After the three-pronged pilot which saw a trio of highly recognised directors delve into the recesses of EC Comics to bring their camp, horror tales to life, there was a wonder if Tales From The Crypt could keep up that hot streak as the season ultimately continued. After all, when you open with a trifecta of Walter Hill, Robert Zemeckis and Richard Donner, what the Hell do you do for an encore?
For a start, keeping with those left-field directorial choices seemed to be the way and as a result, Howard Deutch was brought in to take a crack at “Only Sin Deep” which saw tackled the murderous lengths woman can go through to keep hold of their looks long before Coralie Fargeat unleashed The Substance all over us. Prepare to witness proof to the old adage “looks can kill”…
As we turn our attention away from the Crypt Keeper’s dank mausoleum to the mean streets of New York, we meet Sylvia Vane, a 21 year old prostitute who is as narcissistic as she is beautiful who vows that her looks are going to get her off the streets (and off her back) in into a life of riches and parties that never end. First things first, Sylvia realises she needs funds to achieve her dream, so after shooting the pimp of her friend, Raven, and robbing his body of every dollar and item jewelry it has, she heads straight to the nearest pawn shop to cash in. However, as her ill-gotten items are hotter than the surface of the sun, the pawnbroker doesn’t want anything to do with them leaving Sylvia in a bit of a bind. However, the pawnbroker has an alternate way for Sylvia something valuable for money and it’s here where the supernatural starts to peek it’s head in.
The Pawnbroker has an usual request: he’ll give Vane all the cash she needs to crack the big time if she trades in her beauty. All she has to do is allow him to make a plaster cast of her face and the money is hers, but she’ll have four months to redeem it at twelve percent. Sylvia agrees and immediately gives herself a rich bitch glow-up to start infiltrating those lush parties and before you know it, her stunning looks, new fashions and hard-nosed attitude has her sitting pretty with loaded playboy Ronnie Price.
However, like all narcissists who venture onto Tales Of The Crypt, Sylvia finds that she’s neglected a vital part of her deal and before you know it, the crow’s feet she devolved that morning has soon lead to her face pulling some majorly advanced aging on her. Realising that her four months are up and desperate to retain her looks, she raids Ronnie’s penthouse for the funds needed to but back her former face, but ends up shooting her boyfriend in cold blood when he finds her strip mining the place. But now Sylvia has a conundrum: if her murdering face is now known to the cops, she’ll get a one way trip to the electric chair if she has it restored and is recognised. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but a bit of brains couldn’t hurt when you’re committing murder.
For those unfamiliar with the name Howard Deutch, he was responsible for the John Hughes penned classics, Pretty In Pink and Some Kind Of Wonderful and thus while he had delivered a certain kind of on-screen horror before in the form of Molly Ringwald’s truly hideous prom dress, could he deliver the type of brutal karma need for a Tales From The Crypt episode? The answer is a confident yes, but while Only Sin Deep does suffer the amusing drawback of being somewhat dated thanks to some fashions and Lea Thompson’s rather full on “NuuYark” accent, it offers an interesting change of pace for the show.
Firstly, it’s fun to spend time with a truly devious (if incredibly sloppy) female character as her comeuppance is delivered at a more languid pace than the rapid fire, cat and mouse that afflicted Mary Ellen Trainor’s murderess in “And All Through The House…” as we see her rise from the grimy streets to the penthouses of the rich and famous. It’s established pretty quickly that Thompson’s egotistical hooker is something of a shark in fuck-me heels, blowing away a pimp in order to swipe his bling, but despite an accent right out of Bugsy Malone, the actress does well to largely dispel memories that this diabolical femme fatal was also Marty McFly’s mother – and if the time traveling teen was shocked to see her drinking, smoking and parking, imagine how he’d feel watching her work the streets and pumping slugs into menfolk.
While Deutch gets a good handle on what makes a good Tales From The Crypt episode tick, it helps that he’s got some help in the form of Fred (Night Of The Creeps, The Monster Squad) Dekker who again proves he’s fully down with the weird, tongue in cheek camp that’s required to really nail the more outlandish elements of the plot. In fact, while those unfamiliar with the way EC Comics used to do things may feel that some of the plotting is wildly erratic, dropping a random and exceedingly convenient supernatural element right in the middle of the story is just the way the horror comics of the 50s got shit done. For example, the notion of Britt Leach’s yellow toothed pawnbroker having a second career in black magic which he uses to steal the beauty from greedy women to keep the corpse of his wife young may seem a lazy way to get the plot moving to the uninitiated, but that kooky use of spooky stuff in order to muscle that plot along is all part of the fun of the thing, and Dekker (already on his second Tales venture) makes sure his script rides that line between gripping and absurd.
Another interesting thing about Only Sin Deep is that it’s the first Crypt entry that, after a clutch of episodes that electrocuted, chopped up, or buried it’s leads alive, has its antagonist/protagonist/whatever actually live on to suffer the true ramifications of her transgressions. After blowing away Ronnie when he doesn’t recognise her prematurely wizened face when he catches her trying to steal her own jewelry, Sylvia manages to leave a near cartoonish amount of proof that it was she that did the deed. Christ, she even describes herself as the woman of his dreams while the cops are on the phone to him, but leaving a gun plastered with her fingerprint literally laying in a photograph of herself means she might have well just signed the murder with her own name. However, it’s not a true Tales From The Crypt unless the boot really drives itself into the groin and the fact that the Pawnbroker is actually willing to reverse the spell is countered by the fact that Sylvia doesn’t dare regain her old face in order for the cops to never find her. I guess when you’ve got looks, you don’t have to be smart – but it certainly helps when you commit a murder.
Another episode brings yet another satisfying tale of an entitled shit getting their comeuppance in the cruelest fashion imaginable, but while this story moves at something of a slower pace than the previous entries, it’s good to known that the Crypt Keeper has his tales on lock regardless of the pace. In fact, you could say that he’s not just a pretty face (cue Crypt Keeper style cackling).
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