Tales From The Crypt – Season 4, Episode 6: What’s Cookin’ (1992) – Review

If we were to class Tales From The Crypt’s two biggest virtues as weirdo casts and excessive gore, then surely “What’s Cookin'” has the recipe for success. I mean where else can you find a cast that includes Christopher (Superman) Reeve, Bess (Jaws 3) Armstrong), Judd (The Breakfast Club) Nelson and rock ballad singer Meatloaf in an episode about commercialised cannibalism? In any other 90s show, such a thing would be an impossibility, but in the world of the Crypt Keeper, such an outlandish concept can be a mid-season romp that proves to be a ghoulish standout.
With longpig on the menu and a well-meaning couple caught up in a diabolical, flesh-eating conspiracy, director Gilbert Adler takes time out from producing Tales From The Crypt, to helming it, as he gives the sentence “a second helping of Meatloaf” a whole new, and incredibly grisly meaning…

It seems that no matter how hard they try, Fred and Erma’s venture of running a restaurant seems doomed to fail. For a start, Fred’s “visionary” idea of a squid-only menu has unsurprisingly proved to be a disaster and it seems that they are only days away from shutting their doors for good. Worse yet, their landlord, Mr Chumley, is pissed that they are a staggering three months behind on their rent and is set to run them out of his property unless bills are paid. However, their janitor, a mysterious drifter they hired named Gaston, has a suggestion that could save the day.
After an altercation with Chumley where, in a sudden, frustrated rage, Fred cuts his landlord’s hand with a knife, the couple are surprised when Phil, a cop who’s a regular customer, fills them in on the news that Chumley has gone missing and the only clue is a tremendous amount of blood discovered in his abandoned car. But after finding a bunch of strange steaks in their fridge, they serve them up only to find that their mystery meat is a big hit. Soon, these suspicious cuts of meat prove to be a tremendous success, finally bringing in those big bucks the coue has always dreamed of, but only Fred knows where they’ve come from.
It seems that Gaston has taken it upon herself to revive the flagging fortunes of the restaurant by murdering Chumley and serving up his sizable flanks to hungry punters who can’t get enough of these ambiguous cuts. But while Fred is relieved by the revenue, guilt and keeping Gaston’s atrocities from Erma is causing his nerve to rapidly erode, and soon he can’t take it any more. However, Gaston isn’t about to let his success be cut short by Fred’s conscience and has a plan to get his boss out of the picture. But after a plan that’s supposed to see Fred’s murder palmed off as guilt-driven suicide, Gaston is about to discover that Fred and Erma have a counter plan that’ll see the troublesome drifter, the restaurant and the mounting police investigation served up on a platter to the gods of karma.

Once again, we have an episode that could have gone horribly wrong if the tone had been allowed to deviate into goofiness. However, thanks to a smart script and a desire to use the farcical elements of the plot to its full potential, we happily follow as our hapless leads spiral into culinary slaughter and turning their customer base into unwitting cannibals. A veteran of anthology shows thanks to plying his producer trade on the barely regulated chaos of Freddy’s Nightmares, Adler became quite a hefty cog in the Tales From The Crypt machine as, aside from producing 69 of the 90+ episodes, he also directed the second Tales From The Crypt movie, Bordello Of Blood – even though it was admittedly inferior to the earlier Demon Knight. However, while there’s a few glitches and plot holes that prevent What’s Cookin’ from being an absolute all timer, it’s cast and some eyebrow raising gore mean that the episode is a hugely enjoyable feast.
Liberally seasoning that story is the cast. While it’s initially incredibly distracting seeing the original Superman having a crisis of conscience in front of a mutilated corpse, Christopher Reeves manages to bring pathos to a poor schlub who has been playing along with murder and the processing of human flesh for consumption. If we’re being fair, the script doesn’t really give us a reason to side with Fred and technically speaking, he goes along with murder and mutilation while lining his pockets fairly easily when you think about it – but the gosh-darn niceness of Reeves actually manages to bring you on-side while average Crypt lore demands that everyone usually pays for their sins. Likewise, Bess Armstrong also puts across a good sense of everywoman as her love for her failing husband is being put to the test long before he starts serving up man-meat behind her back. This gives Judd Nelson full rein to play his psychotic drifter as a dead-eyed schemer; but you wish that this was one of those episodes that could have delved a little deeper into his past. I mean, he’s obviously prepared and eaten human meat before, but is this the first time he’s suggested it for public use or has he been working for – and corrupting – restaurants up and down America, converting their menus to servings of people?

Additionally, his motive is a little fuzzy too. 50% of the takings seems a little low if he’s the one doing all the killing and we never actually get any details of his other victims once the meat in Meatloaf runs out; additionally there’s an early scene where it seems he wants to have an affair with Erma too that’s soon casually discarded by the script. However, this could all simply be explained away by Gaston being cuckoo for cocopuffs and caught up in the excitement of his business plan actually working. Who knows, maybe he owned a cannibal restaurant himself once upon a time and going on the run made him a drifter in the first place?
However, while some of those lapses in logic stop What’s Cookin’ from achieving maximum flavour (why would Phil the cop actually want to take over the running of the cannibal restaurant for his retirement – were the people steaks really that good?), it’s still an offering that continues season 4’s hot streak that’s both funny (some of the lights in the window sign that reads Fred And Erma’s have blown to simply spell “ENEMA”) and staggeringly gruesome. I’m willing to put a bet on Meatloaf’s ravaged corpse hanging in the freezer to be one of the most graphic images the show has ever delivered – not least because everyone in that restaurant has technically eaten Meatloaf’s ass – truly a sobering thought if ever there was one. Solid performances, savvy casting and a truly nauseating central conundrum all come together to deliver yet another high in season 4’s many highpoints thus far and it seems that show in general is getting ever more consistent thanks to ditching the thriller aspect and upping the gruesome horror content.

