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Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean our Crypt Keeper doesn’t have to stay in shape, as he opens the episode by lifting some ‘dead’ weights. And before we get a chance to make any more puns, in walks ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER wearing a Tales From The Crypt T-shirt. He’s here to turn the Crypt Keeper from that 90lb corpse into a decaying MACHO MAN.

It’s captivating to look at Arnold as he was twenty-five years ago, especially since he’s been making a second go at a film career playing old, grizzled veterans. Here was a man who was on top of the world, and somehow, he managed that with an accent thicker than his neck. But to see his face without wrinkles and a body in its prime made me sit back and consider time, and how even the man at the top of the world can’t escape the clock.

This concept of time and aging doesn’t go far from our mind as we start THE SWITCH off with a shot of an old hand stoking a fire, before panning back to see a table full of pills in a well-furnished room that would be called ‘old fashioned’ if we were having an estate sale. And we might as well be, since the old man whose hand was stirring those flames seems pretty close to shedding his earthly coil.

In walks Fulton the Butler, played by Ian Ambercrombie (famed actor who played a lot of roles that nerds, freaks and geeks would know: Alfred Pennyworth on the short lived Birds of Prey series, Mr. Lippman on Seinfeld as well as the wiseman in Army of Darkness), finds his employer spent the entire night in the study.

“I’m in love, Fulton! I’m in love!” says Carlton Webster, and that’s the most goddamn creepy thing I have ever seen, because it’s said by William Hickey. I don’t think there was a time when William Hickey was NEVER 78 years old. He’s known for being Uncle Lewis on Christmas Vacation and a bunch other movies – but this gravel voiced man embodied withered evil. Gnarled. Twisted. And to hear him opine with sweet lovesickness made me leave my chair and fix a calming drink, because it’s going to be one of THOSE episodes.

So Carlton tells his man Fulton that he’s in love with Linda, grasping at her photograph and admitting his true feelings. It’s never really discussed how Carlton met Linda. But this is ‘Tales From The Crypt’ and we only have twenty minutes. Fulton, of course, is worried about this woman’s intentions (because why would a young woman love an older man if not to get into his wallet and not his pants?) Two episodes into the second season and we have two instances of gold-diggers. Wonderful. This is what happens when your script is a comic book from 1954.

Carlton and Fulton have a gleeful curtain opening scene that’s supposed to represent how Carlton has shed his past morose self and has accepted that though he of flesh and bone, that “life” and “living” are a perspective, that no man, no matter the age, is beyond the chance to truly live – it’s a compelling and moving scene, or it’s supposed to be but Jay Ferguson’s fucking synth soundtrack is overwhelming Carlton’s speech that I barely hear ANYTHING he says. GodDAMNIT Jay and your keyboard.

Fulton Chauffeur’s Carl’s Studebaker (and that’s NOT innuendo) out to the Valley or Reseda or West Hollywood. Carlton’s putting on a front about how much as much he’s worth, playing down his overall wealth as a test. He thinks playing a pauper will somehow prove that Linda (played by Kelly Preston, two years after her role in TWINS, six years before Jerry Maguire and one year before marrying John Travolta) loves him for him.

Carl proposes to Linda, but she points out the obvious fact that he’s old enough to be her grandfather, he exits with a vow to do WHATEVER IT TAKES. This is four years before a 26-year old Anna Nicole Smith would marry the octogenarian J. Howard Marshall, so the world wasn’t ready for the concept. TALES FROM THE CRYPT – CUTTING EDGE!

We take a quick detour into Terry Gilliam’s BRAZIL as Carlton sits himself in the waiting room for a plastic-surgeon, but the rich ladies promises of the doctor taking “five to ten years” is not enough for him. Dr. Thorne (J Patrick McNamara, with roles from the Bill & Ted Movies as well as Phantasm II) tries his best to get some business but Carlton realizes that if he looks 20 years younger, he’s still going to qualify for the Senior Citizen Discount at Country Kitchen Buffet.

