Look, I understand that it’s important to ensure to make every episode in an anthology series feel different from the rest, but everytime Tales From The Crypt deviates from its path of amusingly mean-spirited horror, it feels like the show is struggling to find its identity. I’d understand it if we were still picking our way through an earlier season, but the fact that the show still hasn’t figured out it needs to go lighter on the comedy episodes by the end of season 3 is somewhat infuriating. Now, I’m not claiming that Crypt Keeper’s third outing has been a bust by any stretch of the imagination – “Carrion Death”, “Top Billing”, “Mournin’ Mess” and “Split Second” all understood exactly what it takes to craft an unforgettable episode – but plonking down a comedy episode in the penultimate episode slot is setting off some alarm bells. Still, at least the comedy in “Spoiled” makes a certain amount of sense.
Janet is the very epitome of thr bored, frustrated housewife. While her husband, Leon, toils night and day at both the hospital where he works and his lab in the basement in the hopes of achieving a medical breakthrough, Janet has been practically abandoned sexually and the cracks are beginning to show. Living vicariously through her favorite soap opera, There’s Always Tomorrow, she’s influenced by the bold, confident, shoulder-pad wearing women who never take no for an answer and who always take what they want. In fact, she’s especially taken with a plotline that sees main character Fuchsia Monroe embark on a torrid affair after her husband, Evian, gets too obsessed with his work.
While Leon works to perfect a brand new anesthetic that puts a patient in suspended animation and would allow doctors far more time to operate, the sexually bereft Janet vows to be more like her hero and sets her horny sights on the hunky Abel, a cable guy who seems really and willing to hook the bored housewife up with exactly what she needs.
With no clue that Abel the cable guy is installing his lead in his wife’s port, Leon works on, utterly unaware that Janet’s infidelity is stretching on for days, but after he finally makes a breakthrough with his long suffering test rabbit, he excitedly emerges from his basement laboratory to share his victory with his wife. However, his elation is soon shattered after he witnesses his better half in flagrante delicto with another man. Instantly driven mad by the sight, he drugs them both and decides to pit his new anesthetic to sinister use as he operates on them like a lovesick Frankenstein. If they like each other’s bodies so much, they can have them – in the form of an audacious head swap operation.
I understand that there’s more to Tales From The Crypt than boundary pushing gore and nudity – but does there really have to be? While the source comics obviously covered all sorts of subjects and tones, it genuinely feels that everytime the show goes with a lighter story, it invariably ends up being forgettable as hell simply because its not smashing us over the head with some sort of daring taboo breaker and that’s regrettably the best way to describe Andy Wolk’s Spoiled – forgettable. But what’s all the more annoying is that this perky story of soaps and sex isn’t actually a bad episode as the comedy is crisp and the camp firmly stays just on the right side of ludicrous as the silly tale goes through the motions. It’s just that when you compare the twee laughs and shameless double entendres with the tougher end of the season 3 spectrum, it proves to have all the staying power of an ice cube on Arizona concrete.
The basics for the story is solid as Faye (V) Grant’s neglected housewife steadily gets more amd more frustrated as the characters on her beloved TV show seem to be getting nailed far more than she is and as female Crypt characters go, Janet is actually quite the three dimensional foil. However, there’s a sense that she does too good a job as while the crime of adultery isn’t exactly a nice thing to do to someone, having your head sewed onto the body of your lover seems a bit harsh when a bitter divorce would have done just fine. Maybe if the tone had been more salacious as a “real” woman starts taking advice from a fantasised TV show, Spoiled may have found some of the edge it so desperately lacks, but as the tone of the real word and the world of There’s Always Tomorrow are essentially the same it’s all too nice to truly make an impact.
Similarly, Alan Rachins and Anthony LaPaglia also hit all the necessary notes with the latter admirably keeping a straight face worthy of Leslie Neilsen even when forced to utter some amusingly outlandish dialogue (“I did so much screwing with my Phillips, I thought the tip would drop off.” is a helluva line to deliver regardless what show you’re in”), but again, it’s all somewhat colourless when a slightly meaner take might have allowed the episode to play more to the strengths of the Crypt.
Even the ending, with its hot, head-swapping action doesn’t quite land as well as you’d hope, especially seeing as Frank Henelotter already nailed it a year earlier in the climax of his raucously offensive, hooker-exploding masterpiece, Frankenhooker and made it far more shocking and sleazy than this.
The thing is, no matter how good or bad a more “sensible” entry of a Tales From The Crypt is, it’s almost aways going to be sorted out from the more extreme entries and discarded chiefly because pushing the envelope was the mission statement that the entire show was based on. For all the adept comic performances and jokes on display here (the in-joke about how installing cable can make your life better is probably lost in the time of streaming and the in episode cameo of the very show you’re watching is cheeky as hell), why would Spoiled stick in my mind when other episodes have seen Kyle MacLachlan get his eye pecked out by a vulture, Brion James get chainsawed into sections and Jon Lovitz have his skull co-opted by an insane theatre troup? Short answer is, you wouldn’t and as a result, Tales From The Crypt offers up yet another installment that immediately makes you feel like skipping the channel.
The jabs at TV are fun and the actors balance the cheese well, but if this was the first episode of Tales From The Crypt that you’d ever saw, chances are of you tuning back in would be remote. With so many comic stories at their disposal and a green light by HBO to bring all sorts of messed-up shit to the small screen, I’m still not entirely sure why we’re still getting episodes like this that still feel so twee.
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