Continuing to whet our appetite for all things gross, What’s Cookin’ may have a half baked plot, but the acting and direction garnish it to perfection. If the old adage is true and we actually are what we eat, I guess that we’re all Meatloaf’s butt – because people, we are eating well.
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Tales From The Crypt – Season 4, Episode 5: Beauty Rest (1992) – Review

While there’s many descriptions to throw at Tales From The Crypt, sexist certainly isn’t one of them as HBOs horror blow out routinely realises that the sexs are equal when it comes to being truly abysmal people. For every suave, slicked back con artist, there’s a ruthless femme fatale, and for every wild-eyed, male maniac, there’s also a desperate woman willing to slaughter her way to the top to get what she feel she’s worth. Thus goes the plot of “Beauty Rest” an early 90s take on the lengths aging women have to go to to stay relevant, that comes from the second Crypt offering of Stephen (Nightmare On Elm Street 5, Predator 2) Hopkins. You could say that it treads some of the same ground as Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, only without the bizarre concoctions and pitiful flesh monsters, but instead of Demi Moore facing the existential dread of growing old, it’s Mimi Rogers clinging on to relevancy as she turns to murder to keep herself in the glamour game.

With every failure to secure a gig, commercial or pageant, Helen is getting ever more anxious about her advancing years, especially as she’s constantly getting passed over in favour of much younger women. It seems that the final straw occurs when she thinks she nails an audition for for a commercial featuring a perfume called “Ball Buster” that would be perfect for her, however she still loses out due to “politics” when she’s utterly convinced that she only keeps getting pipped at the post because everybody else is sleeping with directors and casting agents. The main offender proves to be Helen’s own roommate, Joyce, who not only nabbed the Ball Buster ad campaign out from under her “bestie”, but who also brags that someone else she’s slept with is rigging a special beauty pageant especially so she can win.
Livid, Helen cooks up a plan to drug Joyce with sleeping tablets in order to go and score that guaranteed win at this mysterious pageant for herself, but due to a miscalculation, she causes her roommate to fatally overdose. Faking a suicide note, Helen forges ahead with her plan, but after claiming to be the woman tipped to unfairly win the pageant, she’s usurped once more by Drucilla, another rival, who tries to one-up her when she score an illeagal victory when she threatens to sue the MC for sexual harassment. However, as Helen has already resorted to murder to clear one obstacle out of her way, she reasons that she might as well do it again, and after throttling Drucilla to death and hiding her body, all that’s left is to go through the motions of the beauty pageant and claim her pre-ordained win.
However, Helen learns too late that the “what’s inside” theme of the show is way more literal than she could’ve imagined and it turns out that she’s cheated, conned and killed to be crowned as the winner of something called “Miss Autopsy 1992”.

While my comparisons to 2023’s The Substance is valid from a crazed horror-meets-feminism stand point, there’s something else that Beauty Rest strongly resembles – and that’s Season 3’s “Top Billing” that saw the same basic plot play out (complete with a near identical ending), but with two male actors instead of a cluster of amoral female models. While picking out the similarities to a past episode may seen like I’m set to give the installment a written bollocking, Beauty Rest instead manages to take the suspiciously familiar story and make it fun enough to stand on its own, two, high heels. The main reasons for this is some sharp direction from Hopkins (who previously helmed the nastily mischevious Abra Cadaver back in season 3) and a lead performance by Mimi Rogers who embraces her role as a bitter bitch with gusto worthy of a jaunt to the Crypt.
However, there is no real getting away from the fact that Beauty Rest really is Top Billing in a swanky new clothes as it matches the former story beat for beat as it’s frustrated lead turns to murder in order to get what they want only to find that achieving their goal has led to their own undoing. Of course, the makers of the show are only following the lead of the comics, but it’s to the credit of all involved that both these episodes are of notable high quality. It also greatly helps the installment in question that Mimi Rogers is a hell of a lot easier on the eye than Jon Lovitz and the actress, who went on to rejoin with Hopkins for his largely forgotten 1998 big screen update of Lost In Space, fully embraces the opportunity the show gives her and runs with it all the way to psycho-bitchville. Constantly blaming the world for the fact she never truly made it as a model and dismissing everyone who makes it big as just whores who have slept their way to the top, Helen proves to be a truly great Crypt lead who is pushed too far and counteracts the wayward actions of her rivals with cold blooded murder.
Granted, the death of Kathy (Loaded Weapon 1) Ireland’s Joyce is technically an accident, Helen seals her doom when that gargantuan chip on her shoulder has her cover it up as a suicide. Rogers goes through the whole gauntlet of shock, guilt and self-preservation in an enjoably exaggerated way that proves that she understands the assignment.

