If I can be a little candid about a show I have a tremendous amount of respect for: there are times when Tales From The Crypt can be a little… well, shall we say predictable? I know that’s the whole point, and that the source material made its name delivering twists laden with ironic justice, but there are times where, thanks to that particular format, you can see the ending coming from miles out. Step one: someone’s a bad person, step two: they do a bad thing, step three: bad thing catches up with them, then rinse and repeat – it’s a classic format, but at times you wish that the Crypt Keeper’s stories would break a few of those expected boundaries.
Well, making all our wishes come true is Lower Berth, an episode that successfully flips the format somewhat to deliver maybe the most original installment yet and even gives us something approaching some lore for the show in general. It’s just that classic tale of freak meets mummy – with added castrations included at no extra charge.
During the desperate times of Depression-Era America, Ernest Feeley’s Fantastic Fairway of Freaks is trying to scrape a living as paying gawkers and rubes line up to see such attractions as a fat lady, a family of dwarves and the odd macabre exhibit – but the main draw of the carnival is undoubtedly Enoch, the Two-Faced Man. However, despite his young age, Enoch extreme condition also means that his health is gradually deteriorating and it’s starting to cause friction between Feeley and Enoch’s cruel caretaker, Mr. Sickles, who realises that his meal ticket could be slipping away from him.
Salvation seems to be at hand in the form of conniving British doctor, Zachary Cling, who shows up with a bizarre item to sell – the body of a preserved, 4000 year-old Egyptian mummy named Myrna, who once was a slave girl but was entombed alive after rejecting the Pharoh’s advances. Sickles snaps it up despite being told that the jewellery on the corpse is fake and soon Myrna is proving to be justva good a draw as Enoch, but the two-faced boy doesn’t seem to mind the competition much. In fact, the miserable wretch is positively on top of the world whenever he gets to lay his misshapen eyes on Myrna as he’s fallen head over heels with her.
However, Sickles soon discovers the real reason Cling wanted to sell the mummy as he’s been waiting for the right moment to snatch her jewels, which are real after all. The only thing that’s stopping him is a curse that’s said to castrate any man who dares try to swipe her necklace. During a heated argument, Sickles accidently kills Cling with a pair of shears, but decides to blame it on Enoch, steal the bling and split – but the Two-Faced Man doesn’t take kindly to someone laying hands on the 4000 year-old girl of his dreams. But either the cute bloodily fulfilled, what’s next for the macabre lovebirds? After being discovered a year later dead in each other’s arms, it seems their love bore fruit in the form of a very familiar looking baby with a face only a mother could love.
While there’s all the shady characters, double dealings and rampant bloodshed of your average episode, Lower Berth manages to be quite unlike anything we’d seen on Tales Of The Crypt before. For a start, it’s probably the most serious episode to date, dropping out camp thrills and knowing irony in favour of something far closer to a straight horror flick and while other episodes have embraced other time periods before, there’s something different about how the misadventures of Enoch and his mummified love fully embrace the gloomy aesthetic. The reason for this is that the director had something to prove as, after years of toiling through the ranks of 80s special effects, Kevin Yagher finally bagged himself an opportunity to helm an episode. To be fair, beyond applying Freddy’s makeup in a few Elm Street sequels and creating both the puppets of Chucky and the Crypt Keeper himself, Yagher had also been directing some of the bookend segments, which no doubt nailed him his chance to mount a whole episode.
In a particularly savvy move, the episode he got proved to be incredibly fitting as the big twist isn’t so much about revenge or comeuppance, but more about the bigger picture of where the episode leads. Once we discover that Enoch and Myrna had a year together in “bliss”, their union spawned a little, noseless, zombie child who eventually grew into the Crypt Keeper himself and it’s impressive kismet that the man who helmed the episode about his origin was also the one who created him physically. But stunt casting aside, Yagher ends up doing a bang-up job, creating an atmospheric, gothic mood most Crypt episodes tend to neglect as they’re too busy being funny. But stripped of the need to pull some wise-ass twist, Yagher and returning scripter Fred Dekker, get to tell a full-fledged story whose only weakness it that it isn’t longer.
The cast is nicely lined with various actors willing to go the extra mile. Lewis Arquette nicely chews the scenery as the owner of the freakshow, Stefan (Carrie) Gierasch is appropriately odious as Enoch’s abusive caretaker and we even get Mark Rolston (aka. Drake from Aliens) as a double dealing doctor – but while the “normal” cast provide a selection of lying, cheating, con artists and misanthropes, it’s down to the director’s brother, Jeff, to deliver something else you don’t often get in an offering from the crypt – pathos. While Jeff has no doubt pissed his brother off at some point in order to be caked in such complex prosthetics, the trials and tribulations of the Two-Faced Man really are heartbreaking in an Elephant Man kind of way. There’s even a sequence where a little girl shows the deformed victim pity and gives him her doll; which adds some much needed empathy before Enoch starts snipping off the testicles of the man that’s wronged him.
In fact, the only real down point Lower Berth has is that the actual relationship between Enoch and Myrna is left disappointingly vague. While that doesn’t mean I’d want a comprehensive run down of the exact nature of their… er…. physical relationship, we never actually know if Myrna is still alive, or that her corpse has mystical properties due to her curse. Either way, the mummy becomes a mommy and a disturbingly cute Crypt Keeper is brought into the world, but as a result, it means that Lower Berth creates more questions that don’t actually need to be answered – but I’d be dying to know anyway. How did the birth go? What was the year Enoch and Myrna had together in their cave actually like? What happened to baby Crypt Keeper between then and now? Does Enoch’s second face mean that Myrna’s technically had a threesome? OK, maybe not so much that last one – but it’s weirdly frustrating for an episode to leave so many tantalising threads dangling.
Not only does Yagher provide some typically top-notch make-ups, but he delivers an episode of Tales quite unlike any that we’ve seen before. Weirder yet, rather than being a totally original episode written for TV, it’s actually fairly accurate to the original comic story of Lower Berth which as mindblowing as getting the suggestion of circus freak necrophilia onto prime time television – if only I could simply enjoy the episode an not obsess about what happened in-between…
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