Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990)

Every horror anthology TV show should have its place in the silver screen sun, so the movie gods gifted us with this one, directed by John Harrison. In the framing story, a witch (Debbie Harry with line delivery that makes me cringe) is just about to bake a little boy (Matthew Lawrence, whose line delivery is not much better than Harry’s, but what the heck, he’s a kid). To distract her, little Timmy tells her stories from her favourite book – obviously called “Tales from the Darkside”.

The first of the stories turns Arthur Conan Doyle’s seminal mummy tale “Lot 249” into an EC revenge story. It’s an effective one at that, seeing as it is paced very sprightly (nothing kills EC style horror easier than dragging), does feature a cool looking mummy murdering its victims by bad imitations of the mummification process, and confuses the viewer with what to today’s eyes looks like a preposterous cast for the sort of thing it is – Christian Slater (!), Steve Buscemi (!!), and Julianne Moore (!!!).

The second tale is a (George Romero-penned) adaptation of Steven King’s “Cat from Hell”. An old rich man (William Hickey) hires a professional killer (David Johansen, because someone involved here apparently did like his New York New Wave and Punk scene) to get rid of the cat that killed all of his relatives. At first, the segment mostly recommends itself through the cool and stylish way its (blueish) flashbacks to the cat’s killing spree and the old man relating it flow into each other, but soon, we not just start off on the duel between the killer and a rather small and cute black cat but can also enjoy a hilarious scenes of an obviously fake cat imitating the face hugger from Alien to smother someone before the segment finishes on a special effects bit that is as gruesome as it is absurd – and it’s very, very absurd.

Last but not least, the film comes to “Lover’s Vow”, a segment that doesn’t directly adapt a literary source but places a variation of the traditional tale wherein a man encounters a supernatural creature, is spared his life in exchange for never telling of his encounter to anyone, and then unwittingly marries the supernatural creature in female form in contemporary New York. Usually, they’ll have children, but in the end, the man will tell his wife of the supernatural encounter in the end, most often losing her and only getting away with his life because the wife doesn’t want to rob their children of their father. Because this is Tales from the Darkside, there’s rather more blood involved in the tale, and the ending is pretty gruesome, but otherwise, this effectively puts its old tale into a still grubby New York, using a gargoyle (turning into Rae Dawn Chong) as its monster (and given that it introduces itself with a decapitation, it is a monster), and James Remar as the poor stupid bastard who marries her.


So, even though there certainly are more artfully made horror anthologies (as well as a bunch of very inferior ones), Tales from the Darkside: The Movie is a good time for the discerning horror fan. If nothing else, it is surprisingly well directed given that Harrison is mostly a TV guy from an era when TV directors really weren’t allowed to do much, and that rare case of an anthology film without a weak segment. Unlike your usual bro horror anthology of today that generally has only one segment that isn’t weak.

In short: The Borrower (1991)

Some alien insect species (so Lovecraft was right) banishes one of their greatest serial killers to earth “devolving” him into a human. Here, the charming guy goes right on with the killing. The problems of the devolution process do make his life rather difficult, though, so he not only murders people but also steals their heads and wears them as his own. As you do.

Diane Pierce (Raw Dawn Chong), a cop slowly despairing at the world (or the state of New York), kinda-sorta gets on the killer’s trail, but saying she actually investigates the case or is hunting the alien would say too much. She’s a bit distracted by hunting human rapist and serial killer Scully (Neil Giuntoli), though here too, the film doesn’t show her doing much actual investigating. Of course, Scully’s head is going to end up on the alien in the end, but as with everything else, The Borrower gets to that point slowly, and in the least dramatic way possible.

I’m not surprised that John McNaughton chose to make something completely different in tone and style as his next film after his masterpiece Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, but it’s difficult not to be disappointed by the mediocrity of this horror/SF/comedy/cop movie hybrid thing. It’s not as if there weren’t any cheesy, entertainingly gory or just plain weird scenes in the film, or that it didn’t include some poignant scenes of urban decay. These are all there and accounted for, but there’s no visible effort at all put into actually turning the random assemblage of scenes into a narrative, or much of a movie.

