Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Griff Lees Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Stephanie There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Rick-34 Tales from the Darkside mixes together three individual stories, all "narrated" by a kid in a "wraparound" story he's telling to a woman (Deborah Harry) preparing to cook him. As with Arabian Nights, Timmy is trying to stay alive by telling stories. The first story is the best of the three: "Lot 249" features Christian Slater as well as pre-fame Steve Buscemi and Julianne Moore in a mummy story. The pacing is good, the story works, and the acting is well above what one expects in a cheap horror story. The second story, "Cat From Hell" is an adaptation of a Stephen King short story about a cat that has killed its way through most of a family. An old man (William Hickey) hires a hit man (David Johansen) to kill his cat and the story goes from there. This is yet another example of a Stephen King story that works very well on paper but has gotten mangled horribly in translation to screen. Part of the problem is the special effects involving the cat look dreadful now - but I don't think they were even state of the art in 1990. Regardless, I don't quite know how you could film a fight between a man and a cat and not have the result end up looking ridiculous. "Cat From Hell" didn't really try very hard. The third story, "Lover's Vow", concerns a man who witnesses a friend murdered by some kind of gargoyle-type creature. The gargoyle promises to spare him his life in return for the man's pledge to never tell anybody about the encounter. It's an interesting premise that is tested when the man later hooks up with a young woman played by Rae Dawn Chong. Ultimately the story doesn't make all that much sense, and again the story is hurt by relatively weak special effects. The wraparound story works very well, as does "Lot 249", but ultimately that doesn't feel like enough to redeem the weakness of the other two segments. "Cat From Hell" in particular is a failure. But I would recommend watching the movie if only to see early-career work from Buscemi and Moore in "Lot 249".

TheRedDeath30 Okay, yes, I started with a bad pun, but there is really nothing memorable about this movie, at all. When you consider the level of talent involved in the creation of this movie, it should almost be an embarrassment that it ended up so painfully mediocre. Many would tell you that this is the unofficial "Creepshow 3". The plans to create a Creepshow television series eventually resulted in TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE, a second rate TALES FROM THE CRYPT clone. The movie spin off of the series that started as CREEPSHOW and features many of the same people behind the legendary 80s portmanteau resulted in this movie. I am a big of the original CREEPSHOW and this movie doesn't hold a candle to it. Then again, it's not much below the quality of CREEPSHOW 2 which I loved as a kid, but cringe a little now when I revisit and realize how poor some of that movie is, as well.Like most horror anthologies, we have a wraparound story, here the singer from Blondie overacts in the role of a witch preparing a feast, which is supposed to be Joey's Lawrence's little brother, who is so annoying in the role you wish they would eat him. The setup is that blondie has given the kid a book to occupy his time and he convinces her to allow him the time to read a few sections to her, in an effort to buy himself time. For the most part, all of these stories follow the same blueprint that has been done over and over in EC Comics, Amicus films, CREEPSHOW and TALES FROM THE CRYPT. Introduce a plot, give us 10 minutes of horror, then pull the rug out from under the audience with a twist ending that usually features some visual pun. When the formula works, it usually works well and allows directors success with the timeframe. More often than not, though, it results in halfway formulated ideas, corny plots and ludicrous ideas, which is essentially what we have here.The first segment, LOT 249, is a revenge story featuring a mummy. Steve Buscemi has been robbed of some academic award or other when he's cheated by a rich kid at school. Buscemi, also, happens to be a seller of antiquities and his latest acquisition is a mummy. With a scroll, he brings the corpse to live and uses it to enact his revenge. The story features Christian Slater and Julianne Moore and could have been the most terrifying of the lot, except that it can't help but devolve into cheesiness, with bad jokes and Slater hacking the thing apart with an electric meat cleaver.The second segment is just plain stupid. THE CAT FROM HELL is about a pharmaceutical giant being tortured by a cat, who's apparently been sent on a mission of retribution to right the wrongs of abuse done by the company as it tested its' drugs on cats through the years. The cat has killed the man's wife and friends and he knows his time is next, so let's hire Buster Poindexter, as a hit-man, to off the beast. We get boring recollections of the cat's previous murders, many of which feature ridiculous special effects, the kind where an actor holds a badly designed stuffed cat on their face and wiggles it around to simulate a cat attacking them. Then, the assassin is left on his own, in an old dark house, to kill the cat, which only leads to all too predictable results.The final segment, LOVER'S VOW, seems to be most reviewers favorite, but it's really not much better. An artist has just found out he's pretty much broke and drinks his sorrows away. Upon leaving the bar with his friend, they are attacked by a gargoyle that looks as if it was designed by high school students, on a public access channel budget. It's bad, especially when I consider the level of regard that I have for KNB Effects. The gargoyle spares him so long as he promises never to tell anyone what he saw. He immediately meets Rae Dawn Chong, they fall in love, his life gets better, they have kids. If you don't see the end of this one coming a mile away, then you are either stupid, or not paying attention.Then we get the resolution of our wraparound, which sees two people who can't act, playing out a ridiculous situation that crosses that line from being a bad attempt at humor to being insulting to my intelligence.I am coming off a little harsh, but the movie is not good, at all, and really deserves no more praise than this. There are plenty of other good horror movies around. Go watch one of those instead.

