While there’s many descriptions to throw at Tales From The Crypt, sexist certainly isn’t one of them as HBOs horror blow out routinely realises that the sexs are equal when it comes to being truly abysmal people. For every suave, slicked back con artist, there’s a ruthless femme fatale, and for every wild-eyed, male maniac, there’s also a desperate woman willing to slaughter her way to the top to get what she feel she’s worth. Thus goes the plot of “Beauty Rest” an early 90s take on the lengths aging women have to go to to stay relevant, that comes from the second Crypt offering of Stephen (Nightmare On Elm Street 5, Predator 2) Hopkins. You could say that it treads some of the same ground as Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, only without the bizarre concoctions and pitiful flesh monsters, but instead of Demi Moore facing the existential dread of growing old, it’s Mimi Rogers clinging on to relevancy as she turns to murder to keep herself in the glamour game.
With every failure to secure a gig, commercial or pageant, Helen is getting ever more anxious about her advancing years, especially as she’s constantly getting passed over in favour of much younger women. It seems that the final straw occurs when she thinks she nails an audition for for a commercial featuring a perfume called “Ball Buster” that would be perfect for her, however she still loses out due to “politics” when she’s utterly convinced that she only keeps getting pipped at the post because everybody else is sleeping with directors and casting agents. The main offender proves to be Helen’s own roommate, Joyce, who not only nabbed the Ball Buster ad campaign out from under her “bestie”, but who also brags that someone else she’s slept with is rigging a special beauty pageant especially so she can win.
Livid, Helen cooks up a plan to drug Joyce with sleeping tablets in order to go and score that guaranteed win at this mysterious pageant for herself, but due to a miscalculation, she causes her roommate to fatally overdose. Faking a suicide note, Helen forges ahead with her plan, but after claiming to be the woman tipped to unfairly win the pageant, she’s usurped once more by Drucilla, another rival, who tries to one-up her when she score an illeagal victory when she threatens to sue the MC for sexual harassment. However, as Helen has already resorted to murder to clear one obstacle out of her way, she reasons that she might as well do it again, and after throttling Drucilla to death and hiding her body, all that’s left is to go through the motions of the beauty pageant and claim her pre-ordained win.
However, Helen learns too late that the “what’s inside” theme of the show is way more literal than she could’ve imagined and it turns out that she’s cheated, conned and killed to be crowned as the winner of something called “Miss Autopsy 1992”.
While my comparisons to 2023’s The Substance is valid from a crazed horror-meets-feminism stand point, there’s something else that Beauty Rest strongly resembles – and that’s Season 3’s “Top Billing” that saw the same basic plot play out (complete with a near identical ending), but with two male actors instead of a cluster of amoral female models. While picking out the similarities to a past episode may seen like I’m set to give the installment a written bollocking, Beauty Rest instead manages to take the suspiciously familiar story and make it fun enough to stand on its own, two, high heels. The main reasons for this is some sharp direction from Hopkins (who previously helmed the nastily mischevious Abra Cadaver back in season 3) and a lead performance by Mimi Rogers who embraces her role as a bitter bitch with gusto worthy of a jaunt to the Crypt.
However, there is no real getting away from the fact that Beauty Rest really is Top Billing in a swanky new clothes as it matches the former story beat for beat as it’s frustrated lead turns to murder in order to get what they want only to find that achieving their goal has led to their own undoing. Of course, the makers of the show are only following the lead of the comics, but it’s to the credit of all involved that both these episodes are of notable high quality. It also greatly helps the installment in question that Mimi Rogers is a hell of a lot easier on the eye than Jon Lovitz and the actress, who went on to rejoin with Hopkins for his largely forgotten 1998 big screen update of Lost In Space, fully embraces the opportunity the show gives her and runs with it all the way to psycho-bitchville. Constantly blaming the world for the fact she never truly made it as a model and dismissing everyone who makes it big as just whores who have slept their way to the top, Helen proves to be a truly great Crypt lead who is pushed too far and counteracts the wayward actions of her rivals with cold blooded murder.
Granted, the death of Kathy (Loaded Weapon 1) Ireland’s Joyce is technically an accident, Helen seals her doom when that gargantuan chip on her shoulder has her cover it up as a suicide. Rogers goes through the whole gauntlet of shock, guilt and self-preservation in an enjoably exaggerated way that proves that she understands the assignment.
Of course, Crypt decorum dictates that Helen has to upgrade from manslaughter to outright murder to properly earn her fate and this means we get Nightmare On Elm Street 3’s Jennifer Rubin appearing as the scheming – but equally doomed – Drucilla. A familiar face to anyone raised with eighties horror, Rubin’s character may be just as ruthless when it comes to getting what she wants, but she’s no match for a Helen who has fully snapped and has no qualms about upping her body count.
Of course, this cues us up for the big finish and after strangling her latest speed bump to death and hanging her up her body somewhere out of the way (who says women don’t support each other), Helen goes on to claim her prize. However, it turns out that the entire beauty pageant has been staged by people who, when they say they respect inner beauty, mean that they idolise their internal organs. Promptly taken back stage and murdered with an injection of some sort of lethal concoction, we next see Helen at the finale of the autopsy themed celebration as her lifeless body is displayed opened up like a tin of beans as the MC croons a twisted variation of the “There She Is, Miss America” song. It’s a gloriously macabre finish that not only offers up an amusingly gruesome final image and a whole bunch of irony to keep us sated until next week, but also gets our brains working about who this corpse-obsessed event is actually being held for. Various enticing clues are scattered around the episode, such as the make up artist lamenting that they no longer pull victims off the street for this, or the time and effort that’s clearly gone to professionally slicing up and presenting Helen’s body to a rapturous crowd.
Are they a cult of psychos? A secret society? We never find out, but Hopkins’ spirited direction, Rogers’ all-in performance and a fun script means that despite some superficial similarities to an older episode, it’s truly what’s inside Beauty Rest that what counts best.
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