In the first season finale, we find a 65-year old man named Jonas (M. Emmet Walsh) who has been forced to retire and come home to his wife, Anita (Audra Lindley), who has turned out to be quite an animal collector. With Jonas working hard for forty-seven years, Anita hasn’t really had a man around to talk to. She’s become an animal lover and some may say collector. She’s got birds, fish, cats, dogs, etc. In fact, those big catfish that she has need to be moved to a bigger fish tank. They’re far too large for that tank in my opinion.

Jonas doesn’t look so good since he retired

Anyway, Anita seems to see Jonas as one of her pets. When Jonas asks for an aspirin, Anita gives him one, inside a brownie. It’s like she thinks she has to hide the medicine in food, like you would an animal.

As Jonas finds himself spending a lot of time at home, he grows angry at his wife’s obsession with animals and does something about it. Feeding these animals is an expensive thing. I can’t believe she was giving a dog an entire steak which I swear was big enough to feed three people.

Jonas would eventually take up the art of taxidermy, killing nearly every animal Anita had except for her favorite cat. He saved that one for last. Anita wouldn’t let him kill her, so she instead killed Jonas and stuffed him. I guess his new hobby was rather self-fulfilling, eh? Haha.

I can’t say that this was necessarily a scary episode, but it was disturbing as hell. I can’t imagine someone killing pets like this. I mean I knew it was going to happen, but you really have to lose your mind in order to do that sort of thing. There wasn’t a whole lot to enjoy with this episode. It was creepy, but it wasn’t scary, funny, or particularly well written. I’m a big fan of M. Emmet Walsh and thought he did a terrific job of playing Jonas as he got crazier and crazier as the episode went on. That was the only highlight in my view.

Rating: 5

This episode is about a guy named Charles (Stephen Shellen) who has married Peggy (Amanda Plummer) for her money and everyone knows it, except for Peggy. She is a little suspicious, but she’s not really made up her mind. Peggy’s aunt Edith (Lisa Figus), on the other hand, sees right through Charles and knows that he’s just looking to get Peggy’s fortune which she got from her mother.

Stephen Shellen as Charles

Their wedding night isn’t quite what every couple has. On a dark and stormy night, they’re driving down a back road when they come upon a downed tree, likely thanks to a bolt of lightning. They can’t pass so they decide to hold up for the night in an abandoned home. This was horror movie written all over it, right?

Charles suggests they strip down to warm up next to the fire while their clothes get a chance to dry out. Peggy’s not so keen on that idea and she decides to wander off and look around. When she returns with their bags, Peggy’s ready to jump Charles’ bones. There was a whole personality change here, and then she decides to move their business on upstairs to a bedroom. Apparently she’d prefer not to have sex on the couch. The dark, spider-web infested home doesn’t damper her willingness to engage in sex, however. She and Charles go at it through the night, ending their perfect first night together.

After midnight, Charles wakes up with a nightmare. He sees a woman who looks a lot like Peggy, having sex with another man downstairs. Afterwards, the man gets cut up into pieces by the woman and it’s here that Charles realizes he’s having a vision of the night in which Peggy was conceived. And Peggy continues with the old family tradition by killing Charles.

As far as family traditions go, this was a gruesome one indeed. I liked the twist, but I didn’t think the writers did a very good job of informing the viewers on Peggy’s family’s history. I mean we all learned it from Charles, who sounded like he was reading a monologue, as he was going through his nightmare, telling us all about the family’s history. It just seemed like lazy story telling.

The only other complaint has to be lodged at the makeup/prop department. There was entirely too much blood on Charles and Peggy for that to be believed. It’s like someone butchered a cow and sprayed them with the entire animal’s blood supply!

Rating: 6.5

Lea Thompson plays a sexy, young prostitute, Sylvia Vane, who dreams of something bigger. She’s quite fond of her beauty and bets a fellow-prostitute that she can use her looks to get with Ronnie Price (Brett Cullen), one of the big shot millionaires.

It’s not much of a stretch for Lea Thompson to play a sexy woman. I’ve always been quite fond of her, in fact. The biggest complaint I have is her less than attractive accent. It didn’t really fit the woman, quite honestly.

Strapped for cash, Sylvia makes a deal with a bizarre fella who runs a local pawn shop. He makes a mold of her face and gives her $10,000 cash for it. Sylvia’s beauty is given to what I assume is the pawn shop owner’s deceased wife. He has kept her body in the back of the shop all this time.