Dr. Thorne says “this referral doesn’t come cheap,” and clearly he hasn’t been involved in the US medical system because NO REFERRAL COMES CHEAP ANYMORE. Not even with Obamacare. Anyway, a bribe gets Carlton instructions to a Mad Doctor’s laboratory that looks straight out of The Haunted Mansion. It’s campy as all hell and I’m pretty sure the hunched back assistant with the major head wound came with the lease.

The doctor speaks with a vague Austrian accent, which is hilarious considering Arnie’s directing this episode. Herr Doktor is charging a million dollars, which if calculating for twenty-five years’ worth of inflating, would probably cost about half a billion (or about 1/5 of what Minecraft went for, last week.)

Herr Doktor (Dr. Edgemar from Total Recall, Agent Davis from Tango & Cash, Roy Brocksmith in real life) decides to chew the scenery in explaining the line-item costs of the operation. Turns out the actual operation is only 100k, but it’s the parts that run up the bulk of the bill. Instead of reverting Carlton back to his former youth, he’s just going to get a new face care of Hans (who was in THE TERMINATOR. Seems that all the people here starred in Arnold’s past movies. I SENSE A THEME)

Hans gets 9/10ths of a Million dollars in exchange for his face. Clearly, he’s the winner here.

The camp factor is off the charts this episode as we get a creepy montage – EXTERIOR SHOT OF THE CASTLE! CLOSE UP OF THE DOCTOR’S FACE! ZOOM INTO THE FLOATING HEAD! Arnold as a director is well, young. He also isn’t a horror director, but I expect he’s having fun here. This is camp, this is cheese.

The operation is a success but Herr Doktor says that he’s keeping Hans around “if we need him,” and Carlton has no idea what that might mean (foreshadowing.) He leaves and Fulton can’t believe his boss’s face.

We get a shot of Hans-as-Carl looking as Carl-as-Hans drives away. Side note, Hans-Karl Stepp was a Nazi. The more you know….!

We get a close up of Carl-as-Hans. At first, I can’t tell if it’s the actor Rick Rossovich acting as Carl, but I think they really slathered prosthetics on William Hickley’s face. AND HE LOOKS HORRIFIC.

What is a young face on an old body (but terrifying?) Linda doesn’t get the hots for her plastic lover (innuendo!) so Carl goes back to Herr Doktor for another operation. This time, it’s going to cost TWICE as much to get a new torso.

After another brief montage of goofy shit that’s to imply THE OPERATION, we get Hans acting with Carl’s voice. Carl-as-Hans is happy with the results and because we have Arnie directing this episode, we cut to MUSCLE BEACH!

Yes, we have a Venice Beach work out scene because WHY NOT? While Rick Rossovich in 1990 isn’t fat, it’s odd to see a trim and slim guy working out around your 90’s era of hormone injected beef. It’s like if your Dad decided to join in a game of street basketball just because he completed a six-month workout program to lose twenty pounds.

For some reason, Linda’s there but she’s smiling, totally in love with his body. Or, at least the top half. For some reason, they decided to skip Leg Day and while Carl-as-Hans has a great torso and face, he’s got chicken legs. Off-putting chicken legs.

At the 18th minute of the episode, Linda reveals herself to be shallow and superficial. “I know what I want, Carlton and you just don’t have it.” And this is a bit of an opposite from last week’s episode. Whereas DEAD RIGHT had Cathy and Charlie as faulty characters with both good and bad (Cathy not completely dedicated to being a gold-digging woman and Charlie being innocent and pervy at the same time) this episode has everyone portraying cartoonish sides of good and evil. Carlton is too naive to realize that he’s chasing after a woman who doesn’t care for his personality or the fact that he’s madly in love with him. This once again has me asking “where did he meet this woman?” Of course, answering that question might pull the rug under this poorly constructed plotline, and we don’t have that much time left.

