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 3: "Cutting Cards"
Director: Walter Hill
Original air date: April 21, 1990

Walter Hill returns to the show and to his favorite neon-reflecting streets. Just as I was starting to think this episode could be set in the same universe as The Man Who Was Death, Roy Brocksmith turns up as his bartender character from that episode! (This makes Brocksmith's second Crypt appearance in a row and third overall.) And once again we've got a vaguely noir-ish, Southern-set dark crime story in the Joe R. Lansdale vein that's a lot of fun. Presenting nothing more than the increasingly excessive pissing contest between rival impulsive gamblers Lance Henriksen (playing a character with the outstanding moniker of Reno Crevice) and John Sayles-regular Kevin Tighe (infamous in TV land for playing asshole dads to Nick Andopolis on Freaks and Geeks and John Locke on Lost), "Cutting Cards" gets under your skin, does its dirty business and clears off. Coming in at under 20 minutes, it feels like a Tales from the Crypt one-act play that never loses its intensity for a second despite expertly maintaining the playful tone unique to this series.

Much of the credit goes to the two actors, both veterans of Walter Hill films: Hill directed Henriksen as the also-excellently named Rafe Garrett in Johnny Handsome and of course produced the Alien movies, while Tighe played the Internal Affairs cop up Nick Nolte's ass in Another 48 Hrs. and would turn in a supporting performance in Geronimo a couple years later. Their "Cards" characters share a fiercely stubborn love-hate antagonism that's only getting warmed up with an informal round of Russian roulette in the parking lot. They're like even more unreasonable versions of the feuding hussars in The Duellists, each willing (and arguably over-eager) to mutilate himself in a twisted game of one-upmanship. At the same time, there's something intensely sexual in their mutal hatred - I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the Mr. Show sketch "Spite Marriage" was derived from a viewing of this episode.

We're talking Chains Cooper-era Henriksen, his unhinged days before settling down into quieter Frank Black type parts, so it's all good stuff from him. He plays Reno Crevice as the blowhard cowboy, similar to Michael Winslow in Dead Man (a character so obnoxious he ends up getting killed and eaten by none other than Lance Henriksen). He brings a natural sleaze to the role which cements my belief that he was born to play Big Coffin Hunter Eldred Jonas in Part IV of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, which I still hope he gets to do one day. But Tighe holds his own in the episode, especially when he starts losing fingers during "chop poker" yet sits across from Henriksen in sweat-streaming determination to continue despite the permanently-debilitating stakes. "Cutting Cards" is sort of a variation on Roald Dahl's "Man from the South," famously adapted for the Alfred Hitchcock anthology show, although since this is Crypt it's not just one finger put up as collateral.

Hill once again levels the outlandishness with gritty tension, getting his camera right up in the faces of this fresh set of characters who simply can't turn themselves off. Henriksen and Tighe taking turns pressing a gun against their head and pulling the trigger is almost unbearably gripping and unnerving, and delightful in its absurdity. "Cards" fits into three nice little pieces with an epilogue and its minimalism works very much in its favor. Hill got James Horner to do the music for this episode, the first time since Spielberg's anthology series Amazing Stories that the revered composer lent his talent to television (and housed right between Glory and The Rocketeer, his two best soundtracks!) Horner comes up with a kind of synth-reggae score that isn't anything special, but certainly doesn't detract from the proceedings.

Extra points for the Crypt Keeper's best outro yet: "I heard of giving someone the finger, but this is ridiculous! But at the risk of going out on a limb, I have to hand it to them." That's a Crypt Keeper keeper. A.

Notes:

- Hill co-wrote the episode with Mae Woods, who moved up from being his assistant on Long Riders, Southern Comfort and 48 Hrs. to associate producer on Streets of Fire, Red Heat and Johnny Handsome. She'd pen two more Cryptisodes, one more with Hill and one for John Frankenheimer (the three represent the only screenwriting credits of her career).

- Besides a waitress at the bar, this marks the first woman-less episode of Tales from the Crypt.

- Having the Keeper casually leaning back in his card shark outfit seems to confirm that the host is now more or less fully-fleshed out. (There's some kind of Crypt Keeper-type word play here that I can't quite reach. He's "ghouly-fleshed out?" Nah.)

- After this, the third episode of Season 2's April 21st debut, the directorial prestige for the rest of the season kind of dries up. It improves in the third season but for now, gear up for entries from the co-writer of Doc Hollywood, the director of Wrestling Ernest Hemingway and Sigourney Weaver's husband.

Season 2, Episode 4: "'Til Death"
Director: Chris Walas
Original air date: April 24, 1990

Do you remember the pop cultural voodoo craze of the late 80's/early 90's? We got to see Angel Heart's Lisa Bonet giving a lap dance to a headless chicken in New Orleans and The Serpent and the Rainbow's Bill Pullman being buried alive with a tarantula in Haiti. Crime bosses employed scary voodoo tactics against rivals in both Marked for Death and Predator 2, two movies also released in 1990 that creeped the hell out of me as a kid with their depictions of bloody nude sacrifices. Then a year after this episode aired we got Voodoo Dawn, with former zombie fighter Tony Todd transforming migrant farm workers into flesh-savoring zombies who try to eat Gina Gershon. (Why did neither Todd or Gershon ever make it onto Crypt? Seems like a massive oversight.)