Of course, Crypt decorum dictates that Helen has to upgrade from manslaughter to outright murder to properly earn her fate and this means we get Nightmare On Elm Street 3’s Jennifer Rubin appearing as the scheming – but equally doomed – Drucilla. A familiar face to anyone raised with eighties horror, Rubin’s character may be just as ruthless when it comes to getting what she wants, but she’s no match for a Helen who has fully snapped and has no qualms about upping her body count.
Of course, this cues us up for the big finish and after strangling her latest speed bump to death and hanging her up her body somewhere out of the way (who says women don’t support each other), Helen goes on to claim her prize. However, it turns out that the entire beauty pageant has been staged by people who, when they say they respect inner beauty, mean that they idolise their internal organs. Promptly taken back stage and murdered with an injection of some sort of lethal concoction, we next see Helen at the finale of the autopsy themed celebration as her lifeless body is displayed opened up like a tin of beans as the MC croons a twisted variation of the “There She Is, Miss America” song. It’s a gloriously macabre finish that not only offers up an amusingly gruesome final image and a whole bunch of irony to keep us sated until next week, but also gets our brains working about who this corpse-obsessed event is actually being held for. Various enticing clues are scattered around the episode, such as the make up artist lamenting that they no longer pull victims off the street for this, or the time and effort that’s clearly gone to professionally slicing up and presenting Helen’s body to a rapturous crowd.

Are they a cult of psychos? A secret society? We never find out, but Hopkins’ spirited direction, Rogers’ all-in performance and a fun script means that despite some superficial similarities to an older episode, it’s truly what’s inside Beauty Rest that what counts best.
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Tales From The Crypt – Season 4, Episode 4: Seance (1992) – Review

Regular readers of my takes from the crypt may be familiar with the fact that I tend to sway more towards the overtly horror themed episodes than I do towards the ones that are more of the thriller genre. While I understand the EC publications it regularly adapts also often focused on more down to earth, conventional crime stories, I just figure that a show called Tales From The Crypt that’s hosted by a living corpse does its best work when playing with the more outlandish twists of the comic.
However, with “Seance”, someone seems to want to finally draw a direct connection between the two. Yes, director Gary Fleder (who went on to direct Thing To Do In Denver When You’re Dead – a personal favorite of mine) seems determined to evoke classic Noir with hard-bitten con artists and cold-blooded dames, but who’s to say that a crime episode can’t suddenly veer into the realms of supernatural vengeance – even if it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense…

I guess everybody has to make a living, but even Benjamin Polosky is starting to think that he and his partner are going too far. You see, Benjamin is a con man, but while he’d be the first to admit that he’s done some pretty shady shit in his life, the alliance he’s forged with the ruthless Alison Peters makes even him think twice. As they prepare for an especially callous con, he ruminates over the events that have led to staging an elaborate ruse to make a blind woman think she’s communing with her recently deceased husband.
Walking matters back a bit, we find Alison and Benjamin targeting rich tycoon, Presco Chalmers, with a complex scam that sees Peters attempt to pass as the fat cat’s long lost cousin and get him to sign money over to Polosky’s fake laywer guise, thanks to some technical jiggery pokery and the fact that Alison is more than willing to bed her “cousin”. However, after a quirk of fate gives the game away, Chalmers catches on to their extravagant scheme and attempts to storm out of the office. Sneering at Alison as she tries to persuade him to stay with a loaded gun, Chalmers neglects to notice that the elevator he’s stepping into hasn’t actually arrived yet and instead he plummets down the empty lift shaft.
Luckily for Chalmers, the fall doesn’t kill him; but luckily for Alison and Benjamin, the descending elevator car does, and after their mark is messily squished, Alison locks her focus onto Chalmers’ blind, spiritual wife, Dorothy. Shifting the con up to the next level, Alison proposes that she poses as Dorothy’s usual medium and convinces her to bequeath the money to them by having Benjamin pose as the ghost of the dead husband – and hey Presco! However, veterans of this very show will already know that the harsh hand of karma hovers over everything, but neither Benjamin or Alison could possibly be able to predict that their seance would be interrupted by the very dead person they’re currently impersonating.

Maybe I’m missing the point and the adolescent horror fan within me is getting carried away, but if every crime-based episode suddenly ended with a random bout of supernatural bloodletting, I genuinely believe we wouldn’t have a bad episode. OK, maybe that’s going a bit far, but you have to agree that “Seance” puts forward a rather compelling argument. For the majority of the episode, director Gary Fleder is content to stick firmly to a period piece, L.A. noir flavour as he assails us with all the classic tropes. There’s an opening narration, a scruples-devoid femme fatale, a hard on his luck chump who’s chosen to grow a conscience at the worst possible time and a rich mark who makes things worse once he sniffs out the subterfuge. However, while preceedings continue pretty much how’d you’d expect as the attempts of our dishonest leads get ever more ambitious, a last minute veer into gruesome horror manages to snap us out of any over-familiarity the set-up may have stirred.
But before we address it, first, let us cast an eye over a pretty great cast. Anyone familiar with the work of Cathy Moriarty (and you should be considering she’s been in a wealth of things from Raging Bull to Casper) will know that the role of a merciless, noir-ish, huckster is perfect for her thanks to that husky voice and blonde locks, and she jumps in feet first, infusing Alison with an impressive lack of pathos. Matching her ruthlessness with the pained expression of a man who knows he’s now in too deep, is Ben (Chariots Of Fire) Cross, who nicely emulates the kind of downtrodden anti-heroes that were popular in all sorts of classic crime movies. As an extra treat, they’re both put under the withering gaze and commanding voice of John Vernon as the doomed Chalmers, who delivered his lines with one of the finest voices Hollywood has to offer thanks such roles in Dirty Harry and Killer Klowns From Outer Space.

