Tarot

Directed by Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg, Tarot follows a group of friends, including Harriet Slater’s Haley and Jacob Batalon’s Paxton, as they’re pursued by a sinister force after unearthing a cursed tarot deck. It’s an intriguing premise that is, by and large, employed to hopelessly (and aggressively) lackluster effect by Cohen and Halberg, as the filmmakers, armed with their own screenplay, deliver a sluggish, increasingly uninvolving mess that fares best in its somewhat promising pre-title sequence (ie it feels as though Cohen and Halberg are setting the stage for a comfortably familiar slasher-movie throwback) – with the movie instead seguing into a woefully uninvolving midsection that contains few, if any, scenes or interludes of a compelling nature. (It doesn’t help, certainly, that the picture, which has been populated with dull, underwritten protagonists, leaves virtually all of the kills offscreen.) By the time the dimly-lit and seemingly endless third act rolls around, Tarot, saddled with as lame and uninteresting a villain as one can easily recall, has definitively confirmed its place as a serious misfire that could (and should) have been so much better.

*1/2 out of ****