Sporting the tagline “Your Fate is in the Cards”, the supernatural feature “Tarot” gives you a pretty good idea of what you’re in for. The small budget horror film released earlier this year and had a decent showing at the box office, earning nearly $50 million on an $8 million budget. But it wasn’t well received by fellow critics. Turns out there are some pretty noticeable reasons why.

“Tarot” is based on the 1992 novel “Horrorscope” by Nicholas Adams. It’s written for the screen and directed by the filmmaking duo of Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg. As its title suggests, fortune-telling and the occult come into play, feeding into a reasonably good horror movie premise. But Cohen and Halberg struggle to do much with their movie’s potential. “Tarot” ends up squandering any hint of originality by checking off endless boxes and following formulas that have been re-used countless times.

The story follows seven college friends, Haley (Harriet Slater), Grant (Adain Bradley), Paxton (Jacob Batalon), Paige (Avantika), Madeline (Humberly González), Lucas (Wolfgang Novogratz), and Elise (Larsen Thompson), none of whom are all that interesting and most who fit the common horror movie archetypes. We meet our soon-to-be-doomed partiers celebrating a birthday at a remote mansion in the Catskills that they have rented for the weekend.

After guzzling through the cases of booze they brought with them (yet somehow remaining perfectly sober), they begin rummaging through the house looking for more. In their infinite wisdom they decide to break into a padlocked basement door marked “Keep Out”. But rather than booze, they find a basement full of old antiques including a mysterious deck of tarot cards. In a stroke of narrative convenience, Haley happens to be well-versed in tarot reading. So she uses them to read all of their horoscopes. Bad idea.

In reading the cards the group accidentally unleash something sinister that follows them back to school. Soon after, members of this uninspired gaggle of twentysomethings are picked off one by one, brutally murdered by gruesome real-life versions of the cards they were dealt. The High Priestess, The Hanged Man, The Fool, The Magician, and so on. The survivors eventually wise up and realize something is amiss. They seek the help of Alma Astron (Olwen Fouéré), an occult guru who conveniently knows everything about their creepy tarot deck. She trails the deck’s roots back to 1798 to reveal a curse which must be broken before they all end up dead.

It’s hard to get too involved in anything we see largely because we have no investment in these characters whatsoever. None of them are given a meaningful emotional arc and they are repeatedly doing one incredibly dumb thing after another. Meanwhile the story itself is so formulaic that there is never a real sense of tension or terror (minus one lone scene on a bridge). And what could have been an interesting backstory of the cards is unfortunately crammed into a rushed three minute flashback.

That leaves “Tarot” without a compelling story, no interesting characters, barely any scares, and not an ounce of suspense. Even the kills miss their marks, hampered by the film’s PG-13 rating which strips some clever ideas of their gnarly potential. It’s a shame considering the possibilities. But as it is, you’ll have a hard finding anything you haven’t seen many times before. “Tarot” is now available on home video and VOD.

VERDICT – 1.5 STARS