However, while its obvious that the entire episode is deeply in love with the noir genre – even the Crypt Keeper gets in on the act with a passible Humphrey Bogart impersonation – it all actually turns out to be something of a genius misdirection. While the the episode draws you in ever further with Alison and Benjamin’s plot becoming ever more convoluted after Chalmers’ Loony Tunes style demise (the timing of the elevator gag is bang on), Fleder and the script by Harry Anderson who starred in season 2’s monsterific “Korman’s Kalamity”, is actually performing something of a scam of its own and how well it works will probably be determined by how you think Crypt episodes should end. At the zero hour, just as the fake seance is about to get into full swing, the episode ditches the noir and goes full horror when we realise that Benjamin has been slaughtered off-screen by the vengful spirit of a mangled Chalmers. With his severed head offered up within the suitcase of ill-gotten money that gotten everyone into this mess in the first place, Alison realises that a lifetime of heartless acts will result in an ironic demise as Chalmers rips her still beating organ from her chest as blood pumps everywhere.
If, like me, you tend to switch off a little whenever we get a non-horror entry, the ending of Seance proves to something of an entertaining slap in the face, but I could see how it could be divisive if you were more into the crime elements. In fact, an argument could be made that the abrupt horror ending – that isn’t teased, set-up, or foreshadowed in any way – is somewhat lazy and chooses a bloodbath in favour of something more in keeping with the story. However, I for one was pleasantly surprised that an above-average crime episode managed to con us fully and go full horror.

I’m guessing the jury may be split on this one, but Seance manages to beat the curse of the bland crime episode by firstly making it not particularly bland at all, and then nailing our unsuspecting asses with a chest-ripping, head removing finale, that hurls caution to the wind. It it a particularly clever ending to a rather complex story? Nope, but it sure is memorable and I’ll take a genuine surprise over a predictable twist any day when I’m visiting the Crypt.
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Tales From The Crypt – Season 4, Episode 3: On A Dead Man’s Chest (1992) – Review

You’d think that after such a string of high profile directors, I wouldn’t be so impressed when yet another one turns up to play in the realms of the Crypt – and yet you have to admit that there’s still something pretty wild about William freakin’ Friedkin showing up to helm an episode. I mean, not to get too starry eyed here, but not only was Friedkin responsible for one of the greatest horror movies ever made (The Exorcist, obviously), but he also crafted such epics as The French Connection, Sorcerer and To Live And Die In LA, so the idea that the notoriously serious director would be willing to let his hair down and weave up thirty minutes of fucked-up television is pretty wild.
Thankfully, “On A Dead Man’s Chest” proves to be just as wild as you’d hope, as Friedkin seems to literally be in the mood to rock and roll. Murderous rock stars, living tattoos and a whole heap of gore? Friedkin’s having fun and by golly, it’s infectious.

Danny Darwin is the volatile, hard-partying front man of the heavy metal band Exorcist (sic), but while he’s something of an entitled prick at the best of times, he’s grown worse as of late due to booze-fuelled bouts of jealousy. While he’s the singer, it’s actually guitarist and best friend Nick Bosch who is the true creative mind behind the band, but he’s finally starting to catch on to Danny’s bullshit thanks to the urging of his new wife, Scarlett. Trying to convince Nick to go solo means that Danny fucking despises his buddy’s influential spouse and soon his hatred blossoms into outright obsession.
Meanwhile, conniving groupie, Vendetta, shows off an exotic new tattoo to Danny and suggests that he may calm down if he gets one too. Visiting the mysterious, eye-patched, tattoo artist known as Farouche, he’s informed that he won’t be getting a rose he wants inked on his chest as it’s the body that ultimately choose the design. But Danny is enraged even further when the tattoo takes the form of Scarlett’s face circled by a snarling dragon and it’s the final trigger that sends the singer spiralling into madness. After painful attempts to remove the tattoo fail, Scarlett pushes Nick even harder to break up the band and Darwin finally snaps and bloodily murders the object of his hatred by beating her head against a bathroom wall.
However, rather than making his mania go away, things get even worse when the tattooed face of Scarlett on his chest changes to as look as dead as the real one. After roughing up Vendetta in a rage, it seems like the jig is up but while Nick and his peers learn the terrible truth, that tattoo has yet more surprises for it’s host. As the dragon design erupts from his chest and starts snapping at him with huge teeth, Danny resorts to extreme measures (and a piece of broken mirror) to literally get a load off his chest…

