Join John Cribbs on a journey through the full run of HBO's early 90's horror anthology Tales from the Crypt. You might expect us to make a series of Crypt Keeper inspired puns here in our intro, but c'mon we can't compete with that guy. Instead, we'll simply say that there's no grand idea behind these episode-by-episode recaps, they were prompted by Cribbs' interest in delving into a series that he was not intimately familiar with in his youth.

In addition to being laden with heavy-hitters distinctly of the era like Demi Moore, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Robert Zemeckis, Tales from the Crypt features numerous Pink Smoke favorites like filmmakers Walter Hill, Rodman Flender, Steven E. DeSouza and Tobe Hooper as well as a wide variety of the kind of character actors that we love: William Sadler, Michael Ironside, Lance Henriksen, William Hickey, Grace Zabriskie, a rotating assortment of Paul Verhoeven regulars and even Dr. Giggles himself, Larry Drake. Hell, it's the early 90's so Morton Downey, Jr., Sam Kinison and Heavy D. even somehow end up figuring into it all.

Sorry: there's no delectable twist ending for this intro in which our sins are ironically and violently pointed back into our own faces. It's an intro to an episode guide.

{SEASON 1, EPs 1-3.}
{SEASON 1, EPs 4-6.}
{SEASON 2, EPs 1-2.}
{SEASON 2, EPs 3-5.}
{SEASON 2, EPs 6-8.}
{SEASON 2, EPs 9-10.}
{SEASON 2, EPs 11-12.}

Season 1, Episode 1: "The Man Who Was Death"
Director: Walter Hill
Original air date: June 10, 1989

Wow, so here's a great episode right out of the gate. It perfectly establishes the show's macabre sense of humor and its tireless use of the comedic EC Comics ironic ending. The series was originally intended to be a stand-alone feature film with three stories, and this must have been one of them: it's as cinematic as any straight-up horror flick from the era, with lots of location work and ambitious camera set-ups. Bill Sadler, who'd go on to star in the first Tales from the Crypt movie Demon Knight, plays a charming southern man in a trilby who has deep philosophical opinions about his job, throwing the switch that lights up the electric chair and executes condemned prisoners. Once an abolition of the death penalty renders his services unnecessary, he goes into business for himself, independently seeking out guilty parties who've eluded justice and frying them right in their jacuzzis as they celebrate their sinful act. Sadler's Niles Talbot is a great character, one of Funderburg's "Endearing Psychotic Achievers" in the tradition of Louis Mazzini and Rupert Pupkin whose societal proselytizing perfectly straddles the delicate issue of capital punishment - you can't help but understand where he's coming from even while he's creeping you out.

Coming off Red Heat, Johnny Handsome and Another 48 Hours and just about to enter his mid-90's "western" stage, I'd go so far to say that this might be the best thing Hill directed from 1988 on. It at least rivals the pilot episode of Deadwood. He co-wrote the episode with Robert Reneau, writer of Action Jackson. Which makes me realize that all this episode's missing is a Ferrari Testarossa being driven through a mansion. A-.

Notes:

- According to a recent Random Roles for A.V. Club, Sadler credits being cast in this episode as a huge leap forward in his career. Thanks to this appearance, he was cast in Shawshank Redemption (Darabont was a writer for the series), Die Hard 2 (Joel Silver, producer), Trespass (Walter Hill, producer/director of episode) and, of course, Demon Knight, which as far as I can tell is the only big theatrical release ever headlined by Sadler. Funny that he'd end up playing the actual man who was Death in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey.

- Roy Brocksmith from Total Recall has a nice little role as a bartender.

Season 1, Episode 2: "And All Through the House"
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Original air date: June 10, 1989

For the second episode of the series, Robert Zemeckis cast then-wife Mary Ellen Trainor as a woman being chased through her home on Christmas Eve night by a grunting Larry Drake (Dr. Giggles himself) dressed in a Santa Claus outfit. Although there isn't much to distinguish this from an episode of Tales from the Darkside, it does have a very Crypt angle: she can't call the cops because she just murdered her husband with a fire poker! Trainor performs an impressive balancing act, switching from coldly offing her husband (played by Marshall Bell, so the show has gone 2-for-2 in casting character actors from Total Recall) and methodically looking to blame the deed on the home-invading St. Nick to being forced to defend her daughter from Drake's ho-ho-homicidal maniac.

