Tarot (2024) - Movie Review

What do you get when Hollywood takes a solid teen horror novel from the 90’s and puts it into Chat GPT?

The worst movie I’ve seen in years, that’s what.

Let’s rage.

I’m sorry team, I can’t do my normal schtick with this one. There’s nothing I can use to summarize or make this film sound exciting. The production, writing, special effects, and acting were all below the average community theater production of Twelfth Night.

The film claims to be based off of the 1992 serial killer thriller, Horrorscope by Nicholas Adams where a vicious murderer targets students at a local high school based on their zodiac signs.

This film is about a group of rich, 30 something douchebags who I think are still in college (they never fucking specify) who are targeted by a haunted deck of Tarot Cards that is possessed by a vengeful astrologer.

No, it’s actually worse than it sounds.

The Astrologer is not only a vengeful spirit, but she is also a physical being that can shapeshift—but only into the poorly conceived and drawn Tarot characters—which all look like cheap morphsuit costumes from Spirit Halloween.

There are THREE, count’em THREE writers credited on this absolute turd of a film. Spenser Cohen, Anna Holberg, and the original author Nicholas Adams (who must be real hard up for cash to approve this bullshit).

Here’s the thing, there is no way a human wrote this script. No fucking way.

In my opinion, this movie was written by AI.

The film just starts, no lead in, no character building, no relationship basis for the viewer to build any kind of attachment to any characters. My viewing partner and I were forced to come up with nicknames for the characters because we had no idea who anyone was and how they were related. The dialogue sounds like a boomer attempting to translate teen speech to an alien race.

No one talks like an actual human being.

The lead character, who we called Bangs McGee. Is a self-taught, Tarot expert who’s only dialogue is monologues of exposition and/or instant explanations of what’s going on. She literally will ask, what’s going on to the group? Then 5 seconds later launch into a long detailed speech explaining exactly what’s going on.

There’s an Ahab character brought in, we called her Wrinkles the Clown. She mainly showed up to do 15 minutes of exposition in the middle of the movie, changing the entire rules originally explained earlier in the film. Then she dies in one of the dumbest, inexplicable moments of the film.

The movie has no emotion, or investment from the filmmakers-

This film looks cheap. It’s poorly lit, and the CGI used looks like it came straight out of iMovie.

There’s just no way a human wrote this or edited it.

Jumpscares are timed in such a way that you can literally count the beats between them. Any scene with a jumpscare had the exact same timing. The music would go silent and then there’s a 4 count and boom, really boring jump scare.

Characters randomly change personalities, motivations, and make the absolute dumbest decisions in order to lean into basic horror stereotypes.

The film is lit light shit. Every room is dark, empty, and in some cases unable to be seen. I watched on a 4k HDR screen and in multiple scenes, it was impossible to see what was happening.

Then there’s the fact that world the movie takes place in is completely empty. Every single exterior and interior is empty. They go to the school in the middle of the day. Is it a high school or a college, we don’t know. They never tell us. We don’t know jack shit about these douchebags except that they’re rich and entitled—yet somehow we’re supposed to root for them. I digress—They go to the school in the middle of the day and the halls are empty. One character goes to a subway station in the middle of night, during normal operating hours, and it’s empty. There isn’t a single soul. One character lives in a dorm / commune / mansion—they never tell us what the fuck it is—and there’s no one there. It’s empty.

This film is a lame cash grab, obviously rushed out of the studio in the hopes of making a quick buck

But it’s obvious what they did here.

If a human actually wrote this, they need to excommunicated from the filmmaking community and never allowed to hold a pencil or touch a keyboard again.

However, if you see this film or read the screenplay—I think you’ll agree that this was written by an algorithm.

Film is dead.