In fact, the script seems to go out of its way to half-arse even the most obvious dramatic beats, generally starting off with something nice, cool, or interesting and then doing fuck all with it. It is, for example, pretty wonderful to find an early 90s genre movie from the US having a female protagonist, an African American one to boot, and even better, one that doesn’t have to prove her worth to anyone. It’s much less wonderful to then find this purported protagonist of the film never actually doing much of anything apart from wandering around looking miffed and a bit bored – and who can blame her, with her only actual confrontation with the alien taking up all of five minutes and leading up to one of the laziest endings one could imagine.

This isn’t an exception in The Borrower either, for if ever there was a script to call lazy, this one’s it. So how, just to make another example, do you get the alien and the human killer together for the head-exchange? Why, you just put them in the same morgue, of course, because screw drama, screw thematic resonance, who wants to write this damn movie anyway! If I sound offended by the quality of The Borrower’s writing, that’s because I am. There’s absolutely no need for it to be quite this lacking, and in result for the film as a whole to be quite this half-arsed. This isn’t shot in Mom’s backyard, after all, or made by people who don’t know how to point a camera in the right direction, and still it very much feels like it were.

Time Runner (1993)

Remember the alien invasion in the year 2022? Oh right, hasn’t happened yet. Which is perfectly alright with me, because we will be losing, badly. A bunch of scientists has a daring plan to turn things around: Send heroic astronaut Michael Raynor (Mark Hamill) through a wormhole, which might land him in the past - or not - where he might do something - or whatever. Yes, it’s one of those plans where step two is “?????” and step three “SUCCESS!”. For once, the movie characters seem to realize this too, for the scientists are also attempting to launch some long forgotten former Soviet nuclear rockets at the alien mothership. Things don’t proceed well on that front.

Fortunately, Raynor’s wormhole trip actually lands him in the far flung past of 1992. Alas, our typical, though rather more violent, government Men in Black (not wearing black) are on our hero’s trail, and clearly out to do him harm. Lucky for him, nice scientist (Wo)Man in Black Karen Donaldson (Raw Dawn Chong) has a case of the conscience and attempts to help him evade his pursuers. There’s some rubbish about the need to get back his flight recorder to enable more action scenes, more or less daring escapes, alien infiltration, an inexplicably helpful (and inexplicable) janitor who is frightfully good with guns (Gordon Tipple), Mark Hamill having visions of the near future thanks to wormhole magic, and a lot of of silly-awesome stuff going on, until Raynor decides to go to the future president of the world for help.

Seeing as that guy is played by Brion James, that might not have been the best idea a time traveller ever had.

Yes, yes, yes, earnest looking person there in the front row, Michael “Crackerjack” Mazo’s Time Runner, a comparatively early (which is to say, not boring) Lloyd A. Simandl production, is utter nonsense, cheap as a cheap thing, doesn’t look very good, and makes only little sense. You are, however, very wrong in the assumption that most of these points are a bad thing for the film at hand, even if they might make it a “bad” film.

In fact, I propose that someone going into Time Runner and not getting at least a tiny bit of enjoyment out of it is doing something very wrong in her life, for this is the sort of cheap crap that just glows with the kind of sheer insanity people generally won’t dare put into a serious film. So, in this context, of course going through a wormhole not only lets you go back in time but also gives you shareable flash-forwards with a cute wormhole effect, as well as the ability to change the future in such a way that…well, to be honest, I’m not sure what exactly happens in the last scene (though intimate knowledge of Doctor Who gives me obvious solutions), but it has Mark Hamill badly yet enthusiastically pretending to be in pain, vaporizing into his own past baby self, and the film calling it a wrap. It’s timey-whimey stuff, for sure.

Speaking of Hamill, when let loose, the man in parts of his post Star Wars (which is now also pre-Star Wars in a turn of event Time Runner would just love to have used) “career” was a scenery-chewing force to be reckoned with, leaving no eye unbugged and no opportunity for the wildest emoting un-emoted. It’s joyful to watch, the kind of thing that can’t help but make me like an actor for the sheer willingness to take on a role in a really stupid film and jump into it with great force. Add to this Brion James as the creepiest US presidential candidate this side of Ronald Reagan, talking about peace (yuck, says the film) and an end to suffering (evil alien commie bastard liar, grunts the film excitedly), and you have yourself an ACTING(!!!) bonanza of exciting dimension, with Rae Dawn Chong as the straight woman for the insanity.

Do I sound slightly unhinged? Am I rambling? Well, you go and watch Time Runner while the temperatures rise above 30 degrees Celsius and you might too! Yes, that’s a recommendation, and I’m not sorry about it.

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