TALE OF TALES

I don't know why, since the two movies are utterly different and unrelated, but I kept thinking about Tarantino's THE HATEFUL EIGHT while watching TALE OF TALES. Part of it was, I was thinking, this movie's better than that. Some of the time. TALE OF TALES reminded me of PAN'S LABYRINTH and BARON MUNCHAUSEN and even a tiny bit of TIME BANDITS though TIME BANDITS was better than all of them by far. TALE OF TALES was far better than I'd expected, going in. It's weird, fantastical, bizarre, and much like some Grimm's fairy tales. The casting is both weird and inspired. As the movie goes on, it gets weirder and weirder. And by the end, it occurred to me that its grisly scenes were as ugly as anything in HATEFUL EIGHT. In fact in the end there was something about it that continued reminding me about H8, and still does now. The lengths people will go to get what they want, in a pure Machiavellian sense.

SCORE: 64.