Crypt didn't waste its time getting on board the voodoo choo-choo, and they do it so well (actually it's a mixed bag but c'mon I had to say it). Here the show gets its first zombie story and its fifth or sixth opportunistic golddigger, looking to marry a snobby rich lady in order to finance the building of a hotel on the quicksand-saturated swamp of some Caribbean island. He's managed to piss off the locals somehow (it's barely touched upon 'cause who cares) and also conspired with his doctor buddy to let an old woman die so he can steal her land and build his hotel. On top of that he's jaded about a voodoo priestess he used to date, yet he doesn't think twice about asking her to conjure up some devilry into a handy little love potion. Which always turns out well. "One drop she'll be your wife, two drops she'll be yours for life..." Meaning, even after she's died and been resurrected as a decaying, homicidal walking corpse.

When you think about it, this is the first episode of Crypt to delve into flat-out supernatural horror. Even Joey Pants' immortality in "Dig That Cat" is achieved via surgical procedure, as is William Hickey's transformation into a young man in "The Switch." You could argue that "Lover Come Hack to Me" is a ghost story, but its ax murder is perpetuated by a living human being. Sure, "Only Sin Deep" had some lifeforce-draining black magic hoo-joo and "Dead Right" featured an eerily spot-on psychic, but "'Til Death" is definitely the first time on the show an unearthly entity is called forth to wreak havoc on unscrupulous individuals. Since my first exposure to the E.C. horror comics pastiche was Creepshow, all five of its stories supernatural-based, I guess I'm just surprised this element didn't pop up on Crypt until halfway into its second season.

As expected, they go full-tilt boogie with the zombie madness once the bride self-exhumes and the make-up work is pretty outstanding, including a truly gross wriggling-tongue-in-skull effect to end the episode. Not at all surprising since this one's directed by Chris Walas, the man who melted Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark, created the Gremlins and won an Oscar for turning Jeff Goldblum into Brundlefly. He also has the honor of overseeing the series' first decapitation, complete with satisfying clunky head roll that seems like it should be a TFTC standard.

The effects are so good they basically save the episode, the first half is "Only Sin Deep"-level dullsville which the poor cast is forced to slog through until they can start reacting to dismemberments. It's a notably starless episode - I mean, I recognized D.W. Moffett as the Bateman-esque serial killer from Gary Sherman's Lisa and Aubrey Morris as the crotch-karate chopping corrections officer from A Clockwork Orange and from Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce, but I certainly couldn't name either without the help of IMDb. After opening the season with appearances by Demi Moore and Arnold Schwarzenegger you can't help wonder what happened to the high profile casting (I admit it's generous to consider Lance Henriksen a star). While the cast of "'Til Death" are uniformly fine - Moffett gives an incredible "Jee-zus Chriiiist!" when his wife crawls out of her grave - they are plagued by some truly awful one-linesr: "So much for burning desire!" (delivered to an immolated corpse), "Someone is dying to meet you!" (it's a zombie who's dying to meet him), "I always said you'd get ahead!" (spoken by a detached head). Leave the puns to the Cryptkeeper, guys.

We also get Janet Hubert, the original Aunt Viv from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and she seems to be having fun writhing around, cutting off chicken heads and spitting out rum. With voodoo rituals and stalker zombies this one should definitely be better, although the problem lies with the material and not the production. It follows the right formula - a bunch of amoral, hateable characters receive their comeuppance in the most gruesome way imaginable - but it's all just an excuse to get to the gore. Which is fine, I guess. B-.

Notes:

- Crypt gets its first interracial kiss. Probably not as big a deal as it was on Star Trek.

- Aubrey Morris would pop up in Bordello of Blood, the second Crypt theatrical feature (sadly, he passed away this summer).

- I wonder what happened with Walas' career. He helmed The Fly II, then directed one more movie, 1992's The Vagrant with Bill Paxton and Michael Ironside. Then he went AWOL for 20 years, popping up only recently to co-produce and handle prosethetic design for some movie called Elf-Man. Apparently it's a family Christmas comedy starring Wee Man and Jeffrey Combs, trying to get in on some of that Elf money a decade after the Will Ferrell movie came out? (Did Danny Elfman do the music?) Just seems like a shame - you'd think with his prestigious work in the mid-80's he'd be a legend in the make-up/creature effects industry on par with Rick Baker and Rob Bottin.

- The episode was written by Steven E. de Souza's wife, who also had a small part in his adapation of Street Fighter. Steve himself would be along to write and direct an episode in Season 3.

- I hadn't noticed 'til now, but Crypt Keeper really PROnounces those Ps.

