After a greatly expanded second season that saw various psychos, gold diggers, zombies and oddly high amount of conjoined twins thrown at us (two sets, but that’s higher than most other shows, right?), Tales From The Crypt’s sophomore offering comes to an end with “The Secret”. It’s been something of a wild ride and due to the law of anthology shows, it’s been predictably all over the place when it comes to quality, but while the bad has never truly been that bad, the good has often been genuinely magnificent.
But one question finally remains: of the eighteen tales the Crypt Keeper’s fed us over the weeks, has he saved one of the best for last, or will his second season end more with a whimper than a full blown shriek?
Honestly, when you consider how good some of the offering were this season, we could have finished things off with a massive blowout, but unfortunately the behind The Secret isn’t enough to blow our socks off.
Theodore is a plucky, spirited resident of the Gaines Orphange, but at a hefty twelve years-old, he’s starting to think that he’ll never be adopted. Rendered an orphan after his parents were killed under mysterious circumstances while he was too young to remember, Theodore is also treated like shit by the orphanage’s stern director, Mrs Hagstead, who seems to be desperate to be shot of the little kid. Still, why Hagstead’s constant verbal jabs and cruel words are a bit of a drag, Theodore loves hanging out with the other orphans and also enjoys spending time with Miss Heather, the other, kinder, member of staff based there.
However, after a visit in the dead of night by an eccentric, wealthy couple known as the Colberts, something remarkable happens – Theodore finally gets picked by a childless couple to go live with them, but while the orphan is initially reluctant to leave his friends, he soon finds that the Colberts have enough cash to keep him in the lap of luxury for the rest of his days.
But while Theodore wants for nothing and every meal seems to be cake and ice cream, his life with the Colberts soon starts to sour. For a start, during the day, while his new parents are at “work”, the young boy is constantly locked in his room, and he only sees his benefactors at night. Also, with all those sugary treats, they seem to be fattening him up for something – but Theodore manages to make the best of the situation after bonding with the Colbert’s faithful butler, Tobias.
All that bonding pays off when, one night, Tobias bursts in and tries to smuggle Theodore out of the house and we discover exactly what the Colbert’s game actually is. They’re vampires and they’ve adopted a boy to feed on in the form of an offering when they turn Tobias into one of them, however, while Tobias valiantly tries to save his former sacrifice, the Colberts manage to thwart Theodore’s escape. Or have they? You see, Theodore’s got something of a fantastical secret too and tonight just happens to be a full moon…
With season 2 done and dusted (literally considering how grimy that crypt is), I’m a little surprised that the brains behind Tales From The Crypt didn’t choose a more rousing episode to close things out. There are many superior episodes that are funnier, scarier or crazier than this one and I could pick a couple right now off the top of my head that would have been a much better way to deliver a big finish. Take “Lower Berth”, for example; wouldn’t it been cool to end the season with the episode that suddenly reveals itself to be the origin of the Crypt Keeper himself – or how about ending up with the satisfying insanity of the brutal “Television Terror”?
That’s not to say that The Secret is a bad episode, it’s just missing that extra oomph that the best of the Crypt has to offer and it tends to suffer from having quite a cool reveal that isn’t quite mined as well as it could be. However, up until that point however, director J. Michael Riva (production designer on such films as Lethal Weapon 2 and Iron Man) manages to build a solid set up as we detail young Theodore’s existence as the oldest orphan in the place and it’s no coincidence that the Crypt Keeper is reading Oliver Twist during the opening (“Where’s the twist?!”). All the ingredients of the life of a story book orphan are all present and correct; the fact that no parents have picked him; his parents croaked under mysterious circumstances; the head of the orphanage despises him for some unfathomable reason; and there’s even a kindly member of staff who gives him the kindness he’s so sorely in need of – it’s literally all here.
Of course, much like Oliver Twist (or even Stuart Little) Theodore finally gets adopted, and it’s here that things step up a notch with the arrival of Grace (Twin Peaks) Zabriskie and William (the albino henchman from Foul Play) Frankfather. It’s obvious from the get-go that something’s iffy about this extravagant couple and while the couple have great fun vamping and camping things up, Riva seems a little uncertain about how obvious he needs to be when it comes to the necessary foreshadowing. The Secret could have steered us down a different road and maybe had us thinking that the Colberts are cannibals, but when they first show up in the middle of the night dressed as vampires, there’s a sense that the episode has given the game away a mite too early. However, when it comes to the final twist that Theodore is actually a werewolf, it almost seems to comes out of nowhere despite some clues sewn earlier in the story and feels oddly rushed. If it’s hinted that Theodore runs away from the orphanage every now and then (presumably to go on lupine excursions), why does he only figure out he’s a lycanthrope at the end of the episode? It just feels like the reveal could have been much more impressive despite the fact that it’s quite a cool werewolf design and that in the rock, paper, scissor game of monsters, werewolf apparently beats vampire.
However, despite that final fumble, The Secret has a lot going for it. The time Riva takes to build character is appreciated and it’s always nice to see Larry Drake show up, with Tobias being his second Crypt credit after memorably playing the killer Santa in season one’s magnificent “And All Through The House”. But best yet, the final scenes are shot in the weirdest, bluest version of night-for-day I’ve ever seen and it watching Zabriskie and Frankfather be frantically chased by POV shots in it feels like something out of a lurid 70s Hammer vampire flick, or even one of the Count Yorga movies.
While The Secret would have been a passable episode if released sooner in the series, it regrettably delivers a rather weak climax to a season that contained more than it’s fair share of great points. Still, we get Grace Zabriskie in fangs, Larry Drake playing the hero and, bizarrely, only the first time the horror show has ever utilised either vampires or werewolves. It’s just a shame that The Secret couldn’t have been a bit better delivered…
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