Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990)

'Tales from the Darkside: The Movie' is a feature film adaptation of the syndicated 'Tales From the Darkside' horror anthology series that ran from 1984 to 1988. I was vaguely aware of both the series and the movie but my desire to see this film arose principally from a recent episode of the online series 'Welcome to the Basement' which both examined and riffed on the film, which is what that show does. Like the series on which 'Darkside' is based this film is an anthology, three short stories, in this case with a framing device modeled loosely on '1001 Arabian Nights'. A young boy (Matthew Lawrence) is being held prisoner and prepared for cooking by a suburban witch (Debbie Harry) and reads her stories from a 'Tales from the Darkside' book in an effort to distract her and slow down his impeding death. The stories are mostly of the darkly comic variety, none fully works, the whole movie doesn't, but its intriguing enough to be entertaining. 

Source material here is good, including Japanese folklore and stories by Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle and Stephen King. We have a tale concerning a college student reanimating an Egyptian mommy and using it for revenge, a murderous cat with seemingly magic powers, and a deal with the devil that goes more then a little skewed. The most impressive thing about the movie is its cast, including both Steve Buscemi and Julianne Moore in their film debuts, as well as Christian Slater, William Hickey, David Johansen, and James Remar. It's an odd film, but not without the merit of being mostly entertaining. It reminded me of the strange extent of the anthology revival in the 80's, we had 'Darkside', 'The New Twilight Zone', 'Amazing Stories', ' The Hitchhiker'. Watching this movie makes me want to watch more anthology work. However I'm still only giving it **.