Another year brings us to yet another season of Tales From The Crypt, and despite a couple of last season wobbles, I’ll think you’d agree that the fourth batch of stories from our necrotic narrator probably stands as the most consistent the series has ever been. Yes, there were precious little, five-star standouts, and the last couple of stories were somewhat lax, but for the majority of its run, we confidently got more way more hits than misses than ever before.
But where does this leave season five and it’s trio of premiere episodes? Is the pressure now going to get to this now-veteran horror show, or will it forge ahead into darker, more fucked-up avenues? Well, judging by “Death Of Some Salesmen” it’s very much the latter as the newest season explodes out of the gates with one of the most deranged instalments to date. Gore, humour and an unfeasibly smug Ed Begley Jr. is already enticing enough, but when you add the talents of the great Tim Curry playing no less than three roles, folks, you’ve got yourself an absolute banger of a Tales From The Crypt episode.
Judd Campbell is one of those heartless con merchants who doesn’t give a damn who he hurts just as long as emerges with a little ill-gotten cash at the end of it. Knocking on doors in the guise of a salesman, he cheats people out of their funds while trying to sell them burial plots in a cemetery that, in all likelihood, doesn’t even exist. Enticing them in with the promise that the surviving family member gets a substantial pay out, the slick bastard brazenly manages to extort a couple of hundred dollars from his victims face to face while sitting right there in their very living room.
Plainly speaking, this guy is fucking begging for a shotgun blast of pure, unadulterated karma, and he eventually gets it when he calls at the wrong address one day and ends up meeting the Bracketts. First chatting to Ma, Judd soon figures that while he’s here, he might as well try some of his burial plot bullshit on the redneck housewife, but he soon finds himself contending with the salesman hating Pa, who initially seems somewhat less receptive to the idea, but soon is also won over.
Or is he? Because it turns out that the Brackett’s hatred of salesmen is so legendary, we find that they have the badly mutilated corpses of slaughtered visitors hidden all over their house. But while feigning unconsciousness, Judd overhears that he has a chance of survival if he can win the heart of the Brackett’s daughter, Winona, and after meeting the hunchbacked, phlegm hawking girl, somehow manages to convince her that his romantic feelings are true.
Once Winona lets slip that her folks have a small fortune buried in their basement, it seems that Campbell may actually emerge from his ordeal with a little compensation after all, and after managing to turn Winona on her folks, seemingly succeeds in getting one over on the maniacal family. However, the Bracketts aren’t so easily conned and it seems that despite the big show, it’s Judd himself that’s been utterly – and fatally – tricked.
Just from a mere explanation alone, “Death Of Some Salesmen” even sounds like it’s going to be an above average episode of Tales From The Crypt – it’s got got an appropriately despicable lead in Begley Jr.’s shitheel salesman and the situation it plonks him into is so impressively sordid, it perfectly rests on the crest where horror meets comedy. However, what pushes it into the big leagues is that all three members of the Brackett family are each played by Tim Curry buried under mountains of prosthetics, who takes the concept and runs with it like a rocket powered road runner. The unforgettable result is some sort of unholy fusion of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Eddie Murphy’s outing as the Klumps in the Nutty Professor movies and Curry, a veteran of similarly unhinged, heavy make-up roles as the It miniseries, Legend and, of course, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, attacks the part of an entire family with an impressive frenzy.
In fact, at times you have to wonder if the makers of the notorously dark sitcom, The League Of Gentlemen, got some of their ideas for Edward and Tubbs from the sight of Curry inhabiting the Bracketts so fully. Easing us in somewhat gently with the more mild-mannered Ma, we can only dream of how far Curry’s going to take his drag performance, but then the far more volatile Pa enters the scene, and at this point we fully know that Judd is in for a whole world of well-earned pain, as the redneck’s pychotic loathing of salesmen soon bubbles up after a tense conversation. It’s here where the full, extent of the murderous impulses of the family are unleashed as Judd stumbles upon a severed head in the microwave and a mangled body crammed inside their malfunctioning television.
However, just when you think that the already high levels of gonzo insanity have reached their natural ceiling, Curry brings out Winona to fully shatter that glass roof. Malformed, palid and indescribably horny, all the Brackett daughter desires is a husband – which Judd is only too eager to supply if it saves his skin – but from here, the episode outdoes itself by actually giving us an honest to God sex scene between to two. When you consider the heavily censored state of horror television at the time, the fact that even a cable channel such as HBO managed to get away with the sight of an in-drag Tim Curry, happily grinding away on his male co-star, is nothing short of astounding back in 1993. Of course, the actual sex is only part of the disturbingly funny scene, as a frantic Judd has to will a near-impossible errection into being in order to convince a skeptical Winona that he truly is in love with her. However, after managing to keep it up despite being humped by a throat-clearing homunculus, the show allows us to think that he’s still has a legitimate shot at freedom and fortune when he discovers that the Bracketts have a sizable horde of cash stashed away in their basement. However, unsurprisingly, the seemingly fatal family fallout that leaves Judd the last one alive is merely a mischevious ploy to get him downstairs and unwittingly dig his own grave.
While there’s an argument to be made that “Death Of Some Salesmen” may be a little light on plot (it really is just a basic variation of the con artist gets their just desserts trope), both Tim Curry’s fearless triple-duty as the deranged Bracketts and Ed Begley Jr. being a ridiculously good sport gives the first episode of season 5 an amazingly good start.
Gilbert Adler’s second – and final – episode that he directed for the show manages to even improve on the strong start he delivered with season 4’s “What’s Cookin'”, and the payoff and truly ghastly gore are of very high quality too. But at the end of the day, it’s Curry who deserves the majority of the flowers as no other actor has thrown themselves into a Crypt as much as he does here… thrice.
The rest of the season now has a hell of an act (or three) to follow.
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