I’ll be the first to admit that Friedkin’s big swing at Tales From The Crypt doesn’t actually make a whole lot of sense when you look at it. Is the tattoo actually alive? Is it actually some sort of gateway to madness much like the imagined beating of Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart? Is the strangely influential Vendetta more involved than the plot is letting on? Friedkin seems not to give much a shit about the details as he’s far too busy blurring those lines and creating a heavy metal atmosphere that’s nice, sleazy and quite unlike anything we’ve seen on the show before. What the episode misses in charactization (for such a central character, Paul Hipp’s Nick doesn’t get to do much) and subtlety, the entire thirty minutes feels as angry and restless as the rasping metal songs our cast scream to their baying fans. Through the smoke, haze, casual nudity and copious gore, Friedkin seems to be trying to transfer the very nature of metal scene on the screen regardless of whether it sticks to any conventional Crypt logic.
While other episodes are keen to put you in the shoes of their various scumbags before karma runs over them and then reverse over their bodies like a mack truck, Yul Vazquez’s Danny Darwin is such an angry, volatile presence, he’s virtually unknowable from the start due to the lack of any moment that allows us to see him as happy or even remotely calm. Similarly, Tia Carrere may have some familiarity with the rock scene thanks to Wayne’s World, but a lot of her performance is drowned out by the episode’s seething tone. However, while it seems that all I’m doing is just ragging on the episode I’m claiming to love, the constant, raw, edginess the installment has means that it has loads of uncomfortable energy to spare as it goes to a bunch of trippy places.

For a start, the nature of the tattoo itself is fairly fascinating and it’s no coincidence that the only time the episode stops ranting for a second is to focus on the exquisite, yet painful process Farouche (rapper Heavy D) employs to mark his subjects. Using old school methods that avoids using typical needles and requires topless women to hold you down, we never truly find out if the tattoo has mystical properties, or if everything is all within Danny’s paranoid brain; but the fact that Farouche draws a portrait of our lead’s hated enemy sight unseen on his epidermis suggests the former. Of course, while Friedkin continues to immerse us in the world of music by offering up cameos to the likes of Gregg Allman (The Allman Brothers), Steve Jones (Sex Pistols) and Rudy Sarzo (Whitesnake), he truly cuts loose in the graphic, bizarre finale.
While the more violent side of horror is obviously no stranger to the director of The Exorcist (not to mention forgotten, deranged, killer tree movie, The Guardian), it’s impressive how far Friedkin is willing to push the show, firstly with the sight of Vazquez messily bashing Carrere’s brains in over an extended sequence that’s pretty nasty, even for this show’s standards. However, it’s with the final denouement that proves to be most memorable of all when Danny’s dragon tattoo suddenly comes alive and erupts from his chest like a xenomorph and starts whipping around the place while still affixed to his torso. The creature is gorgeous, a bright, sparkling green compared to the smokey dinge that the majority of the episode has employed and whether or not the beast is real, or is a vivid figment of Danny’s collapsing imagination, his way of vanquishing it proves to be just as memorable. As concerned parties burst in the room, we find that Danny has resorted to skinning the tattooed area clean off of his body with a chunk of glass and as he proudly displays his flayed chest to the horrified onlookers, we reach the end of a slightly muddled, but utterly unforgettable episode.

While Friedkin deliberately keeps some of the storytelling vague, you can’t deny that he’s created something of a unique tone even if the show has played in the sandbox of the music business before. However, a thoroughly batshit ending ensures that roping in a director as legendary as Friedkin proves to give the three-part season premiere the big finish we were all hoping for. It’s so fucking metal, dude.
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Tales From The Crypt – Season 4, Episode 2: This’ll Kill Ya (1992) – Review

Compiling anthology premieres are something of an artform, especially when they’re delivered in the style of Tales From The Crypt. In case you’d forgotten, whenever the Crypt Keeper kicks off a brand new season, it usually takes the form of a trilogy of stories that delivers a range of the tongue in cheek horrors the show has to offer. Past seasons have either gotten the mix insanely right with a triptych of bangers (season 1) or fumbled the ball by delivering only a single, standout entry (season 3), but while season 4 got off to a healthy start thanks to Tom Hanks’ spirited “None But The Lonely Heart”, could the second installment keep that momentum going?
With a more grounded tone and without a ghoul, zombie, or creature in sight, can the noir-tinged tale of “This’ll Kill Ya” manage to keep up the quality?

Cops are understandably flabbergasted when a dishevelled man enters a police station while dragging the body of a murdered victim by his leg, but when they all pull their guns on the perpetrator, he seems relatively unfazed. Telling them that they might as well shoot because he’s dead already, we turn back the clock a spell to see how the players ended up in this bloody predicament.
Unscrupulous scientific researcher, George Gatlin, and his long suffering lab partners Sophie Wagner and Pack Brightman, are tinkering with an experimental virus that goes by the catchy moniker of H-Cell-24. The plan is for the experimental hybrid cell to cure any disease by “breeding it out of the body”, but so far all it can do is cause masses of tumors to grow within it’s host – but that hasn’t stopped Gatlin making premature promises to investors that they’re ready for human testing in order to guarantee that the cash keeps flowing.
Obviously, this enrages Pack and an exasperated Sophie tries to get the greedy George to understand that science doesn’t move forward just because he wants to line his pockets, but matters are made more complex due to the fact that both George and Sophie have had a prior relationship that he’s eager to start up again. However, thanks to the fact that the diabetic Gatlin is such an overconfident douche, he keeps his insulin on the same shelf that they store the H-Cell-24 and when the inevitable happens, he gets injected with a syringe full of his tumor making poison.
However, while George struggles with suddenly being forced to face his own mortality, he starts to get suspicious as the last couple of hours of his life tick down. Becoming convinced that his injection of H-Cell-24 was no mere accident, he plots to take revenge on the colleagues that have conspired to kill him. But after murdering Pack and dragging his body into that police station, Sophie fills him in with a truth far more devestating than his impeding “death”.