After realizing that girls go crazy for a man with LEGS (who knows how to use them) Carl-as-Hans sits alone in his study. Fulton enters, dressed not in a tux but as if he’s about to hop a bus. Turns out Carl can’t afford him or the house anymore. I might say that Carl forgot the “bros before hos” saying, but I don’t think it was a saying back then. Here, we see Carl giving up his money and what we assume is his only true friend in the world for the last piece of the puzzle. WHATEVER IT TAKES, indeed. The problem is that we don’t see Carl and Fulton develop this friendship. It’s pretty professional and it doesn’t have any kind of warmth. If Fulton had one or two scenes where he expressed the nature of their relationship or how Fulton has spent his life in service to Carlton, we might feel bad about seeing him leave. But because there is no emotional worth in their friendship, there’s no sense of loss when it’s dissolved. We don’t FEEL anything because there’s nothing there worth feeling about.

The next meeting Herr Doktor comes with a $3 million price tag or “one million per each limb” that needs replacing. Yes, we get the mad scientist referring to Carl’s dick as a ‘third limb.’ HILARIOUS. Herr Doktor is eating a length of bologna/salami during this, just to hammer home the subtle references to man-meat.

So we get our third (and final?) surgical procedure and finally – Carl is Hans complete!

Carl is excited to show Linda that he drives off to show her. And we only have three minutes left so you know what that means:

IT’S TIME FOR THE TWIST ENDING

Carlton goes to show Linda his new body but found that she has moved out. And he finds her at the penthouse of her new address. Carl comes in to propose but finds out that Linda…is already married!

See, Linda was a gold-digger after all! She didn’t really care about youth or Carlton. She wanted some kind of financial stability, and she reveals her new husband – his name is Hans! And he comes with a butler named Fulton. Yes, Carlton could have had the woman of his dreams had he only revealed he was rich from the start.

We end with a shot of Hans-as-Carl laughing, with everything that Carl-as-Hans ever wanted.

The Crypt Keeper ends with a PUMP YOU UP pun in honor of the celebrity director and we are done.

Clearly, the rotating cast in the Director’s chair means a wild variety of styles and differences in episodes, but a clearer distinction between this week and last week’s episode could not be made. The experienced hand of Howard Deutch crafted a program that had subtle tones despite a corny script (not to mention the class of actors, where as this week we get a cast of Arnie’s friends.) What shades of grey we had with last week’s show are thrown out for villains who are totally reprehensible and a bumbling fool that borders on pathetic.

Of course, the source material is sixty years old, so it was already dated when the episode ran over two-decades ago. But here, it’s like Arnold is more playful with being creepy and spooky than actually scary. Herr Doktor was more of a goofy exaggeration than anything. There was no sense of realism or weight of the character’s actions. It was a cartoon with people in place of the drawings. If last week was a strong step forward, this week was a goofy stumble.

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Welcome to SJTV: Tales From The Crypt, as we start to recap the second season of the HBO series Tales From The Crypt. In the initial installment, the future George Bluth Sr. decides to woo the future ex-Mrs. Bruce Willis in an episode that shows that money is thicker than water. Or something.

DEAD RIGHT (first aired April 21, 1990)

This episode was directed by Howard Deutch, who directed ‘Pretty In Pink,’ ‘The Great Outdoors‘ ‘Getting Even With Dad‘ and ‘Grumpier Old Men.’ After 2008’s ‘My Best Friend’s Girl,’ Howard has kept himself to directing an odd television show every here and there (Big Love, Hung, CSI: NY, Warehouse 13, American Horror Story, etc.,) I can’t blame him – after doing a movie with Dane Cook, Jason Biggs and Alec Baldwin, I’d quit movies as well.

