Technically speaking, every episode of Tale From The Crypt is a love letter to the range of horror comics published by William Gaines’ beloved EC Comics, but every now and then an installment decides to take that extra step. A prime example of this is Korman’s Kalamity, an offering that goes adorably meta by making its central character an actual artist who works for Tales From The Crypt magazine and whenever the show does something like this, the nostalgic love that so many filmmakers seem to feel for the infamous comic that was hounded off the newsstands by outraged parents and knee-jerking politicians is almost palpable.
Yup, even the Crypt Keeper himself – in a typical bit of wall breaking hosting – admits that Tales From The Crypt started as a magazine as he playfully sketches a Droste Image of himself. But wait, if he admits that his show started in comics, does that actually mean he knows he’s on a TV show? You know what, before we tumble down that rabbit hole, let’s move swiftly on to an episode that doesn’t skimp on bringing on the monsters.
Jim Korman is an overworked cartoonist who gives everything he has when providing the gruesome illustrations for Tales From The Crypt magazine. But while his publisher and writer keeps firing off ever more random ideas for their spooky publication, Jim tools away fully aware that there a more stressful thing in his life than a strict publishing deadline. That thing is his tyrannical, emasculating wife, Mildred, who constantly berates him for his job and whose paranoia has her believing that he’s forever attempting to cheat on her with any other women in the vicinity. But her favorite means of nagging her cuckolded spouse is to berate him about the fact that he hasn’t given her a child yet and Mildred even has Jim on experimental, non-FDA approved fertility pills – but it turns out these pills have a pretty strange side effect.
It seems that every time Jim concentrates extra hard on a monster that he’s drawing, it suddenly comes alive somewhere in the city, with the most recent example being a giant frog-monster that eats a potential rapist threatening off-duty cop, Lorelei Phillips. But with Jim utterly unaware of his bizarre superpower, Lorelei vows to get to the bottom of these monstrous occurrences. It doesn’t take her especially long to figure things out either, especially when all the reported creatute reports match up to various beasts found on the covers of recent issues of Tales From The Crypt magazine.
But after approaching the hapless Jim, it seems that the cartoonist and the cop have a fair bit of chemistry and soon get to work getting to the bottom of the various monster sightings. Of course, Mildred isn’t particularly pleased to find out that her man is spending so much time with another woman, but that isn’t something another quick monster sketch can’t fix.
Korman’s Kalamity has me experiencing something of my own calamity thanks to the episode containing so many things that I both love and hate about the best and worst of the show. I Iove it when episodes go for broke and blow the effects budget on a small, but various clutch of monsters – alternatively, I tend to get annoyed when the humour gets too broad and everyone starts acting in that stylised, 50s, screwball comedy way that proves to be way less effective than the episodes that earn their chuckles through a noticably darker form of irony. I guess I shouldn’t be totally surprised that the episode drops the subtlety in favour of more comic book inspired yuks as Korman’s Kalamity is helmed by Rowdy Herrington, the man who gave us the roundhousing nirvana of Patrick Swayze’s Road House. However, as my hackles started to rise at the sight of big, throwback performances that made Abbott and Costello seem like De Niro and Pacino, something rather odd started to occur – I was actually enjoying myself.
Now let’s not get things mixed up – compared to the mean spirited magnificence of Richard Donner’s batshit crazy “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy” and Jack Sholder’s viciously sardonic “Fitting Punishment”, Korman’s Kalamity seems painfully quaint and unreservedly silly, however, as the episode goes on, it managed to win me over by pulling a few tricks that your average Crypt outing doesn’t often try. For a start, this is one episode that breaks the mold by actually having something of a positive outlook and at its heart is something of a dopey, but genuinely sweet romance. Harry Anderson’s Jim isn’t a philanderer or a cad, he’s just a miserable shmoe who married wrong, but doesn’t have the spine to stand up to his vile wife, but isn’t actively plotting her death either – something of a rarity for this show. When he meets Cynthia Gibb’s pretty policewoman, you genuinely want them to get together and while the plot is borderline childish, it’s also fun to watch the show pay a loving homage to its roots.
Also helping a lot is Colleen Camp whose truly horrendous Mildred may not be the most nuanced performance in Crypt history, but it sure is fun. The nagging, awful wife trope may be a little reductive these days, but it’s also been one thats sustained the horror anthology well for decades (just ask Adrienne Barbeau in Creepshow), but you can tell that Camp is having the time of her fucking life, wearing her godawful outfits and constantly talking to the mildmannered Anderson like he’s the biggest piece of shit to ever bake in the sun. However, what really and truly sold me on Korman’s Kalamity and ultimately almost edges it from three-star into four-star territory is that menagerie of monsters.
They’re big, they’re rubbery, but by God they’re perfect for the episode as the effects department overachieves with style when delivering a trio of perfectly EC-type cryptids. First we get a hulking frog beast that proves to have quite the appetite for wannabe rapists when in bites the head of one clean off, but what’s even better is that we get a cobwebby zombie that proves to be another strong entry in the shows growing pantheon of the living dead the show has been offering. Finally, we get a monster version of Mildred herself who bares something of a passing resemblance to the lumpy, lipsticked witch from 1985’s House and in a nice bit of trivia, FX whizz and serial Alien suit performer, Tom Woodruff Jr. is the man performing the utility monsters.
On paper, I should’ve absolutely hated Korman’s Kalamity as its humour tends to be more on the wishier washier end of the Tales Of The Crypt scale, however, the varied parade of monsters, the oddly sweet charm and Colleen Camp swinging for the bleachers manage to give us the oxymoron of a fell-good Crypt entry. I don’t know, maybe I’m just a sucker for all the old school comic love that the episode pumps out with genuine warmth, but Korman’s Kalamity causes capital Crypt.
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