It may surprise to you learn that the stories the Crypt Keeper tells us each and every week sometimes have been altered from the original EC Comics source material. Sometimes the changes may just be to bring them more up to date with the times (they were first published in the 50s, remember?), but in other instances, the show have revamped them completely, offering up entirely new stories and twists to hopefully add more punch. One such example is Uli Edel’s Came The Dawn, which saw the original story utterly reworked into something of a strange, Psycho clone.
Obviously Edel, the man who gave us the provocative Last Exit To Brooklyn and Body Of Evidence, would want to helm an episode heaving with barely concealed lust, and the promise of violence born of frustration, but the result ultimately ends up being something of a middle-of-the-road offering that potentially has aged a little awkwardly.
After witnessing a shocking murder in a restaurant bathroom that sees a busy blonde get chopped up while on a date, we switch focus to mild mannered antique importer, Roger, who is driving through the pouring rain to get to his remote cabin in the woods to try and patch things up with a woman named Joanna. However, we find that their volatile relationship has been marred by tempestuous rows and various alleged affairs, and it seems that Roger isn’t exactly hopeful for a reconciliation as he listens to his beloved opera music. His journey his interrupted when he comes across a broken down car caught in the deluge, and he meets the stranded “Norma”, a streetwise woman who seemingly has something of a salty past herself when it comes to relationships.
Playing the good samaritan, Roger offers to give her a lift to his nice warm cabin and ply her with champagne; but while Norma is understandably suspicious, she ultimately agrees and is promptly wowed by just how much wealth Roger has. However, while it’s easy to view the importer as a potential threat, it’s actually Norma who we should be watching as she hints that she has a serious issue with duplicitous men in the past, and she seems to have decided to target Roger due to his callous treatment of Joanna.
Opting to seduce him, and tie him to the bed for the promise of a spot of kinky sex, Norma plans to rob the guy blind at the very least; but before she can fully put her plan into action, she discovers that shes wandered into something far more serious than a mere spat between a love rat and a jilted girlfriend. It seems that Joanna is Roger – or at least another personality that he has – and whenever he gets close to another woman, the bespectacled opera lover violently switches, pulls on a dress and wig, and violently axe-murders the offending female in an act of enraged jealously. Sucks to be you, Norma.
I don’t usually compare the TV versions to the comic stories that make up the various tales that encompasses Tales From The Crypt, mainly because I actually haven’t read that many – but it’s interesting to compare and contrast “Come The Dawn”, because the decisions and changes that have been made probably do more harm than good. The original story from the comics tell of a man living in a remote cabin who takes in a lost woman who may be the girl of his dreams, only to discover that she could potentially be an escaped, female lunatic. The man tries to save himself by locking her outside only to discover that he’s only gone and delivered the latest victim to the actual maniac who promptly murders his dream girl to his dismay. Now, I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a recipe for some prime, Crypt mischief – there’s sex appeal, there’s drama, there’s murder and a nice, cruel twist in the tale that would seem to fit Edel like a glove, yet the reworked Tale ditches virtually the entire plot and replaces it with something that just seems to be simply way less fun.
The preamble is cool, as Perry King’s Roger l enticement of Brooke Shields’ Norma back to his cabin has us guessing over which of these two are more of a threat. Norma drops various hints that she’s scammed, robbed and even harmed men before whom she deems to be untrustworthy or problematic, and when we see that Roger lives in the lap of luxury and also has a girlfriend that he’s constantly dumping on, it suggests that he might be the potential victim. On the other hand, Roger is a man, and in situations like this, I guess that’s all you need to be a credible threat – but while the set up bristles with promise, the following seduce and destroy story takes an odd turn when we discover that Roger has a major case of the split personalities and it is, in fact, he who has been the violently angry Joanna all along.
Obviously, “Come The Dawn” wants to riff heavily on the type of gender bending killer trope made famous by a whole bunch of films including Psycho, Dressed To Kill and The Silence Of The Lambs, but the issue is that it doesn’t present it in a particularly memorable way other than being a shocking image when Roger suddenly shows up in a dress and wig.
As a further result, it also means that it’s aged pretty badly too, but my real issue is that the original story didn’t actually need all the cross-dressing/spilt personality stuff when the original tale was strong enough to not actually demand it. However, with all that being said, that’s not to say that the episode is a complete wash. The opening half of “Came The Dawn” is actually pretty atmospheric as we switch from a garish killing in an overlit bathroom, to a remote highway on a dark and stormy night. While it’s always amusing watching Brooke Shields attempt to play streetwise (that’s like asking Leslie Nielsen to play Charles Manson), the campness inherent in every Crypt episode makes it work. Furthermore, her back and forth with King actually does a good job at building tension over which one is the threat we should be looking out for and in true, Tales fashion, it’s always fun to see a recognisable star score themselves a horrible demise, be it Tom Hanks getting his head smashed through a TV screen, Joe Pesci getting chainsawed in half by twins, or Brooke Shields getting hacked up with an oversized axe.
It’s just confounding why the episode would just blatantly rip off other, more famous movies to deliver a cheap shock when the original story offered up the opportunity to serve up something potentially far smarter. I originally looked up the original story to see if the notion of a cross dressing murderer had actually pre-dated Psycho, but in my research, I ironically found that sometimes the original “Tale” proves to be better. Still, extra points for a Michael J. Pollard cameo – but that’s only common sense.
A solid episode with numerous neat touches falls foul of an ending that seems weirdly out of place. If nothing else, it serves as a warning to me that maybe I should wait until I’ve finished the entirety of the TV version of Tales From The Crypt before I even think about reading all the comics in bulk, if only to preserve the show.
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