classicsoncall Funny how these horror anthology films all manage to include a black cat somewhere in the proceedings. I'm thinking of Vincent Price's "Tales of Terror" from 1962, and 1985's "Cat's Eye" based on a trio of Stephen King short stories. Actually, King wrote the middle story here, "Cat From Hell" with a screenplay treatment from George Romero, a couple of horror masters. No need to get into the individual stories, a fair amount of reviewers on this board have already done that. The final one of the trilogy, 'Lover's Vow' probably had the coolest twist, although if you've watched enough horror flicks you might have seen it coming. The opener is notable for featuring a handful of actors before they became well known like Christian Slater, Julianne Moore and a rather geeky and very young Steve Buscemi. The finale of the second story was rather gross in it's execution, with the titled cat from hell going to extreme lengths to pay back hit-man Halston (David Johansen) for his attempts to take him out. To say that the cat got his tongue would be bordering on the cliché, but no more so than little Timmy (Matthew Lawrence) getting the drop on Debbie Harry at the close of the wraparound story. Don't you just love happy endings?

Toronto85 Tales from the Darkside: The Movie is a horror anthology type film that includes three tales. One is about a mummy that kills, the second is about an attacking feline, and the third tells the tale of a murdering gargoyle. I've always loved these type of horror movies that tells multiple stories within it. Some others that come to mind are "Tales from the Crypt (1972)", "Cat's Eye" and "Trilogy of Terror". Like the 1972 flick Tales From the Crypt', this film has a main plot that surrounds the tales told. The plot for this one is of a little boy who is being held captive by a beautiful housewife who plans on serving him for dinner at her house party. The little boy tries to stall her plans by reading the three stories from the book 'Tales from the Darkside'.The first story (Lot 249) is about a mummy who is brought back to life by a college student who wants revenge on those who have wronged/bullied him. The mummy kills the students in horrific ways, and the tale ends with a decent twist. The second story (The Cat From Hell) shows an old man named Drogan hiring a hit man named Halston to kill a cat. According to Drogan, the black cat is responsible for the death of his sister and two others. He offers the Halston $100,000 to kill the cat. So basically the whole tale revolves around Halston chasing the cat around the huge mansion, leading up to a pretty gruesome finale. The final story (Lover's Vow) is about a guy named Preston who witnesses another man getting slaughtered by a gargoyle one night in a New York alleyway. The gargoyle tells him that if he ever told anyone of what he saw, it would come back and kill him too! That same night, he meets a beautiful woman who he ends up falling in love with. A year later Preston makes the fatal mistake of telling her what he saw that night, leading to one hell of a twist that frightened me the first time I saw it.The last story is the best of all three. It has a good story to it, lots of gore, and an interesting little twist at the end. The weakest of the bunch for me would have to be "The Cat from Hell". It was just to ridiculous for me, this cat running around with a professional hit-man not being able to capture it. There was definitely a lot of blood and gore in this film, we get a decapitated head and a cat who goes inside of a person's mouth and rests in their stomach. The wraparound story with the woman trying to cook the kid was decent, nothing special but nothing to complain about.The acting was pretty good with some big names leading the way (Christian Slater/Julianne Moore/Deborah Harry). Overall, Tales From The Darkside: The Movie is an average horror film. I am a fan of the original TV series, I'd rate them above this film. The 'Lover's Vow' story was the best one, the other two lacked a bit and dragged on a little. I guess I'd recommend it for horror anthology fans. It isn't as good as 'Tales from the Crypt (1972)' or 'Creephow', but it has it's moments.6/10