I’m not going to lie and tell you that I’ve been anxiously looking forward to Tarot. Like every other horror fan, I thought this movie looked like the worst kind of generic genre drivel, so I went into it with just about the lowest expectations possible. In fact, I was basically dreading the experience, so immediately after I agreed to review this film, I started to have second thoughts. But I decided to stick with it and take one for the team, and now that I’ve finally had the chance to watch Tarot, I’m happy to report that it’s not quite the worst movie I’ve seen all year.

Tarot was written and directed by Spencer Cohen, and it stars Harriet Slater, Adain Bradley, Avantika Vandanapu, Wolfgang Novogratz, Humberly González, Larsen Thompson, and Jacob Batalon. The film is about seven college friends who rent a mansion in the middle of nowhere to celebrate one of their birthdays, and while there, they come upon an old, odd-looking deck of tarot cards.

One of the friends, Haley, is super into tarot, astrology, and the like, so she uses the cards to read everyone’s horoscope, including her own. At the time, it just seems like a bit of harmless fun, but these characters soon realize that they’ve made a deadly mistake. Almost immediately after they return from their little getaway, they start dying one by one in ways that are eerily (or obnoxiously, depending on your point of view) similar to the horoscopes Haley read.

On paper, that doesn’t seem like a bad idea for a horror movie. In fact, it sounds like it could be kind of fun, but unfortunately, Tarot completely botches the execution. For starters, it commits one of the cardinal cinematic sins–it tells us about its characters rather than letting us see what they’re like for ourselves.

The film opens with the seven friends playing a drinking game where they have to decide which of them is most likely to do certain things, like have a baby or eat food off the floor. Then, not long after that, when Haley reads everyone’s horoscope, she tells them what their astrological signs say about them, so we get not one but two scenes of exposition-driven character development.

And predictably, it’s completely ineffective. Sure, we learn things about these characters, but we don’t get a chance to truly know them. To take just one example, two of the friends are voted the most likely to get married first, and the other five say they’re like a dream couple. But lo and behold, right after they’re given that honor, we learn that they’ve actually broken up, so we never see what they’re actually like as a couple. We just have to take everyone else’s word for it, and that’s a horrible way to get to know anyone, movie characters included.

Because of that poor character development, it’s impossible to care about anybody in Tarot, and that totally saps the film of any effectiveness it might have had. It causes the story to fall completely flat, and the scares barely induce anything more than a few bored yawns. Simply put, the weak characters make this movie an absolute slog to get through, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

Next, let’s talk about the horror in Tarot. By and large, it’s super generic, so if you can name a genre trope, it’s probably used at some point in this film. We see lights flicker and go out, monsters quickly scurry past the camera, and characters get dragged kicking and screaming (quite literally) into the darkness, so the whole thing is mostly just an exercise in worn-out horror cliches.

What’s more, as I said before, the characters get killed in ways that are very reminiscent of their horoscopes, and the similarities are often insufferably literal. For instance, Haley tells one of her friends that he’ll be led down the wrong track, and he gets killed on a railroad track. Similarly, Haley says in another reading that something will end up being water under the bridge, and wouldn’t you know, that character dies on a bridge. To be fair, that might not sound too bad on paper, but on screen, it becomes super obnoxious super quickly.

Last but not least, I want to mention something that doesn’t quite fit into the two big areas I’ve been focusing on so far. It’s an instance of Madame Web-level writing that’s so bad it caught me off guard, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t warn you about it. After a couple of the characters die and the remaining ones figure out what’s going on, they decide to get help, but since they don’t know where to turn, they do a Google search about horoscopes.

And guess what? It totally works. Before they even click any of the links, they can tell that most of the articles are written by the same person, and as luck would have it, this occult guru lives within driving distance of their school. So they trek out to her house and plead for help, and once again, they hit the jackpot. Not only is this person legit, but she knows all about the history of the specific deck they used and the curse they’ve invoked upon themselves.

In other words, even though Haley and her crew go about it in arguably the dumbest way possible, it all works out for them because…well, just because. This is one of the laziest series of events I’ve seen on screen in recent memory, and because it’s so important to the movie’s plot, it’s also one of the most egregious.

In case you couldn’t tell, I absolutely hated Tarot, but surprisingly, I didn’t think it was all bad. In fact, there were a few things about it that I actually quite enjoyed. Most notably, the malevolent entity targeting these characters takes the form of the various monsters from the tarot cards, and the creature designs are really cool. On top of that, the third act features an obviously Insidious-inspired scene that’s a ton of fun, and at one point there’s even an effective jump scare that reminded me a lot of the all-time great scare in the eighth episode of Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House.

But in the grand scheme of things, none of that is enough to tip the scales. The bad in Tarot far, far outweighs the good, so if you’re looking for anything even remotely close to a decent time at the movies, don’t watch Tarot. Granted, it’s not quite the worst film I’ve seen all year, but if it wasn’t for Madame Web, it just might be.