We start off with a snythtastic 80’s Noir plunkings, courtesy of Jay Ferguson (who?) as if Casablanca was done somewhere east of the Pyramid Club in 80’s NYC. We start off with our heroine walking down the street. Judging by Cathy Finch’s (Demi Moore, about two months away from her iconic role in Ghost) manner of dress, it’s a nebulous 50’s type of era. Cathy walks into Madame Vorna’s Fortune Teller parlor. Vorna is played by Natalija Nogulich, who I only know as a Fleet Admiral from two different Star Trek series. That doesn’t really do the woman’s body of work justice, but that’s all that comes to mind.

After Cathy pays twenty bucks for a reading, most of Vorna’s accent splits with the cash, leaving the pseudo-gypsy caricature to use VIBRATIONS to read Cathy’s future. Instead, she reads Cathy TO FILTH. Vorna isn’t saying she’s a gold digger, but you don’t see her with no broke…

Along with pointing out that Cathy aims to marry into a higher tax bracket, but Madame Vorna says that not only will Cathy lose her job, but she’ll get a new one by the end of the day. That one was on the house – the first one’s free. The second one will always cost you.

We get a wonderful shot of Cathy’s legs as she exits Vorna’s parlor, stepping back into her office, as if the door out leads in to the Office set. A great concept, really makes a crisp transition from one scene to another. And that’s going to be the tone of this episode – quick, clean, fast.

And upon her return, the boss Cathy expects to be gone (“Clayton was going to fire me today. I told her that asshole’s not even in town.”) But it seems that though Clayton’s okay with her calling him an asshole but he’s NOT okay with tardiness. Getting shitcanned for taking an extra twenty-five minutes at lunch, that’s harsh. I’ve been talked down by micromanagers in the past who counted the minutes, so it’s not hard to sympathize with Cathy in this situation.

Dejected, the future-former-Mrs. Ashton Kutcher wanders the streets in a hopeless gaze, passing by a bar where a woman, sans shirt, is being fired by a fat Staten Island-esque Eddie Munster in a Hawaiian shirt, offering her a job. Because before LinkedIn, women could only get job offers from random men on the street! AND THAT’S CALLED MIS-O-GYNY!

“Every exit is an entrance, someplace else,” says Madame Vorna, who consoles Cathy afterwards. Seems Vorna’s a proto-Dan Savage in giving sex advice. And that advice is going to help out, as she tells of a potential marriage to a poor man, who will inherit money ONLY TO DIE OFF, leaving Cathy to dream about being a rich widow.

Cut to the bar and the 80tastic 50’s va-va-voom soundtrack as a topless dancer doing a ‘I Think This Is Sexy’ dance to a crowd of barflies, that’s less arousing and more confounding in the “Huh, I don’t think those are real” way. For some reason, Staten Island Eddie Munster introduces Cathy as a new waitress, which is something they do at strip clubs? I don’t think they do that at Applebee’s, but I don’t frequent either establishments (between the two, I think you’d have a lesser chance of catching a disease at the strip club)

Miss Nude Nebraska 1948 takes the stage and shows just how high an Elephant’s Eye can be, just as Jeffery Tambor arrives in his best Mr. Creosote suit. Man, Jeffery Tambor. Here’s a guy who has never looked any less than 43 years old, even when he was doing MASH, Three’s Company and Max Headroom. But despite probably losing his hair before he was old enough to drink, he never really was a bad looking guy. This is something we all can learn – you can make any bad hand work if you know how to play the cards.

With that said, man. They really had to slather on the prosthetics to make him repulsive – the fat suit, a bulbous nose and buck teeth make him look almost as off-putting as when he played The Mayor of Whoville in ‘The Grinch.’

Of course, Jeffrey is entranced by Cathy’s dress (and the body it’s painted on) and asks for a date after work. Of course, Cathy turns him down until she remembers the words of wise Madam Vorna. Still, it’s going to more than cigarettes and gin to get her into the mood of being mounted by a Bull Elephant Seal in a bad polyester suit, and after he starts laying on how it’s ‘destiny’ that he’s going to get in her pants (the ones she’s not wearing,) she splits faster than the legs of Ms. Nude Nebraska 1948 during an encore set.