Making things all the more bizarre, Sylvia doesn’t come back within the four months to return her beauty. I know, it doesn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense, but that’s horror writing for ‘ya. She ends up losing her beauty within hours. And yet, her arms looked just fine. The only portion of her body which shows any signs of aging is her face.

She wasn’t able to get her beauty back in the end because she ended up killing her eventual husband (Ronnie Price) and left evidence of it at the crime scene. If she were to get her old face back, she’d be locked up as soon as she is found. With the aging face, she’ll be a free woman but remain horrible looking.

The fact that her body wasn’t aging like her face was showed me just how much thought went into the production of this episode. I am sure the budgets for this show wasn’t that impressive, but they should have either covered up her arms or simply not have shown them in the later scenes.

Rating: 6.8

It makes sense for one to use this ability to make money, but one would think he’d be a little more careful when counting the number of times he has died. If I had this ability, I wouldn’t use it to make a few bucks at some sort of freak show.

Robert Wuhl is a long way away from Arli$$.

I’m already liking the guest cast in the show. Each episode so far has at least one recognizable face. It’s true that Tales From The Crypt was made twenty years ago, but it’s nice to see that some of the people here are recognizable today. The two most famous from this episode are Joe Pantoliano and Robert Wuhl. They’ve both done a lot of work with movies and TV since Tales From The Crypt.

The episode employed some of the same camera work as the pilot did, with the main character talking right to the audience. I prefer this to the way the second episode was done, which used a traditional set up. Getting the first person narrative changes things up a bit and makes the show stand out from the competition.

Although I liked the narrative style, it just didn’t seem as good or as interesting as the pilot. I guess I just don’t care for the carnival/freak show stuff. There’s just something about listening to the barker that drives me away. I can’t imagine living in a time where this was relatively commonplace.

Rating: 6.0

The opening of the episode was superb. The Crypt Keeper was great as was the wonderful Christmas music which took up the first minute or so of the episode. It was a nice, warm start to what would be a bloody TV show.

Be careful what you ax for, kiddies. You just may GET IT.

The episode focuses on a wife who kills her husband in the living room and calls what I would presume is her lover and tells him the good news, that she did it and they’ll be free, with all of his money. There wasn’t anything original about the story of course.

Through quite a coincidence, another killer is on the loose, a guy who broke out of the mental institute has dressed up as Santa and has killed numerous people in the area.

Much of this episode featured bizarre coincidences that made it difficult to take this episode’s plot even remotely believable. Heck, even the snow was fake as hell. I know we’re talking about 1989 fake snow here, but I’m sure better stuff was available. The snow flakes were larger than shredded coconut you’d buy in the grocery store.

Still, the episode did have a few good moments. I thought there were a few genuinely tense, exciting moments here, but by and large, this episode was a big disappointment. It didn’t come anywhere near the pilot. I did like seeing Marshall Bell though. He’s been in a lot of TV shows and movies and I just don’t see him very often.

Rating: 5.3

The series started off its reign of terror in 1989 with an episode starring William Sadler, who just so happens to be a favorite actor of mine. Sadler played a character named Niles Talbot, a country boy who didn’t mind the city. He liked the pretty lights at night and knew that there was plenty of trash within the city that would keep him busy at work, as the state’s executioner.

Why hello there, my pretty!

A controversial vote would later put an end to the death penalty in Talbot’s state, thus eliminating his job. I kind of saw Talbot’s future as a killer well in advance here, much thanks to Showtime’s Dexter, a terrific show about a man who takes out the city’s garbage, as it were. Like Dexter Morgan, Niles Talbot typically killed murderers.

The biggest disappointment was the silly move to re-institute the death penalty just as soon as Talbot was arrested for the murders he committed and he got a taste of his own medicine. I guess that’s what happens when you get too caught up in your work, huh?

I loved the way Sadler’s character got to speak right to the audience. He laid it all out there, giving us plenty of insight into the mind of this eventual murderer. It made him an interesting character to watch. Still, the biggest thrill I got was from the Crypt Keeper himself. I haven’t seek the Crypt Keeper on my television in years so this was a pleasant re-introduction. His laugh is still great and his witty lines are full of puns galore. I just loved the writing for the Crypt Keeper.

Rating: 7.8