TAROT (2024) ***

Tarot has a good hook to hang a horror flick on.  It’s so good that it is somehow able to overcome the PG-13 rating and still deliver the goods.  If your film is carrying a PG-13 rating, it’s pretty much a given you’re not going to be tossing the gore around and letting the T & A jiggle and wiggle.  So, what you have to do is give your flick some style, atmosphere, and a sense of humor.  Tarot more or less checks all those boxes and is a surprisingly good time, mostly because it… ahem… plays its cards right. 

The film is basically Ouija meets Thirteen Ghosts with a little bit of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Final Destination thrown in.  A group of friends rent a mansion for the weekend.  While looking for booze, they stumble into a basement that would give the Warrens the creeps.  There, they find a mysterious deck of old tarot cards and the witchy one of the group performs readings for her friends.  Before you can say “Miss Cleo”, her friends begin dying off in ways described by the cards. 

As an added bonus, the victims’ final card takes on a life of its own to deliver the killing blow.  Such villains include The High Priestess, The Hermit, The Fool, and even Death himself.  Each has their own little gimmick.  For example, The Hangman uses a rope to hang one girl and The Magician locks a gal in a box and saws her in half.  Even though the flick is PG-13 this scene is still effective as the shots of the saw blade coming perilously close to the gal’s kicking legs works rather well.  The scene involving a ladder is also fairly brutal given the rating. 

The fact that the potential victims can outsmart Death if they heed the warnings in their reading is a smart little wrinkle.  Naturally, since this is a horror movie, many of them still manage to make dumb choices.  Sure, some of the backstory wasn’t really necessary (they should’ve saved it for a sequel), but for the most part, this is a solid flick. 

Our local theater does bargain shows on Tuesdays for $7.50.  That’s how I saw Tarot, and I would say I got my money’s worth.  So far, 2024 is shaping up to be a banner year for horror.