We get a Dutch Angle of Demi Moore (which ISN’T a sexual innuendo, I promise) as she runs to Madame Vorna. Vorna’s sitting back to watch The Honeymooners and the two of them gossip like besties. Vorna reassures that yes, once Cathy Hitches the Walrus (which IS a sexual innuendo) she’ll be made like lemonade in the shade.

The next day, Cathy meets with someone (the ex-secretary from earlier on?) and the two of them fantasize about the terrible deaths of Jeffrey Elephant Seal. We get a comedy-level pair of hit-and-runs with a mannequin (because if it doesn’t work once, it’ll work twice) before we watch him choke one some food. This is pretty clever, as it seems to happen around the diner/cafeteria where Cathy and her ex-secretary pal are eating. It adds an element of fantasy to this straight-forward tale of golddiggery.

Right after we see Jeffrey Tambor take a facefirst dive into food, we suddenly get a flash of burlesque breasts in what HAS to be a bad cross-wire of food and sexual impulses. I wonder if anyone else got turned on by fried chicken after this. Strange enough, six years after this episode with topless dancers would air, Demi would turn heads in STRIPTEASE, the movie everyone knows as “Wait, don’t you mean Showgirls?”

Jeffrey Fatboor pops back in and tries once more to woo the ever-confused Cathy. Got to give the character credit, for someone who initially said that love is a low-priority when it comes to marriage, she doesn’t automatically jump on Jeffrey Tambor’s Norbit. She ultimately accepts a date and we learn that she’s about go out with Charlie Marno.

In a move of cinematic glory that pales only to that one time Travis Bickle took Betsy to a porno, Charlie takes two giant buckets of popcorn to a horror movie and they follow it up with a pair of scenes that only emphasis how CHARLIE IS FAT. They have dinner at a Chinese restaurant before ending the night dancing. Despite a few missteps (one of which nearly cruses Cathy’s foot during the dance) it seems like a decent date. Of course, after Charlie kisses Cathy, and she literally throws up. Ah, the subtlety.

A few dates later and like any man of desperation, Charlie proposes to Cathy. Considering her future, she asks about any possible help the two of them might receive if they need it. Charlie says he has an uncle who “owns a factory,” and with the thoughts of inheritance in her mind, Cathy accepts the proposal. We then get a shot of a glassy eyed Cathy, dressed in white, as she swears “till death do us part,” which emphasizes the quick-cut-editing of the day (this being the 90’s, after all.)

But these short scenes do what they need to. I can’t imagine the budget could afford lavish landscapes. This is the first episode of the second season of a relatively young series, and though Tambor and Moore’s price tags were just about to blow-up, I suppose they didn’t come cheap. The brief cuts don’t let the viewer to pick out how sparse or possibly flawed the settings are/could be. They focus on the right things for the right amount of time, something that most horror moviemakers understand. If your monster doesn’t look the greatest, there are ways around that – mainly, don’t show it until the very end.

Right as Charlie and Cathy consummate their marriage, we get at trippy fantasy sequence with the two of them dancing, interspersed with scenes of 1950’s suburbia home life. Seems Charlie saved all the charm for the Chase, because he’s quite a bore after the catch. It’s a lovely choice, juxtaposing the fantasy ideal of marriage life (the fancy dancing) and the reality of domesticity. Of course, Cathy can only take so much. She starts drinking and one night, she “has a headache” when Charlie wanted to be the George Bluth to her Lucile.

Agitated, Cathy asks Charlie if he heard anything about his rich uncle, and he says that Uncle Moneybags is out west with a family of his own. Distraught with the fact that Charlie’s uncle would leave whatever inheritance to an actual next-of-kin, she splits to vent to Madame Vorna, who’s doing her morning calisthenics to Jack LaLanne. Swearing that she’s DONE and THROUGH and that Vorna was WRONG, Cathy leaves in a huff. Vorna, right as she sits herself down to coffee and donuts, says that she’s “always right” into the camera.

