Cinemavenger

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Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

A fluffy kitten playing with a ball of yarn.  A giggling baby covered in her first piece of birthday cake.  Sock monkeys.  Sunflowers.  All of those things are blood-chillingly scarier than anything in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

Fuck anybody who apologizes for this bloodless, gutless, boring as shit, "gateway" horror movie.  There are plenty of crap-your-pants terrifying PG-13 flicks, so that's no excuse.  Claiming that it deserves love and money because it's "creepy rather than gory" only works if this spook-lack-ular was even remotely creepy.  Spoiler Alert:  it ain't.

Let's talk about the bits that are supposed to be creepy and/or scary but don't come within a cold, moonless, country mile of either.  A scarecrow - you can't even call it an evil or vicious or misunderstood scarecrow because it has zero backstory - turns its victim into a scarecrow.  How?  Who knows?  Why?  Who fucking cares?

A corpse goes looking for its missing big toe.  That could be scary, you know, if we knew why the corpse wanted the big toe back.  Or how she lost it.  Or how it ended up in a pot of stew that magically appeared in a suburban kitchen in a house with no apparent connection to the corpse.

Sensing a trend yet?  When Scary Stories isn't lubelessly ass-pounding the most basic elements of storytelling, it's stealing from third rate urban legends.  One character's nasty pimple turns out to be filled with a super-clutter of spiders.  I've seen zoo workers hit by rhesus feces scarier than that.

Scary Stories can't even keep its own main plot straight.  First, our high school heroes explore a haunted house where an albino chick was kept hidden by her family but was also able somehow to tell scary stories to local kids through a brick wall.  And then some - not all, but some - of those kids disappeared.

After pasty Patsy died decades ago, so did her scary stories.  Until this movie starts, and without a tick's dick worth of explanation she's back from the dead (maybe?) and writing new scary stories from beyond the grave (possibly?).

Not one fucking things makes sense in Scary Stories, least of all its delusional attempt to set up the most undeserved sequel since The Human Centipede II.

August 16, 2019