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 2, Episode 11: "Judy, You're Not Yourself Today"
Director: Randa Haines
Original air date: June 12, 1990
The Crypt Keeper opens the episode dolled up for the beauty salon (face covered in a "bloodpack") and you can already tell he's going to outshine the story itself. But it's not for lack of effort: it's obvious a decision was made to ramp up the episode's camp levels to maximum. Largely a domestic farce with some supernatural mayhem tossed in - more body swapping! Based on "Only Sin Deep," "The Switch" and this one, I'd say horror comic writers of the 1950's harbored a genuine fear of aging men and women usurping the tender flesh of the young - "Judy" lets its three main actors run hog wild. Now if I had to guess, I'd say Brian Kerwin was probably the one who made that acting decision while Carol Kane set her Carol Kane meter to "Transylvania 6-5000", leaving Frances Bay to keep up. Which she admirably manages to do ("You got a great ass! I'll like it even better when it's MIIIIINE!") After all, you don't go back & forth between working with David Lynch, John Carpenter, Ben Stiller and Jerry Seinfeld without a high level of Canadian stamina.
Once you get past a few minutes of the actors doing their Crypt-worthy best to play up their parts, it becomes obvious just how much work went into the writing of this episode. (In case you were wondering: yes, the title is recited in the dialogue.) I kind of doubt the boils and ghouls at E.C. Comics gave a shit about the very current issues brought up here, but the minute Kerwin levels a shotgun at nerdy gun control advocate Todd Field (sadly he doesn't use it and spare us all the debacle of Little Children), it's clear this is the most political Crypt episode up to this point. One character is going to be on the wrong side of the issue and end up paying for it in an ironic twist of fate. He's not going to deserve that fate because of being necessarily greedy or evil or gullible (in fact he's willing to accept some very strange claims and makes two pretty smart moves that should see him coming out on top in the end), he's simply damned for his personal beliefs.
Even for this show, that's a notably empty characterization and I don't think it would work but for just how broad and big the three stars are willing to go. The married couple are shallow and materialistic - he fetishizes guns, she can't stay away from fancy jewelry even with the knowledge one particular necklace is teeming with black magic - but since these traits aren't necessarily damning on their own, Kerwin and Kane are tasked with bringing in the performances super-broad, almost to the point of pantomine. The result is an episode that feels like a stage comedy - there's even a time lapse where nobody is going to believe the new scene wasn't filmed immediately after the first half of the episode.
This isn't high praise, but it's not exactly damning either; at very least, it makes the episode memorable. It's definitely in keeping with the series and we even get a walking, rotting corpse at the end. Brian Kerwin gives the best performance by a soap opera actor on the series so far, although I didn't understand until the end of the episode that his random slips into a bad British accent was the character trying to act like James Bond. (Crypt Keeper picks up on it and makes a great Bond reference.) Kerwin even delivers a classic Crypt line: "Babe, you've got a witch buried in the basement, get a grip on reality!" B-.
Notes:
- Carol Kane was also in Crypt honcho Richard Donner's Scrooged.
- Frances Bay went on to appear in Krippendorf's Tribe, directed by Crypt contributor Tom Holland. (Oh, I mean Todd Holland. The guy who made The Wizard.)
- Pop quiz: Who directed Children of a Lesser God? The answer would be Randa Haines, who followed up her award-winning film by directing this episode. She started her career as a script supervisor on low-budget movies like Let's Scare Jessica to Death, one of great underrated horror films of the 70's. Later on she'd direct such genteel fare as The Doctor, Wrestling Ernest Hemingway and a tv movie where Matthew Perry reaches out to inner-city school kids. This was her first credit in the four years following the critically-beloved Children; I liked the idea that the Crypt producers might have made a conscious decision to hire female directors, considering they also got Mary Lambert to helm the best episode of Season 1. Sadly at a glance, it seems there won't be another female behind the camera until the final season. (p.s. In an AFI poll, Haines named Alain Resnais' Muriel as her favorite film - no shit!)
- First episode written by Scott Nimerfro, who'd write nine more episodes, become story editor for the show's final season and co-produce the first TFTC feature film, Demon Knight. Like many of the show's writers he also got his start on Donner films, working as video coordinator on Scrooged and assistant to Lethal Weapon 2 producer Jennie Lew Tugend.
- A tabloid paper called The National Tattler makes an appearance. Is it a specific Red Dragon/Manhunter reference?