And that, dear reader, cues Act III of this episode. If you know anything about Tales From The Crypt, it’s that the finale/climax and conclusion usually come together in the last five minutes of the episode. It’s usually a lot of buildup for a gruesome ending. These are stories taken directly from the old horror EC comics (this story is taken from Shock SuspenStories #6 from 1952) so the pacing is not these shows strong points.

Back to the episode—in her best ‘Rosie the Riveter’ outfit, Cathy goes to get something out of the vending machine – only to win a million dollars for being the millionth customer. Remember when that was a thing? No?

Cue Cindy Lauper and MONEY CHANGES EVERYTHING. After a shopping spree, Cathy enters her home with a new attitude – or her original one, where she confesses her true feelings of loathing and resentment towards her husband. She’s outtahere like Vladimir but Charlie isn’t too keen with break-ups, it seems. After getting stabbed in the heart by her cruelty, Charlie stabs Cathy in the chest with a knife, repeating “If I Can’t Have You, No Body Can!”

A quick cut to the cemetery to Cathy Marno’s freshly buried grave is accompanied by a voice over, which turns out to belong to Ernie Kepros, a TV reporter covering Charlie’s execution. We see him strapped into the electric chair as one last fat joke is made at Charlie’s expense (“…[Charlie] has eaten his last meal, which we understand is the largest any death row prison has ever had.”) In a clever switch, which I mean – the editing on this episode deserves kudos, because throwing the switch on the electric chair causes the screen to go black as the lights dim from the excessive use of electricity. When the lights return, we see the scene in black and white, as we are now watching it on a television set belonging to Madame Vorna. As the episode comes to a close, it begins as it starts, as another woman has wandered into Madame Vorna to ask about their future.

It’s an odd way to start off the second season, but at that time, I suspect that Demi Moore’s name was HUGE. She was a big star and doing this type of period piece probably drew in some viewers. She does a good job, playing the 50’s attitude with conviction. And for someone who was supposed to be a single-dimension character, Moore does her best with the material. Cathy seems to be a real person who demonstrates some regret at the altar as she goes through with the plan. She also doesn’t seem, at first, to hate Charlie completely (up until her cartoonish vomit after the kiss). When the third act kicks in, she is then reduced to the gold-digging stereotype I imagine she was originally written to be.

Despite her final turn on her husband, I don’t think that Cathy is the complete villain in this case. And that’s why the episode is strong. This episode succeeds on the strength of both Demi Moore and Jeffrey Tambor’s acting (Natalija Nogulich’s appearances are frequent enough to justify a third billing, but this is a strict Moore-Tambor show.) It’s Tambor’s howling as he does his best Norman Bates that is the highpoint of the episode, the only real bit of horror within the story.

I think it’s a pretty basic story, even for 1990’s standards of storytelling. Had I seen this back in 1990, I would know that Cathy wasn’t going to make it out alive. The gore is minimal and the horror is in itself sparse, but the director and the two lead actors make it work.

What did you think about this episode? Leave your comments below.

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After closing the poll yesterday (thanks to those who voted) we ended up with a clear winner for this inaugural edition of SJTV: 

Yep, I will do my darndest to offer something new to say about the old HBO horror anthology, as it was the clear winner. But before we dive headfirst into the Nostalgia, I have to explain that we’ll be doing Season 2 of Tales From The Crypt, since there’s seven seasons to it. We’re not starting with Season One because the Nerdist recently ran an excellent EnCRYPTed series, detailing the first season (and I’m not competing with the Nerdist here – Blue Ocean Strategy, yo.) Season 2 has the most episodes (18) which means this could go as long as four months or, if I double up, I could knock this out by Thanksgiving.

First installment starts up at 9/16 when we talk “DEAD RIGHT,” where a Star Trek admiral, George Bluth and the former Mrs. Ashton Kutcher decided to play “Fuck/Marry/Kill.”