budget Tarot is a good-looking film, from its attractive cast to its warm color palette to the cards themselves. Yes, the deck itself is the scariest thing in the movie, with each card featuring disturbingly rendered, hand-drawn artwork.
First-time directors Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg lay everything on too thick — from almost constant, needless camera moves to a recurring need to underline expository dialogue with close-ups of whatever’s being discussed as if they didn’t trust the audience to be able to follow the narrative. And if some viewers are indeed only half-watching while they scroll through their phones, then maybe that’s just as well.
The disc’s special features are limited to two brief featurettes and a few minutes of outtakes. Unsurprisingly, fans of Batalon’s deadpan humor, as seen in the latest Spider-Man films, will get the most mileage out of the outtakes. Both featurettes underline the idea that the cast and crew had a blast making the film, so at least someone enjoyed it.
