HOLLYWOOD—I thought the horror flick “Tarot” was going to be horrible. It had the premise of every horror movie you can think of when characters are well aware NOT to do something, yet they do it anyway and bad things happen as a result. However, “Tarot” was not as bad as I expected it to be, it actually held my attention at a solid 90 minutes which is an accomplishment.
For starters, it is typical horror 101. Characters see a room that says stay out. Instead of staying out, the college students enter that room and then start snooping. In the process of snooping, they discover some dark Tarot cards, that one of our protagonists decide would be a smart move to indulge in some readings despite the ominous looking cards.
That indulgence ultimately comes back to bite our co-eds in the bum as an evil is unleashed and some wicked ghosts and entities unleash terror on the unsuspecting ones. Are any of the characters interesting? Not really, not at all. They portray your typical cliches we see time and time and time again in the genre. I knew who the protagonist was in the first five-ten minutes of the movie where our primary player Haley (Harriet Slater), reads astrology and recently severed ties with her boyfriend Grant (Adain Bradley).
The other standout is the comic relief from Jacob Batalon who portrays Paxton and delivers some solid laughs throughout the movie. The other characters are just there and part of the body count. I barely remember them in the movie. Beyond the characters making stupid choices, especially when the obvious answer is NOT to do them, the movie does thrills quite well. There were several moments that had me jumping out of my theater seat. I love a great jump scare and “Tarot” delivers quite a few, but relies too much on formula to be an actual standout.
Just when the audience suspects they are getting something different, the movie slips into those expected troupes and they lose you slightly before drawing you back in. Considering each character had a unique Tarot reading that would ultimately predict their death, that could have been played with a little more. Why can I say that? As a viewer you knew, once the Tarot card came into play a character was about to meet their maker and there wasn’t much of a bait and switch to say otherwise.
Is there a bit of violence? Of course it’s a horror movie, but it is not over the top that throws you off too much that you want to shy away from the big screen. “Tarot” managed to maintain my attention and I found myself enjoying the movie more than I expected. Did it knock my socks off? No, but it was that perfect B-movie that was bad, but not so bad that it was not worth watching. With a few tweaks in the narrative an OK horror movie could have been transformed into something that could have been talked about for years to come.