While Tales From The Crypt has always made some interesting choices about who they get to helm their episodes (Hello? Tom Hanks?) the choice of getting artist Robert Longo to helm one seems to be an especially eccentric choice. While he’d had some experience behind the camera thanks to shooting music videos for New Order, Megadeth and R.E.M. and eventually directed the feature film Johnny Mnemonic, his stint on Tales seems to be more than a proving ground than a memorable offering. Taking more of a same sort of ticking clock thriller approach as D.O.A., Longo plays things fairly straight as we follow Dylan McDermott’s huckster scientist as his ego starts writing checks his partners can’t cash. And yet, for an show as excitable as Tales From The Crypt, the script actually pays more attention to the events leading up to the fateful injection than after it.
In fact, the episode’s dedication of making everything that transpires make some sort of logical sense is something to be admired. Rather than just having McDermott’s sleazebag be a bit of a greedy dick, the show takes the time to double down on just how much of a prick he is, from repeatedly not giving a shit about how lethal H-Cell-24 would be for human trials, to his unsubtle attempts to woo Sônia Braga’s Sophie back into his bed despite her annoyed protests. I mean, what better way to decisively explain how much of an egotistical, reckless turd your main character is than having him overconfidently store his insulin right next to the indentical vials of killer serum?

However, while Longo should be credited to take his time with the set up, you can’t help but think that things might have been more fun if we’d got to spend more time with George post injection to really see how such a bastard would act if they knew their life’s end was imminent due to a stupid mistake.
Still, watching him get shitfaced at a bar and hallucinate people around him suddenly suffering from masses of tumours is still pretty cool and it sets us up for his drunken swing at revenge. Obviously someone as ego-driven as George can’t fully accept that such a simple mistake could be an accident, so he gets his brutal revenge of Cleavon (Blazing Saddles) Little’s Pack by battering him into oblivion with a bat and then finishing the job by jabbing a syringe full of insulin directly into his heart (it’s a nice touch that we hear his organ actually explode). While it’s fairly disconcerting to see the sheriff of Rock Ridge die in such a savage way, the scene is given an extra layer of sadness when you realise that Little died four months after the episode aired.
Of course, this takes us back to the opening where George hopes to go out in a blaze of glory by dragging Pack’s body into a crowded police station, but this is when the twist fully kicks in. Regrettably, it’s actually pretty easy to predict, as, in an attempt to teach their boss a lesson, both Sophie and Pack have played a prank on him by only letting him think that he’d been injected with the deadly virus. Worse yet, it turns out H-Cell-24 has actually been perfected, so if George hadn’t spiraled into a paranoid rage and murdered one of his partners, he’d be finally riding that pharmaceutical gravy train to cashville. However, while it all ends fairly neatly (if incredibly unprofessionally from a medical point of view), This’ll Kill Ya never really manages to rise above being marginally interesting despite some strong performances and a dark noir-thriller tone. But compared to a previous episode, that saw dripping zombies, plentiful murder and Treat Williams putting Tom Hanks’ head through a TV set, it’s actually fairly forgettable and ends up joining the other straight-played crime episodes that just end up being season filler.

A nifty central premise can’t quite stop This’ll Kill Ya from shifting the season 4 premiere into more middling territory during its second installment and it certainly doesn’t help that the title is weirdly reminiscent of “Easel Kill Ya” from season 3. But while it does work well within the parameters set by its own story, it’s regrettably an episode that’s far too restrained to be Tales at its very best.
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Tales From The Crypt – Season 3, Episode 14: Yellow (1991) – Review

We now seem to bring you a change in your regularly scheduled programming. If something feels a little off abd decidedly un-Crypt like for the season finale of season three, I’d like to assure you that it’s not just you. In fact, Robert Zemekis’ “Yellow” wasn’t originally planned to be a tale from the crypt at all, but instead part of a trilogy of stories that would go on to form the season premiere of a spin off show called Two-Fisted Tales. While the Crypt covered all those horror stories that EC Comics churned out in their heyday, Fisted would give that ironic twist to stories more geared toward the war, western and thriller based adventures. Needless to say, the pilot (directed by Zemekis, Richard Donner and Tom Holland) didn’t do so well and as a result the stories were folded into the Crypt Keeper’s roster of tall tales that started here and continued into season 4. But as I’ve recently started getting tired of episodes that go easy on the horror, can Robert Zemekis change my mind with an offering that takes place during World War I?

