Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Into the Dark: Uncanny Annie’ on Hulu, in Which a Board Games Comes to Life to Kill Teenagers

Into the Dark: Uncanny Annie officially marks the Hulu-Blumhouse collaboration’s first trip around the sun. The monthly, holiday-themed horror anthology launches its second season with another Halloween tale; this time, six college students unwittingly play a board game where IF YOU DIE IN THE GAME YOU DIE IN REAL LIFE. If you’re hoping the movie depicts the highest-stakes Candy Land battle in history, with lollipop impalements and literal jawbreakers, I’m right there with you — but it doesn’t. No, it’s one of those new, artisanal craft board games lovingly conceptualized by the title character, who’s a creepy, sunken-eyed corpse girl who likes to wreak deadly mischief. Uh oh.

INTO THE DARK UNCANNY ANNIE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s Halloween, and instead of living it up, a group of soon-to-be-dead teenagers assembles for an intimate party commemorating the one-year anniversary of their friend Tony’s untimely death. Two things to know about Tony: He loved board games, and he died in six inches of water. Notably, these are the things about Tony that are important to the plot, and that’s why we won’t learn any other things about Tony.

Anyway, Wendy (Adelaide Kane), Eve (Georgie Flores), Grace (Paige McGhee), Craig (Jacques Colimon), Michael (Dylan Arnold) and Peter (Evan Bittencourt) garb up in Halloween costumes, pop a few beers and crack open the game closet. Some of the characters have slept/are sleeping with some of the others, but that’s beside the point, because the movie isn’t about them, it’s about how they will die. Grace is the newcomer to the group, because the plot needs one in order to ask what happened to this Tony guy, only to be rebutted by the others with surly glares that scream TOO SOON.

So they fire up Uncanny Annie, prompting a scene that’s utterly terrifying: one of the characters reads the instructions, which is the most dauntingly unfun part of playing any game after a couple of beers. (CAN’T WE JUST START PLAYING AND FIGURE IT OUT ALONG THE WAY? I yelled at the screen.) Cards are turned over, secrets about Tony and the other characters are unfurled like the shoddily crocheted throw on the front-room davenport and people die in very disgusting ways. So it goes.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It’s Jumanji meets Ouija!

Performance Worth Watching: Although Karlisha Hurley is reasonably ghoulish as Uncanny Annie herself — she looks like she could be one of the Burton-Bonham-Carter offspring — special credit goes to the sound-effects designers, who soundtrack her every twitch with so many arthritic bone cracks, you’ll want to jump on the screen and force-feed her anti-inflammatories.

Memorable Dialogue: “I swear, gamers these days play like they’re in the f—ing White House situation room,” Craig gripes, which means he laments either how seriously some people take games, or that they blatantly disregard the rules and make up special go-directly-to-jail rules for non-white people when they play Monopoly.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: I’d say Uncanny Annie is a depiction of fine gamesmanship, but it’s more like LAMEsmanship. The concept is flimsy, the writing is flimsy, the execution is flimsy. The characters are irritating wisps of humanity with one or two traits each; the best is a physics major who dies immediately after he wonders if all the weirdness around them is the result of “something (going) wrong with the Hadron Collider.” If only!

But what about the kills? you may be asking. There is one good kill, and it doesn’t involve the power drill that’s used as a prop. Please don’t ask me what’s up with the power drill; I think about how it was used, sigh deeply and wonder how people were paid to come up with the dumbest possible use for a power drill in a horror movie. Those same people also came up with the movie’s two endings, which are the weakest teas on the cart.

Uncanny Annie is easily the worst of the Into the Dark episodes yet. Some exhibit thematic ambition, others are visually compelling or skillfully made. This one smacks of front-to-back minimal effort. Good movies invigorate us; this one made me want to take a long nap.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Watch it only if you have a fetish for vague dissatisfaction.

Your Call:

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.</em)