10/24/16 – day twenty-four of thirty-one days of horror!
Every year I like to throw in a horror anthology, and this year TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE gets its due. Most children of the 80s remember the TV show and its creepy opening theme, but most don’t know that it was created by George Romero and was originally intended to be the small screen version of he and Stephen King’s successful EC comics homage, CREEPSHOW. While the show never reached the heights of Romero and King’s 1982 feature-length anthology, the 1990 TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: THE MOVIE comes pretty close. Director John Harrison is from the Romero camp, and one of the three stories, CAT FROM HELL, is an original King script. The movie also boasts an impressive cast, featuring future 90s stars Christian Slater, Julianne Moore and Steve Buscemi, plus Debbie Harry, Rae Dawn Chong, David Johansen and sexy James Remar. Make-up and gore effects are impressive by late 80s standards and the stories are creature-filled and fun, thrilling you with mummies, gargoyle demons, evil cats and most terrifying of all the corpse-like William Hickey. If you’ve got a Halloween hankering for dark tales the show will satisfy your 80s cheese cravings, while the movie might actually surprise you with what a solid entry it is in the horror anthology subgenre.
