Tarot Parent Guide

Renting out a big old house in the Catskills for a birthday party sounds like a great idea on the surface. And Haley (Harriet Slater), Grant (Adain Bradley), Paige (Avantika Vandanapu), Paxton (Jacob Batalon), Madeline (Humberly Gonzalez), Lucas (Wolfgang Novogratz), and birthday girl Elise (Larsen Thompson) are certainly having a good time. Looking for some entertainment, they break into a locked basement in the property and do tarot horoscope readings with a deck they find.

It’s all fun and games – until they get home, and Elise is killed in a bizarre accident. A random tragedy, right? When another member of the group dies in an equally unlikely incident, though, the survivors notice that their friends are dying in an oddly similar manner to the tarot readings they had. Haley, who did the readings, is determined to find out how to stop this and save her friends…and herself.

I’ll save you some time here – this movie is not good. I don’t mean it has objectionable messages or relentless sex or anything; it’s just unpleasant to watch. You’re either stuck listening to the aggravating morons standing in for characters exposit at one another, or you’re sitting in a room slightly darker than night on Pluto waiting for your three-thousandth jump scare. Great choices there. Next time just tell me I can either lay down in traffic or play “find the finger” with some power tools. It’s an easier choice.

The nice thing about movies like this is, even if the characters are an insufferable, illiterate, and joyless batch of utterly hapless, hopeless clowns, there’s usually something horrid lurking around the corner to murder them. There’s an added bonus here, too: As the film goes on, the amount of dialogue drops off as characters get whacked. The story doesn’t really make a ton of sense, but I don’t think that was even a consideration for the filmmakers, who seem more interested in seeing how many times they can make a CGI Halloween mask lurch into camera range before it stops being scary and starts being annoying. I don’t know what the final total was, but it got annoying by the third one, roughly ten minutes into the movie. Things went downhill quickly.

Of course, if you’re looking for an excuse not to go to Tarot, I’ve got some options for you. There are the 15 scatological profanities (admittedly low for a horror flick), the bloody violence (about average for rating and genre), or the regular weed use. The best reason, though, is because this movie is worth neither your time nor money, and frankly, I think reading this review qualifies as occupying too much of your attention. Go forth and forget about it! Everyone else will have done so by this time next month.