Holy Hell Batman! We have got ourselves a true blue contender for the worst film of the year. I say contender, because, *spoiler alert* it is the worst film of 2024 thus far. I do not like to give a film an F grade, because with all the artists working on set, it is like saying there’s no redeemable quality here. I’m suggesting your life will be more rewarding if you do not watch this film. Staring off into space for 90 minutes is more productive. This film is terrible, but it does have audio description. So, a win for inclusivity!
Tarot is a pretty basic dumb plot, where a group of interchangeably forgettable young folk do something they should not be doing, and it curses them. And some of them die. It’s PG-13, so no one gets their skin peeled from their body like that tanning bed death in one of the Final Destination films, but Taro seems to want to do that. The worst offense of Tarot, is that it is actually an adaptation. Horrorscope is apparently a book, and I bet the author is livid, because I can’t imagine this was adapted faithfully.
And, as a critic who rarely gets to set this fucker on fire, thank God we have the same dumbass hacks writing that are directing, so I don’t have to debate “was it the script? Was it the direction?” No, this tag team of troglodytes own both credits, and therefore, can find a special place in Uwe Boll hell.
This film is never scary. It is occasionally attempting a jump scare, but anyone who has seen more than 1 horror film should be fine. This “plot”, and I use that term lightly, is based around this group of friends who are at this mysterious cabin, where they find a random deck of Tarot cards. Someone mentions it is bad luck to use someone else’s deck, but fuck it. That would be a short movie. So, we have this long scene where everyone gets their fortune told, and it becomes pretty obvious how everyone is going to die. This girl doing the card readings is like a walking spoiler.
So you hear things like “ladder”, and you think this one will die in some ladder involved death. And, you figure that there’s some rules to this, as most horror films have rules that the smart ones can survive. These kids do not die in order. That pissed me off, because what was the point of that to begin with? It feels like a “you had yours done first, you die first” film. That’s not even the worst offense.
So, rather than attempting to write an engaging script, these fuckers decided to just throw out the concept of a rule book, and go full Boll. The girl with the ladder? She is alone, in some sorority house, and the attic ladder comes down. You think, here it is. Final Destinaation style. But no, after dragging the scene out, we see this demonic nun character spawn and literally beat the girl to death with the ladder. Rather than creatively figuring out a way for her to have a ladder death that makes her friends go “Wow.”, they instead choose to spawn a demon from nowhere and use the ladder less as a suggestion and more as a tool.
And this happens over and over. Anyone who you thought might have had a creative death, is always met with some shitty demon that seems to defy logic and reason. One girl is standing in the middle of the street, and her demon puts a noose around her and yanks her up into the sky. To where? Where did she go? Another is in the cabin one moment, then suddenly on stage with a magician who performs that magic trick where you saw the person in the box in half. She was *just* in the cabin. What is actually fucking happening in this film?
They get help from an older lady, who seems to know what a tarot card is, and that’s her qualification, and she hasn’t even touched the damn cards. Shit still happens to her. There’s even a fake out death, where you are pretty sure that person died, but they didn’t. All of this is tied to some spirit who cursed the cards, and there’s a threadbare story holding it together.
I truly despise this film. I will say, that the audio description was good enough that I was able to follow these events, though the film itself makes very little sense, so it is really hard to feel like I got excellent audio description.
When I’m tasked with discussing the audio description for a film that makes no sense, and has no rules, and when it needs something to advance the plot, it just spawns what it needs without any rhyme or reason, it can get a little confusing. I think Noah Greenspan and the Media Access Group did probably a decent job of making this seem watchable, but the script, and the direction is so bad, it is almost impossible to truly discern if the audio description got all of it. My gut tells me it did, and that the film just is that bad.
At the end of the day, I’d say don’t watch this. The audio description was good at describing what it was given, in the horror moments, but the whole thing is non-sensical and even after all of this, I think we got audio description that will go unloved because the film is too ugly to love.
There’s literally this scene, after the girl is beaten to death by the ladder, and the demon nun is standing over her, and she turns at the camera and screams. I was like… who the fuck is she screaming at? Did you think that looked cool? There’s no one around. The girl is alone, and she’s dead. It is just such shitty writing, and such terrible direction.
In Tarot’s future, I’ve read the cards, and I see nothing. Not one redeemable quality in this film.
Final Grade: F
