It seems that the Halloween season is
beginning early this year. The Alamo Drafthouse is planning a great time for
all with their annual even. There is a great amount of flicks coming out and
this week has seen the release of the highly anticipated Scary Stories to Tell
in the Dark.
Personally I have
been waiting for this flick for a while being a fan of the original stories by
Allan Schwartz and growing up during the banning of the books in the 80s
while in elementary school and seeing their rise to immortality in the hands and
eyes of readers like myself on the playgrounds, and this movie gives these
stores a new meaning to that statement.
Following his
genre hits Trollhunter and The Autopsy of Jane Doe director André Øvredal has
joined genre master and Academy Award Winner Guillermo del Toro as producer of
the film inspired by the infamous literary trilogy.
Now you will
notice that I said Inspired. Well that is due to the fact that while there are
many references to the books they aren’t exactly the same.
Del Toro made the
decision not to make the flick into an anthology movie in order to avoid
comparisons to films like Creepshow and Trick R Treat and to go in a different
direction.
Now that
direction makes me feel that the movie is a crossbreed between Hulu’s Castle
Rock and the Goosebumps movie in the fact that the movie follows a trio of
teenagers while enjoying what they feel will be their last night of Trick or
Treating confront the town bully and meet a young outcast and decide to go to
the local Haunted House and tell the local urban legend.
Our main
character Stella, a local horror fan who is also in conflict after the
abandonment of her mother, finds and steals a book belonging to Sarah Bellow,
the local centerpiece of the legend.
Fascinated by the
stories Stella soon sees that the book writes itself with the fears of the
people that it encounter and these fears are based on the stories that the
victims have heard in the past.
Stella and her
friends now must stop the stories from happening while solving the mystery of
Sarah Bellows and her magic book.
Now I feel that
it is more appropriate to say that the inspiration of the book takes the form
of Easter Eggs as while the stories take life form that aren’t the same as the
book and are completely different in their outcomes which makes it interesting
for those of us familiar with the stories and their outcomes.
That being said
the film is in many ways predictable and runs the same as many of the films
that you can find today with the Conjuring and Insidious films.
Younger viewers
will get a kick out of the Jump Scares and the suspense but I feel that they
will find the flow of the film is slow in getting to the plot and may get board
early on but when the scares begin they are good.
I have to express
my disappointment with the references to the book in the fact that there are
too few of them. While the use of Harold and "Me Tie Dough-ty Walker"
and the others are nice there are so many more that I would have liked to be
seen.
Granted The Hook
has been done to Death but I would have liked to have seen The Thing and
Wonderfull Sausage being shown through the eyes of the directors.
Those issues
aside this was not a bad flick and I can see it having a long life on the
streaming sites especially around Halloween.
2 Dead Bodies
2 Disappeared
Bodies
1 Disembodiment
5 Beasts
Spiders
Stalking
Stabbing
Arms Roll
Legs Roll
Torso Rolls
And
Head Rolls
3 Stars
Check It out
