Dark Stories started life on French television as a series of short films. Now it has been repackaged for international audiences as a feature encompassing five of the original episodes. Despite being a French production, there are plenty of familiar faces for those that aren’t that hip to French cinema or television. They do have French royalty, Dominque Pinon (Delicatessen, Alien: Resurrection) make an appearance, but Kristanna Locken (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines), John Robinson (Elephant) and even Michelle Ryan (Eastenders) appear and try to give you a scare.
The film begins with one of the most peculiar hostage situations we’ve probably ever seen as a woman finds herself tied to a chair by a warped version of Pinocchio. It’s a freaky-looking doll and will be responsible for a few nightmares, and the film hasn’t even started yet. In hopes of keeping the doll distracted long enough that help might arrive, the woman offers to tell the doll some scary stories. The doll is interested and so our protagonist begins to recount a series of – as the name suggests – dark stories.The ‘telling of stories to save a life’ is a familiar angle for an anthology film. It’s exactly what happens in Tales From the Darkside: The Movie; just swap out woman for small boy, and killer doll for Debbie Harry’s witch, and there’s not much between them. Although Tales from the Darkside doesn’t have a demonic doll that is clearly sucking the viewer’s life-force.
First up is Le festin des goules (The Ghoul Feast), a tale about ghouls hiding and eating their way through a fancy art gallery. After the curator’s son goes missing she teams up with the night watchman to find him, which leads to battling monstrous ghouls. It’s a great story to kick things off as it has a very strong vein of humour and works well at easing the viewer in, making them feel comfortable, so that later on when the tone changes, they’ll be caught completely unaware. It’s kitsch, camp, fun, but still has a couple of good scares.
Things then take a darker turn in Le Parc as a female runner finds herself face-to-face with a ghostly serial killer. It’s a shorter segment than some of the others, but still manages to pack in a sledgehammer punch during its finale. Next up comes Mort mais Vivant (Dead but Alive), a rip-roaring zombie revenge tale that re-calibrates Dark Stories into comedy territory. A man comes back from the dead to exact deadly revenge on those that want to hurt his girlfriend and her younger sister. It’s like The Crow, only without the year wait, and the angst replaced with buckets of blood, gore, and slapstick comedy. If you’ll pardon the pun, there’s a lot of heart on display in this segment, which is needed after the darkness of Le Parc. I’d maybe skip the snack for this one though as the sound design is intensely wet and sloppy; a strong stomach is advised.
The penultimate tale of Dark Stories, Boughtat, is by far the most nightmarish. It follows a young woman who is plagued by frightening visions whenever she tries to sleep. She is adamant that she is being stalked by a Djinn-like creature, but her friend thinks sleep deprivation has sent her cuckoo. Things take a trauma-inducing turn when the pair decide to have a sleepover. It’s a haunting segment and the make-up work on the creature is genuinely terrifying. Glimpses of it are kept to just that – glimpses, but as with the red demon in Insidious a flash is all you need for it to be seared into your retinas ready to randomly appear when you wake up in the night.
Finally, we come to Le Jugement Dernier (The Last Judgement) in which a TV documentary crew visit a rural farm to interview one of the residents whom believes that aliens have chosen him to be the new saviour. It’s here that we meet both Pinon and Ryan, and never did I ever imagine those two actors sharing the screen. Of all the stories, this is potentially the one that we’ve seen the most, with it tapping into found-footage tropes with The Exorcism of Emily Rose tones. The inclusions of an alien is a little fresher, but again, Dark Stories brings in the humour, which is needed after Boughtat, but almost feels somewhat of an anticlimax.
Overall Dark Stories works really well as a collection of stories, with something to satisfy most tastes; it will delight, disgust, and unnerve in equal measures.
Dark Stories was reviewed at Arrow Video FrightFest 2020.
Dark Stories
Summary
A gruesome and gruelling collection of devious tales, sloppy sounds, and nightmarish visions.