It's crazy to think about the Vault of Horror comic this story originated from. By the 80's, Killer Santas were running wild in the Silent Night, Deadly Night movies, but I'll bet in 1954 it was considered fairly unfashionable to drag the name of Kris Kringle through the mud, not to mention the story's emphasis on child endangerment (even in 1989, the Crypt Keeper himself uses his precious 60 second outro to assure the audience that the kid survives). The same story was adapted in the 1972 anthology film Tales from the Crypt with Oliver MacGreevy's psycho Santa menacing Joan Collins, but it took the Crypt crew to really tease out the nastiness of this guiltily fun venture: the murdered husband angle is unique to the Crypt version, the first of five adapted by Fred Dekker (you know that teleplay must have been fun to read). While it would have benefited from a more original take on the ol' axe-wielding Santa story, I do appreciate this episode's stripped-down, one-set approach. (And it must have inspired Home Alone, right? It came out the following year.) B.

Notes:

- Very sad that Mary Ellen Trainor passed away recently; I always loved that she played the same character, reporter Gail Wallens, in Die Hard and Richochet. There need to be more character actors playing recurring minor characters in random movies.

Season 1, Episode 3: "Dig That Cat...He's Real Gone"
Director: Richard Donner
Original air date: June 10, 1989

It shows great restraint on the part of the producers that the show waited a whole 3 segments before locating a story at an actual carnival. Placing the giddy debauchery right in the middle of the most merrily depraved setting imaginable is inspired, if a bit obvious, and results in what feels like the first full, completely realized Tales from the Crypt episode. It's got everything: sin, greed, spitting in the face of science/nature, betrayal (including a literal back-stabbing) followed by deliciously ironic comeuppance, seedy set designs, gaudy camera angles and, for the first time, the Cryptkeeper's signature cackle to end the episode. And... Robert Wuhl! What says mid-90's HBO more than Arli$$ himself? Remember Arli$$? It's one of those things I can recall being aware of everybody hating. ("Over forty hours of keep-your-pants-dry entertainment!")

Mostly this episode's got violent death - death by drowning, hanging, electrocution, crossbow, car crash, gunshot to the head and live internment, all visited upon the same fellow, Joe Pantoliano's Ulric the Undying. After undergoing a very flimsy surgical procedure which grants him the nine lives of a cat, he and the doctor who performed the felinectomy (Gustav Vintas, sort of the Christoph Waltz of the 80's and 90's) cash in on their astonishing medical breakthrough by... joining the carnival! Because when you uncover the secret of resurrection, that's where you cash in, obviously. What follows is a series of Joey Pants dying on stage in front of delighted audience only to spasm back to life wearing a coy grin (it makes me wonder if the Doctor Who/Torchwood people based Captain Jack on Ulric?) A great episode to be sure; if I don't rank it as high as the pilot, it's only because Donner's approach is the most obvious considering the bawdy carnival atmosphere: tons of extreme close-ups with fishbowl lens, etc. But lots of fun from beginning to end, even if Ulric's ultimate fate is of the variety I personally have a hard time watching! B+.

Notes:

- Donner recruited a bunch of his stable character actors for this episode, including Vintas and Steve Kahan from the Lethal Weapon movies, Pantoliano and Jack O'Leary from Goonies and Paul Tuerpe from literally every goddamn movie Donner ever made.

- The first three episodes of Crypt debuted on HBO on the same night, possibly because these were the three stories they intended to turn into a film before redeveloping the idea for television.

- This episode utilizes what I guess you'd call the "splat wipe" - a device where one scene transitions to another in the shape of a splatter of blood. It's only used once (later in the episode they opt for the more conventional diamond wipe) but I'm curious how much of a staple it will become to the series. (If I had directed one, I'd probably go wild and use it between every scene.)

- This is the second episode to use the framing device of a narrator speaking directly to camera, something that does become a staple of the show. Narrator mortality rate for the series is currently 100%.