The run of bad luck on King anthologies is officially over!

More below the cut.

So, after Cat’s Eye and Creepshow 2, I was pretty tired of King anthologies. Actually, after Cat’s Eye I was pretty tired of life, but it’s largely involuntary, so here I was, facing another DVD of anthologi-tasticness.

Only, this one’s pretty good!

Tales from the Darkside the Movie is only partially written by King; he wrote the middle segment, “Cat From Hell”, while the first segment “Lot 249″ is adapted from a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story and the last, “Lover’s Vow”, was written by Michael McDowell, who did the screenplay on Beetlejuice. George Romero did the screenplay, meanwhile, for this film, instead of directing ala Creepshow.

What’s different? Well, for one thing, this is a beautifully and often very cleverly shot film. It eschews the over the top EC comics style of Creepshow for a more modern, sometimes gothic horror style. In many ways it’s less like Creepshow and more like the HBO series Tales from the Crypt. Everything has a modern flavor, if by modern you mean ‘late 80s’. There’s a lot of use of color in the film, with “Lot 249″ dominated by warm tones, while “Cat From Hell” is almost obsessively blue and chilly. Tales from the Darkside is very nice to look at, and the camera, unlike, say, “Pet Sematary”, is always where it should be, rather than focused on a tree root or the ground while characters are talking. (Better luck next time, Mary Lambert)

The special effects are also quite solid here as well. Watch out for a gargoyley thing in the third segment; nifty, I think.

The stories pull off a neat trick, in that they feel like they’re moving much faster, with less fat and wasted time, than in Creepshow 2, but have more room to breathe than in Creepshow, given their longer length.

The acting is also better here than in Creepshow 2 or Cat’s Eye, with a mix of good and decent performances. There are some fairly major names here, and Steve Buscemi in particular does a nice job, playing, for once, a fairly ‘ordinary’ guy. Well, fairly.

The movie opens with, you guessed it, a framing device, as we see a well dressed yuppie (played by Deborah Harry from Blondie) prepares for a swanky dinner party. All seems normal, until she slides open a wall in her kitchen to reveal the evening’s entree: a local boy she’s keeping in a cage.

He’s less than pleased.

It turns out that the yuppie had given the boy a book to read while he waited on his doom, her favorite childhood collection of stories in fact, the Tales from the Darkside (cute, I know). In desperation to stall his fate (she wants to get on with gutting him to get him in the oven, which, at 12 minutes a pound for an estimated 75 lbs, would take 15 hours, so I think that ship’s already sailed), he offers to read her stories from the book, which she has largely forgotten, and those stories are our three movie segments.

This framing device is pretty cool, for the record. Harry does a great job as the yuppie cannibal, and the actor who plays the kid is ok. Sometimes he hams it up a little, but hey, he’s a kid.

Now, the first story is “Lot 249″, and as mentioned above, it was written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The filmmakers try to update it to a more modern setting, but.. in a humorously half-assed way. As a result there are a lot of anachronistic elements, like 3 undergrads assigned to a single dormitory, or the fact that a student’s part time job could be high-end antiques dealing, or the idea that just anyone off the street could, with enough money, buy a frikkin Mummy from Egypt (legally too!).

All that aside, it’s a simple little tale about 3 dorm mates. Two are wealthy, and one is a struggling antiquities dealer (Buscemi), who has just been screwed out of a prestigious academic award (and the money that goes with it) by one of the two blue-bloods, who is also banging his love interest, who in turn is the sister to Blue Blood #2, played by Christian Slater.

Buscemi is out for revenge, however, and the name of the game today is: Mummy.

Mummies… aren’t that scary. And to its credit, Tales… knows that. Watch for the ways they play with the old Mummy tropes, it’s great. There’s also some nifty camera work here, and quite a bit of dark comedy.

Next up was “Cat From Hell”, which is the reason we’re talking about this movie at all. It’s a nice little tale about a hit man who is called out to a mansion late one evening to take an unusual, but very lucrative, job: off a cat.

An eeeeeeeevil cat.

Yeah. In some ways this is the silliest of the three stories, but competent acting and a very earnest, very very blue cinematography pull it together. “Cat From Hell” was recently released as a short story in the King anthology (book) Just After Sunset, with a lot of elements changed, so now there are two versions for King fans to enjoy, I guess.

The hit man here is a bit comical. He really tries too hard, and goes for the gun way, way later than one might otherwise imagine. Let’s face it; killing a cat with a garrote or a syringe? Even an ordinary one? Hard. They’re fast and vicious.

Things go about as well as you might expect, and then a whole lot worse. The ending… well, let’s just gloss over that, as it makes no fucking sense.

After some more frame, where Harry really gets into the role of a woman who wants to eviscerate a small child, we move on to “Lover’s Vow”, whose title I was somewhat reluctant to repeat here, as it offers hints about the story.

Essentially, this boils down to: starving artist sees friend brutally murdered by a demon or a gargoyle or some such. It spares his life so long as he keeps his promise not to tell anyone what happened. Ever.

Shortly after this attack, the artist meets a charming young woman, and his life turns around. She helps him land work, success, and he finds love; they settle down and have two children together.

No points for guessing what he eventually finds himself tempted to do about that promise, though the results are interesting to say the least.

Then we’re back to a frame, the outcome of which honestly had me on the edge of my seat. Will the callous yuppie get her tasty boy-meal? Well, you’ll have to watch to find out.

All in all, this is a very solid little film. It’s less King than anything else we’ve seen here, but hey, it still counts, unlike, say, The Lawnmower Man.

A good time was had by all this week.

Next Week: Graveyard Shift, or (JOKE REDACTED)
Last Week: Pet Sematary, Whee, Dead Demon Toddler!