Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

I rented Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark from a Redbox kiosk.  It marked the first time in five-ish years that I rented a movie outside of the Internet.  Didn't have the same pizzazz as a Blockbuster rental, but it tickled the same tract in my brain.  And that...has nothing to do with the film itself.  Man, how many centuries had we been promised a cinematic adaptation of these anthology books?  Personally, I never read them.  I thought they looked cool.  I possessed the knowledge that the illustrations were materially and altogether smacktabulous.  But I never read them, dag-nab it.  Okay, liberal use of words such as "dag-nab" and "smacktabulous" are hereby prohibited for the rest of this review.

Technically, Scary Stories is a period piece.  We open in 1968 where a shy girl named Stella discovers a tome in a tall, caliginous mansion on Halloween night.  So at least the atmosphere is sweet.  The narrative is unique in the way that it unspools each story.  Clearly, this isn't a traditional anthology furnished with a connective wrap-around segment.  I dig how the tales are essentially death sequences.  If there exists another fright flick with this exact gimmick, I can't place it.  This particular VDM (Vignette Delivery Method...my secretary is filing the copyright paperwork this very second) allows Scary Stories to avoid a common anthology pitfall.  Usually, pacing becomes stale as you flip pages, so to speak, from one short to the next.  Here, we are spared a handful of expositions.

Am I making any sense?  I just thought it was refreshing to see an entire story relayed in a spurt of dialogue.  "That monster is looking for her missing toe."  Done.  That's all you need to know!  It keeps things bristling at a perky step.  Of course, the actual monsters are divine, provided that they manage to sidestep shady digital effects.  I was pleasantly surprised to find moments of creepy menace.  The PG-13 rating doesn't take the teeth out of this ghoul, but I want to make sure that I don't send the wrong message.  I'm not gaga over Scary Stories to tell in the Dark.  I haven't seen any other reviews complain about the acting, but Zoe Margaret Colletti (Stella in the flesh) comes off as stagy.  To me!  Ugh, I feel like I'm being mean.

Plus, she's a fucking whore.  That was a joke.  I mean, she's fine most of the time.  She loses me when the script goes the simpering, dewy-eyed route, which it does in the closing ten minutes.  The climax has a perfunctory vibe to it.  As I was watching it, I couldn't help but ask, "Is this the ending of a different movie?"  I get bent out of shape when villains turn out to be good-natured people who were abused into being evil spectres.  Haven't we been through this enough already?  Fuck, "spectres" is underlined in red.  It's not misspelled, you shitheel.  That's the British spelling.  I'm British!