Promising horror premise is not developed well

A lot of horror nowadays goes for an M or MA15+ classification rather than R, all the better to bring in teenage audiences legally. Too bad for the gorehounds.

Tarot, the latest such offering, is a disappointment. Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg made their directorial debut as well as adapting a novel by Nicholas Adams called Horrorscope, but they should have spent more time at their keyboards before moving to the set.

Tarot cards, surprisingly, don't seem to feature much in horror movies, certainly not as the main story device. It's a pity this movie isn't more imaginatively written. The characters are cardboard and the plot and execution pretty rote - it's got all the depth of a typical 1980s slasher movie. That's coupled with the schematic nature of a Final Destination movie.

And everything is lit so dimly that the frantically edited scares, such as they are, seldom work as well as they should. Even the jump scares - a cheap device, but it can work - create no frisson.

The set-up is simple. A group of college friends have rented a remote country house to celebrate the birthday of one of them. When they grow tired of drinking games, they poke around the house looking for something to amuse themselves, like a game.

The group come across a locked door with a warning not to enter. But they're not going to let little things like that or the fact that it's somebody else's house stop them. They break the lock and go into the cellar.

They find a deck of tarot cards in an old box, and one of their number, Hayley (Harriet Slater, knows how to read them, so the next diversion is obvious. Despite it being, apparently, a sacred rule never to use someone else's deck to do a tarot reading, they throw caution to the wind and go for it.

The readings are a mix of tarot images like the Hanged Man and horoscope signs, and each person gets a vague and cryptic message.

That seems to be that.

But after they go back to college, one of them is killed in what looks like an accident but we know isn't, then another, in ways suggested by the foretold fates. Can the survivors figure out what's happening (it's no real spoiler to say there's a curse) and stop it before they're all dead? Rather conveniently, they manage to find someone online who not only knows about such things but is familiar with the same cursed tarot set.

There are some pretty good special effects for the supernatural manifestations. The quick glimpses we get of them are sometimes effective - what we can see of them (as noted, the film looks murky). And the reliance on suggestion rather than lashings of blood was fine by me.

But the ways in which the deaths are, shall we way, executed aren't very inventive and, worse, it's really hard to care about any of the characters in the film. There's none of the efficient, often funny character sketching of, say, Scream.