The year is 1918 and the forces of General Calthrob are getting hammered somewhere in France as they try to take a hill from the really determined Germans. While the hill itself doesn’t that much of a tactical advantage, the attack would divert the enemy forces enough to allow forces in the rear time to reposition, but the plan is ultimately scuppered by an unseen problem: Lieutenant Martin Calthrob. While Martin’s father is every inch the iron-nerved military man, his son suffers from cowardice that simply just won’t away and while his men are valiantly fighting and dying for the greater good, the constant mortar barrage and whizzing bullets causes him to break and order a premature retreat.
When the Genral learns from his men that his son is Yellow, he offers Martin a chance to redeem his honor and go out into no-man’s land with a small team to fix a broken communication wire.
However, once again that yellow streak kicks in and in his gibbering fear, Martin is too terrified to even warn his fellow troops about advancing troops and as a result they are killed and he escapes to spin a tale of tragic heroism. But when it turns out that there was another (temporary) survivor who outs Martin’s cowardice with his dying breath and leaves the General with no alternative but to severely punish his son and sentence him to death by firing squad. While Martin pleads with his father to spare his life, Calthrob assures his son that he’d never murder his flesh and blood and reveals a plan that will spare his life.
Revealing that the rifleman will all have unknowingly have blanks loaded in their weapons, all Martin has to do is stand fast and be brave in the face of his death and then he can play dead and collect a bag of supplies left in the grave behind him. However, during his big moment, believing himself to be safe, Martin does indeed face his (fake) execution with bravery, but too late he realises that he’s been tricked to restore honor to the tarnished Calthrob name.

To be honest with you, before watching Yellow I was 50/50 about whether I would actually accept it as a genuine Crypt. In the plus column it’s directed by one of Tales’ big three, Robert Zemekis, who has been conspicuous by his Crypt absence since the superlative “And All Though The House” back at the start of season one. However, on the con side, not only was it never supposed to be an official episode, but the WWI setting suggests that the usual recipe of creeps and chuckles may be in short supply and further worrying me is the last time one of the big three directed an episode, it resulted in Walter Hill’s rather leaden “Deadline” which showed a distinct drop in quality from his previous attempts.
However, despite all these things counting against it, Yellow proves to something of a incredibly pleasant surprise that not only sees Zemekis returning to the show with style, but giving it an expanded canvas that it’s never enjoyed before. This is an episode that still may be introduced by a Crypt Keeper in full WWI uniform cracking jokes about getting shot, but it also has full on battle sequences that give the show a sense of scale hither to unheard of as Zemekis shoots them in sweeping long takes that sees dialogue and plot merge with stunt men flying across the screen. It may not be Saving Private Ryan, or even Band Of Brothers, but for an episode of Tales From The Crypt, it isn’t that far behind. Also adding to that scale is the cast and while the Crypt has seen its fair share of familiar faces, seeing Kirk fuckin’ Douglas show up still feels like something of a massive get. What makes it cooler is that the episode is plainly riffing on Stanley Kubrick’s Paths Of Glory, which starred Douglas as a French officer also accused of cowardice and the actor also gets to perform opposite his actual son (no, not Michael – the other one, Eric) which adds extra tension to the scene even if Eric isn’t quite as talented as his old man.

In addition to this, we also get Dan Ackroyd and a returning Lance Henriksen (from Walter Hill’s magnificent “Cutting Cards”) to round things out, so it’s impossible not to feel spoiled with such Hollywood heavyweights getting stuck in.
However, the biggest surprise is that despite the starry cast, the more dramatic plot and an extended run time, Yellow isn’t afraid to stick to that old EC Comics tone and dally with the macabre when it gets the chance. There’s no real reason for a wounded Henriksen to suddenly reveal that he’s missing a stomach and he’s been using his helmet to hold his guts in, but Zemekis makes it happen in order to deliver an amusing shock of gore. Better yet, the twist ending is actually something of a belter that not only gives more of an emotional punch than your average Crypt, but still manages to retain that darkly amusing cruelty the show had become well known for. After detailing a complex plan to his son that will apparently save his life, we realise at the last moment that Calthrob has concocted a harsh counter plan to fool his jittery son into standing strong and proud in the face of death and no such salvation was ever going to take place. Worse yet (and by worse, I mean better) there’s a split second of realisation from Martin when he sees his father turn away when the order to fire is given, which means that an episode that wasn’t even meant to be an official Tales From The Crypt entry ends up being objectively better that more than half of the actual episodes. My confidence may have wavered in the big three as of late, but Zemekis brings it back with style.

What could have been a cheap attempt to salvage a failed pilot ends up giving Tales From The Crypt’s third season the big finish it so richly needed. While other episodes from Two-Fisted Tales would show up further down the line, Yellow is rousing proof that sometimes it’s hood not to be afraid of a little tinkering.
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Tales From The Crypt – Season 3, Episode 12: Deadline (1991) – Review

While season three of Tales From The Crypt certainly has had its fair share of name directors (Tobe Hooper, Stephen Hopkins and Russell Mulcahy to name just three), there’s been precious little in the form of offerings when it comes to the series’ “big three”. Not only did the trio of Walter Hill, Robert Zemekis and Richard Donner kick the entire thing off back in 1989 with an unfeasibly strong triptych of episodes that merged to form a magnificent pilot, but Hill and Donner also returned in season two to deliver two of the strongest episodes – however, season three has thus far been conspicuous by their absence.
Well, wait no longer, because Walter Hill is back with yet another noir-tinged episode thanks to Deadline, a hard-bitten tale of a desperate reporter struggling with the bottle as he stops at nothing to try and reclaim his former glory. Can Walter Hill do the same with his third trip to the Crypt?

