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Tales From The Darkside: The Movie

The ubiquity of online streaming makes it harder than ever before for movie stars and established filmmakers to hide their early mistakes. With that in mind, we bring you Absolute Beginners, an ongoing column devoted to movies streaming online that movie stars and top directors made before becoming household names. The idea is to ascertain whether these obscure early efforts are overlooked gems or enduring sources of shame.

The Film: Tales From The Darkside: The Movie
Year: 1990
Streaming on: Netflix
Absolute Beginners: Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi

Julianne Moore has never been an ingenue, never been a teen star. No, she emerged on the national stage fully formed, a red-haired, porcelain-skinned goddess with the classical good looks of a 1930s cinematic bombshell or a mysterious soap opera star, but one blessed with a decidedly contemporary sensibility. That’s what made her casting in the lead of Todd Haynes’ Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven so perfect. Moore was able to fully inhabit the character while, at the same time, commenting on the cultural factors that shape and mold and define her. She was able to be on the inside and the outside simultaneously.

Moore was never a girl onscreen, always a woman, even in her 1990 movie debut Tales From The Darkside: The Movie, which paired her with another actor who would go on to make a profound impact in the decades ahead: Steve Buscemi.

Adapted from George Romero’s cult horror anthology, which in turn was inspired by the success of Romero’s own Creepshow, which in turn was inspired by the E.C Horror Comics that would inspire the Tales From The Crypt movies and television shows (It all comes back to the Crypt-Keeper, man! He is the alpha and undead omega), Tales From The Darkside: The Movie offers three tales of what could very generously be deemed terror united by the following framing device: A little boy reads stories from a book entitled Tales From The Darkside to a witch (played by Deborah Harry!) in a desperate attempt to postpone being eaten.

For a modestly budgeted horror anthology TV spinoff, Tales From The Darkside: The Movie has a surprisingly impressive pedigree. In the first segment, Michael McDowell, a novelist and screenwriter who was a favorite of Stephen King’s and co-wrote the script for Beetlejuice, adapts “Lot No. 249” a tale of mummified spookery in a snobby college town from Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle.

But the star power doesn’t end there. Buscemi, who had just begun to make a name for himself with Mystery Train, his first film with Jim Jarmusch, plays a cagy, smart collector and graduate student locked in a war of wills with rivals played by Moore and Robert Sedgwick.

Moore is introduced wearing a leotard and rocking big late 1980s hair and accompanying a big, tennis-playing lummox straight out of the Preppie Handbook. But if she’s a glamour girl, she’s also a steely, smart and ambitious one who owns her sexuality and isn’t shy about exploiting it to her ends.

Moore plays the role with a sense of ironic detachment. She knows damn well she’s in the kind of movie that demands that she hurl a vase full of flowers at a rampaging mummy (a tactic that proves about as effective as you might imagine) and distances herself from the material through attitude and icy cool even as she and Buscemi invest this silly spookery with unexpected attitude and personality.

Buscemi similarly never had a boyish stage and in “Lot No. 249” he lends a pleasing specificity to a character that could have come off as a generic crank railing against the modern world. His savvy schemer takes an unseemly glee in the morbid nature of his trade, deriving a palpable pleasure from rooting around inside mummified remains. He’s someone who has lived, and not happily, or well.

But in the end, these overqualified players, along with Christian Slater as the fourth player in their deadly game, can only do so much, and “Lot No. 249” is ultimately pretty dumb mummy nonsense.

According to the wisdom of the elders (i.e Wikipedia), the segment “Cat From Hell” was originally scheduled to be included in Creepshow 2 but was scrapped for budgetary reasons. And boy oh boy, is “Cat From Hell” ever scrappable, despite a script by Romero adapting a Stephen King short story. One custom-made for the junk heap, “Cat From Hell”, as its title so artfully conveys, is about a fiendish feline a crazy old wheelchair-bound billionaire played by William Hickey hires a hitman played by David Johanssen to kill.

Johanssen doesn’t feel so hot, hot, hot about the unusual nature of the gig (wordplay!) but he soldiers on regardless. Hot cat-on-man violence ensues as this cat shows just how much damage a truly focussed feline can reap, particularly in a disgusting climax that lends new meaning to the phrase “Cat got your tongue?”

The anthology peaks with its third and final segment, a moody exercise in gothic romance entitled “Lover’s Vow.” James Remar stars as a struggling artist who barely survives a run-in with a mythological monster who tells him never to tell anyone of their encounter.

That same eventful evening, he meets a mysterious woman (played by Rae Dawn Chong) and falls in love, but his happiness and the happiness of his family are compromised by the ever-looming shadow of the dangerous night they met.

“Lover’s Vow” turns on a pretty ridiculous twist but the segment maintains a delicate tone of hushed, tragic romance that makes it far more affecting than it has any right to be. The segment works better as romance than as horror but it’s not quite strong enough to redeem this misbegotten enterprise, which is weak even by the lenient standards of both horror anthologies and television adaptations.

Buscemi and Moore were of course destined for bigger and better things. They would reunite, for example, in a motion picture called The Big Lebowski that’s pretty good if you haven’t seen it. But everyone’s gotta start somewhere, and a movie where you hurl flowers at a mummy as a defensive maneuver is as good a place as any.

[Watch Tales From The Darkside: The Movie on Netflix]

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Nathan Rabin (@Nathanrabin) is a freelance writer, the original head writer of The A.V Club, and the author of four books, most recently You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me as well a panelist on Movie Club With John Ridley, a basic cable movie review show hosted by the Academy-Award winning screenwriter of 12 Years A Slave. He lives in Marietta, Georgia with his wife, son and dog.

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