Season 2, Episode 12: "Fitting Punishment"
Director: Jack Sholder
Original air date: June 19, 1990
Next to carnival barker, mortician has got to be the most represented occupation on this series. That's just a guess, but my familiarity with 90's horror movies in particular leads me to believe this won't be the last episode set in or around a mortuary. The real question is whether the next funeral director we meet will be anywhere near as odious as this one. Moses Gunn's Uncle Ezra is the most reprehensible Crypt character so far, and that's saying something. There is literally not one line from his mouth or anything he does that isn't absolutely despicable. He embodies the typical E.C. villain, which Stephen King once described as "a totally black character, with absolutely no redeeming qualities, the Compleat monster."
Interesting that he'd use the word 'black' as director Jack Sholder sets the episode in a heavily black community, featuring a cast of only black actors. This is a great change of pace: other than Janet Hubert, the show has been pretty much exclusively white up until now (and at a glance seems to have never hired a black director, although Ernest R. Dickerson helmed the first movie, Demon Knight.) And while I'm sure no person of any race would be eager to take part in the kind of sadism, greed and mutilation that define the series it's just good to have all cultures represented in this celebration of mankind's depravity.
And goddamn is this one of those: the episode almost reaches a Fassbinder level of cruelness and suffering. Sometimes it gets so bad Sholder uses a closed-curtain wipe to exit the scene and spare us from seeing any more. It's not always pleasant to watch, but unlike "The Sacrifice," here the serious approach to the pulpy scenario actually works. It works because of that Crypt magic that happens when the show is in the hands of a director who makes it seem practically effortless, in this case the man behind Alone in the Dark, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge and The Hidden (signing off on what was unfortunately his sole contribution to the series). He works the same spell as Mary Lambert and Walter Hill in their exceptional episodes, making it so that even though the scenario playing out in front of you is horrendous, you can't help enjoying every second of it. Like the best horror films, it reaches that moment of unbearable repugnance and goes beyond it until all you can do is laugh.
Not sure how much of this assessment is informed by our modern era, where undisguised baseness and rampant hatred are the order of the day (pretty sure I don't remember the Bush Sr. period being quite so explicitly inhumane). But this story seems to exist solely to see funeral director Ezra Thornberry, brilliantly played with the perfect amount of tackiness and sleaze by great character actor Moses Gunn (a pioneering theatrical performer so memorable as Bumpy Jonas in Shaft), have his comeuppance delivered to him with every ounce of awfulness paid back in kind, with interest. All his artless scheming, brazen hypocrisy and untenable self-righteousness (favorite line of the episode: "Like it says in the Bible, a penny saved is a penny earned!") fools absolutely no one yet goes shamefully unpunished until the undead dish out their own ghoulish brand of justice. It's A Christmas Carol with a legless wraith in place of redeeming spirits.
It hardly matters that said retribution isn't particularly "clever" as many are in these types of story. Sholder makes up in visceral shock (the sound of an embalming instrument going into a leg, ugh!) what the episode lacks in narrative twists. He knows exactly what to focus on: the escalation of Ezra's malevolence and abuse of power, incredulously witnessing how somehow every new act makes him that much worse. Based on the title, I thought for sure this would be an ironic story about clothes (it kind of is, as sneakers play a significant part). There is a double meaning to the title of course, but it works perfectly on its own: fitting punishment for one so foul, so irredeemably offensive that he's been condemned by the very forces of nature (and the Crypt Keeper, who makes fun of his name in the outro). B+.
Notes:
- Don Mancini, the father of Chucky the killer doll, worked on the script. His first screenplay was 1988's Cellar Dweller, a horror movie with a plot similar to the Crypt episode "Korman's Kalamity" from later on this season. Like "Judy, You're Not Yourself Today" scribe Scott Nimerfro, Mancini would end up writing episodes of Hannibal (he even threw a reference to its cancellation in the latest Chucky movie). The script is also credited to Michael Alan Kahn, who crewed on Donner's Lethal Weapon movies, and Jonathan David Kahn (his brother, I assume?)
- The effectively creepy brass and piano score was composed by Stanley Clarke, would go on to write music for John Singleton films Boyz n the Hood, Poetic Justice and Higher Learning.
- Jon Clair, who plays Ezra's nephew, appeared in a few 90's films such as Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (the screen debut of Charlize Theron) and Twisted Love, starring Lisa Dean Ryan, Mark Paul Gosselaar and Soleil Moon Frye - as far as I know, the only film ever made to give top billing to three 3-named stars.
- Moses Gunn sadly passed away in 1993; co-star Teddy Wilson in 1991. Wilson's last role was in the classic Blood In, Blood Out.