Charles McKenzie used to be something in the world of reporting, breaking stories left and right and claiming countless headlines in various papers; however, these days he’s a shadow of his former self as he steadily slips down the treacherous slope of alcoholism. Broke, desperate, but still clinging to his glory days, Charles frequently tells anyone within earshot that he used to be a bigshot, but his epic consumption of booze usually leads to him either getting pity or derision for his troubles.
However, it seems that Charlie’s life may be picking up when the sultry Vicky walks into his life. Red of hair and gutsy as Hell she catches the old jorno’s eye immediately, Charles wastes no time turning on that old charm and to his surprise, Vicky reciprocates. However, the woman has rules and the main one is that this relationship can’t get serious as she’s not in this for the warm, fluffy feelings. However, after sharing a bed with her a couple of times energises him for the first time in years, Charlie vows to kick the booze and get back in the game in order to win his respect back.
Pleading with the editor of a newspaper to give him a chance, Charles gets a deadline for his troubles: deliver a juicy murder story by the end of the night and he’s hired. However, as he pounds the pavement looking for leads, all of his old informants prove to be dryer than the inside of his mouth. Dying for a drink, he’s instead shuffled off to a diner where fortune manages to work it’s terrible magic as he overhears the owner first have an argument with his wife that soon turns to sounds of a struggle. As “luck” would have it, Charlie’s wandered into a fatal domestic argument that’s seen the owner of the diner lose his temper with a young wife that humiliates him by sleeping around and strangle her to death in a rage. However, as Charlie is phoning the story in, the young woman not only proves not to be death, but it turns out that the wife is Vicky. How dar will Charlie go to get his story, and what will it do to his sanity if he takes that darker path?

I’m sorry to admit that I just didn’t get on that well with “Deadline” for various reasons and considering that it’s been directed by one of the show’s leading lights, I have to say that my expectations were pretty damn high. In the past, Walter Hill gave us the very first episode with the marvelously gritty “The Man Who Was Death” and he even managed to top that one with the superlative season two offering, “Cutting Cards”, that arguably still stands as one of the best Tales of all time. However, with such a high bar to clear, third time doesn’t seem to be the charm for the veteran director as his tale of booze and murder not only lacks the punch of his earlier efforts, but it’s a strangely unfocused event considering Hill’s previous form.
Fitting into a similar format as the director’s previous episodes, Deadline sees a dark, noir-ish story play out through the eyes of an immensely flawed individual and while previous lead characters have been addicted to both death and gambling, here we find a much more prevalent monkey crawling over our protagonist’s back. Booze sodden and at the end of his rope, we get Richard Jordan convincingly tasting desperate as the low life journalist fallen on hard times. Despite the fact that the actor passed away only two years later, he delivers a honest, wretched performance of a man at his lowest ebb and there’s a hint of the same desperation you’d find in something more like Glengary Glen Ross than Tales From The Crypt. However, once Marg Helgenberger’s promiscuous Vicky shows up, you think that things will start to gradually take more of a classic, Crypt turn – but to our surprise, it sticks to it’s more drama-based tone as McKenzie starts to clean up his act despite the fact Vicky’s warned him not to get too attached.

From here, it’s now a race against the clock as Charles has precious little time to bring in a juicy murder story before his deadline runs out and in an attempt to heighten the tension, Hill magnifies the sounds of any ticking clocks in the room. The problem is that even when it finally drops the big twist (which you’ll probably see coming anyway), Deadline in this form just doesn’t feel like a good fit for Tales From The Crypt with its over-reliance on down-to-earth drama over crazy shocks.
It also doesn’t help that we’ve already had a boozy reporter story only two weeks ago, and that one had bald, fanged, corpse-eating ghouls in it which leaves Hill’s version looking more than a little bland. Worse yet, the ending ends up being a bit confusing as the story tries to tee up a coda that just doesn’t work. Discovering that the “murdered” wife of the owner of the diner is Vicky might have hit harder if they both were in love – but at this point we already know Vicky is a user. Similarly, Charles choice to kill her might have carried more wallop if she was in love with his and he decides to choose his career over her, but as it stands, his actions don’t make much sense when he already has to know that she’s bad news. However, things get extra confusing when we then suddenly cut to Charlie in an insane asylum as he tells us he lost his mind over the event. But being random told this in the dying seconds of the episode just feels like we skipped over vastly important parts of a far bigger story and thus feels tacked on and unearned. What’s even more frustrating is that this would be the last Tales From The Crypt episode that Hill would ever direct, so the fact that he doesn’t nail the hat trick proves to be yet another mark in the negative column for an episode that’s way too scrappy to satisfy, yet way too mature for a show hosted by a zombie puppet.

While Deadline has all the makings of a typically hard boiled Walter Hill episode, a strong central performance and a more grown up tone are rapidly undone by a weak ending and a slow burn that isn’t quite worth the wait. That’s a wrap on Hill’s time in the Crypt director’s chair; it’s just a shame that after being one of the show’s most consistent contributors, he couldn’t finish on a high.
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