Into the Dark: Uncanny Annie (2019)

Hulu's anthology horror series Into the Dark has been renewed for another season. Uncanny Annie is its first episode for Season 2 and being the month of October, it once again uses Halloween as the month's theme. Those of you who have faithfully followed the series since its launch last October may fondly recall that first episode last October, The Body, which was a rather uniquely dark humoured take of Halloween with a hitman lugging around a mummified corpse who gets mistaken as a cool dude with a cool Halloween costume! Season 2's opening episode however, fails to provide the same level of enthusiasm or creativity to set the series off with a good start.

Uncanny Annie is basically the name of a haunted board game that a group of teenagers end up playing when they decided to spend their Halloween night indoors. Predictably, these typically obnoxious teenagers gets bumped off one by one until we are left with one. Yawn .... Same old cliched situations, same old boring teenage characters who carry some dark secrets that comes back to haunt them, same old ideas for the killings. So despite the reasonably competent direction and acting, the episode falls short simply because its content is so familiar. So what we have is the feeling like we have watched this before many times. A more liberal dose of dark humour or tribute to the genre would have help lift this from its mediocre level.  Uncanny Annie herself is a rather ugly character with a giggle and smile that succeeds to being more annoying than sending

shivers down the spine. Despite the poor start to the season, and being the devote fan of anthology horror series, I am willing to forgive and forget and will continue to see what other episodes have in store for the coming months.