Season 2, Episode 5: "Three's a Crowd"
Director: David Burton Morris
Original air date: May 1, 1990

The bad guy from Death Wish 3! That's right: Manny Fraker, that proud killer of little old ladies himself, headlines this episode. We see here the toll taken from being shot by a rocket launcher at point-blank range out a five-story window onto Brooklyn gravel: Fraker's Chuck Jones-style fate at the end of that classic has turned him into a surly, drunk shell of a man who spends his vacation weekend spying on his wife, growing increasingly paranoid that she's plotting to cheat on him with an old family friend. Because what else could they possibly be discussing in secret? There's clearly no other explaination, so Fraker decides to dust off an antique crossbow and take revenge for something that there isn't the slightest evidence may have happened.

Fraker, a.k.a. Gavan O'Herlihy, son of Robocop's Dan O'Herlihy and combination Gary Busey-William Atherton, gives a performance that ranks with Harvey Keitel in Two Evil Eyes. If you've seen Two Evil Eyes you know exactly what I'm talking about; for everyone else I'm sorry I can't provide a more universal comparison. Basically it's a spectacle of over-the-top drunk acting mixed with theatrical self-pitying. Like Keitel at his grossest, O'Herlihy is shirtless for a large amount of the episode, and he is... not in shape. While I appreciate that Oliver Reed-in-Women in Love gusto on the actor's part, it's somewhat difficult to endure, especially since the episode opens with about five minutes of teasing that the lead actress is about to go topless only to have her peel off layer after layer of blouse, pajama top, chemise and bra only to ultimately turn her back to the camera. C'mon HBO, I'm too young to stay up for Dream On, give me something to work with here!

Not that we're talking Demi Moore-level gorgeousness: this marks the second starless episode in a row, and the blandness of the cast weighs down what is essentially 20 minutes of purely humorless tension-building towards a super-obvious (even for this show) and mean-spirited conclusion. I was hoping for more from David Burton Morris, director of the underrated gem Patti Rocks starring the great Chris Mulkey. He's worked with Mulkey numerous times, it's too bad he couldn't have gotten him for this episode - for one thing, it would have been a Twin Peaks reunion with Mulkey and O'Herlihy. Instead his out-of-work alcoholic suffering cabin fever melodrama turns into a pale version of The Shining, its version of Jack Torrance lurking about with an open shirt revealing ginger body hair over a bloated orange belly. Like "Cutting Cards," it comes off like a one-act play, but a really bad one (or, an adaptation of a comic book without the benefit of the lead character's interior thought bubbles). There's only so much of the peeping, panting, shirtless, shitfaced fear of being cuckolded one can tolerate without benefit of the usual flare the series so often uses to spice up the cardboard storytelling. There isn't even a standard "hallucinating significant other in graphic sex scene with suspected interloper" scene a'la Van Damme's Double Impact.

Part of me wants to give D.B.M. props for going off-model and making a more grounded installment with an upsetting ending, but then I remember O'Herlihy's nutty performance. While very enjoyable, it belongs in an episode about a gypsy curse or a haunted lawnmower. Not in one that ends with the unpleasant death of an innocent woman by strangulation, capped off by Crypt Keeper joking about dragging your wife around. I suspect I might have been easier on it had it turned up in the middle of the fourth or fifth season, when the Crypt formula was well and truly established. I like that the friend O'Herlihy thinks is making the moves on his lady isn't some young bohunk, he's just some guy, but in the Crypt world it should be a young early-90's pin-up. It should have been Billy Warlock. And the final twist is too Shakespearean for Crypt. Which is to say, it's just too fucking mean. Maybe it would fly as a Tales from the Darkside, but not a Crypt. Not to mention that it's so grounded, I actually found myself developing qualms with the plot: when confronted with a crazed O'Herlihy with a loaded crossbow, why would the wife's friend not immediately tell him, "There's no conspiracy, your wife is pregnant and I came here to bring you to a special surprise party to let you know!" But I guess that's besides the POINT. (Cross-bow, right? I dunno.) D+.

Notes:

- When I was a kid, and learned that Gavan O'Herlihy's character "Eric" from Willow spelled his name "Airk", I didn't like that character anymore. Gavan's uncle Michael O'Herlihy directed a very Crypt-like episode of Miami Vice in which a voodoo-practicing criminal rises from the dead and plots to turn Tubbs into a zombie.

- At the time she co-starred in this episode, Ruth de Sosa - famed for her roles as "Ticket Agent" in Planes, Trains & Automobiles and "Secretary" in Hook (was she a pirate secretary?) - was married to Dr. Giggles himself, Larry Drake, who played the Psycho Santa in "And All Through the House."

- Following his stint on Crypt, Morris went on to direct TV biopics of Sonny and Cher and the Partridge Family. He hasn't directed anything since the 2011 TV movie Accidentally in Love with Jennie Garth and Marilu Henner. But he's been "thanked" in numerous recent short films, which means he's probably teaching film somewhere.

- The script is credited to Morris and two other people(!), neither of whom ever did anything else.

- One thing I like about this episode is how it opens with the Crypt Keeper DJ-ing. It's a nice bit of foreshadowing for the final twist but, unlike the following 26 minutes, it's not at all obvious.