Twisted affairs are fairly common place within the irony laced universe of Tales Of The Crypt, but can there be such a thing as genuine true love when the leathery mug of the Crypt Keeper is presiding over everything? The short answer, predictably, is no and “Til Death”, the fourth episode in the second season, is more than willing to go to bat and double down to prove this to be true.
The man helming this episode turns out to be non-other than Chris Walas, the one time Oscar winning special effects guy (Gremlins, The Fly) who turned director with The Fly II, so you know that some tremendously goopy setpieces are going to errupt at some point. But can the director steer a tricky plot through some potentially problematic issues in order to serve up a main course of amour turned amorphous? Turn the page dear friends, and discover the worst form of undying love…
The year is 1948 and the scheming Logan Andrews is all in when it comes to financing a development project in the Carribean islands that’ll eventually become a resort for paying guests; and due to a few unsubtle jokes he shares with a corrupt, disgraced English doctor, we already know that he’s killed a former wife in order to secure a hefty inheritance to pay for it. However, when his workers come across a sizable amount of unstable quicksand in the swampy areas where her plans to build, his dreams soon lay in ruins has he no longer has the capital to pay for the additional work needed.
Enter haughty – but wealthy – snob, Margaret Richardson, who is trying to enjoy a vacation by is far to high strung (and racist) to fully enjoy herself without critiquing literally every single thing around her. While Logan’s initial opinion of the woman is that she’s “a bitch on wheels”, he soon realises that wooing her will be the fastest way the enterprising gold digger can get his hands on more money.
But after Margaret proves to be irresistible to his smarmy charms, Logan decides to get some help from an ex-girlfriend – namely the visibly bitter Voodoo priestess, Psyche, who rustles up a love potion for him to bend his fussy target to his will.
However, the elixir comes with a typically catchy warning – “You give her one drop and she’ll become your wife, but if you give her two, she’ll be yours for life.” – but after one drop seemingly takes a little while to take effect, the greedy cad soon fucks up and gives Margaret the whole damn bottle which promptly kills her infatuated ass dead. However, the rules may state “yours for life”, but they never stipulated whose life and it seems that not even death can stop the love of a bewitched woman, even when she starts to succumb to decay. But after bullets, fire and a brush with quicksand fail to stop Margaret’s loved-up corpse from coming for her lover, Logan decides to take the easy way out and down a bottle of poison to avoid his fate – however, Psyche has other ideas and a resurrected Logan realises this love will last an eternity even if their bodies will rot.
If I’m being fully honest, Til Death manages to scrape a four-star rating just by the skin of its yellowing teeth for a varied amount of reasons. There’s issues with tone, the performances and a distinct lack of unpredictability – but on the other hand, Walas’ special effects instincts knows that he has to finish the episode big and it pretty much saves the entire story. But as plots go, Til Death is noticably standard of the show. We get a unscrupulous lead who’ll happily latch onto anyone with money and will even resort to outright (if clandestine) murder in order to ensure they can keep their kitty full and we get a clueless victim who is blissfully unaware that her wealth has been greedily targeted.
However, one trope the episode manages to flip is making the woman in peril an absolute nightmare rather than the shy, retiring waif who naively gets ensnared into a dastardly plot. D.W. Moffett’s Logan may be an absolute sack of backstabbing shit, but he means his match in Pamela Gien’s shrill, stuck up and racially insensitive shrew who finds disgust and discomfort in virtually everything she sees. It’s obvious that this Crypt has something nasty in store for these two and we’re in for a buy one get one free slice of karma once the story really gets up to speed, but I have to be honest, Walas directs his cast to act like they’re in some sort of exaggerated drawing room comedy as the performances regularly seem quite inconsistent. Moffett in particular seems to be veering between some figurative mustache twirling and going pell-mell into a period farce, pulling comedy faces and delivering camp screams like he’s participating in some vaudeville play. Gien fares better considering that she’s supposed to be shrill and annoying, but the only one in the cast who really properly nails that tone is a gleefully cackling Aubrey Morris as a sozzled doctor. The actor’s are probably only doing what they’ve been directed to do, but the exaggerated performances do manage to scupper any scares and matters are made a bit more awkward by the use of Voodoo in the plot.
Now, Tales From The Crypt has always loved a bit of Voodoo when it comes to injecting a bit of convenient magic into a plot, but while it’s about as thought to take as seriously as, say, the Voodoo used in Live And Let Die, it has admittedly aged about as well as radiator stored milk. However, despite all the chanting and shrieking that comes with horror film Voodoo ceremonies, an interesting fact arrises when we discover that Logan and Psyche used to date, but the prick dumped her after others showed a racist distaste of their relationship. Still, while the episode chugs along well enough, the second the love potion is deployed, the show almost fully trades in on some spectacular make-ups that detail the rapid decay of an undead Margaret who us being kept alive purely because of her Voodoo-powered love.
Assuming that his consistency pissed doctor friend has simply fucked up and buried his new wife alive, Logan is horrified to discover that she’s already been embalmed and as the night goes on, her physical condition spectacularly goes to shit.
A typical “zombie” make up with sunken eye sockets is up first before Margaret gets progressively more ravaged, and the main joke is that the vain Logan has to fend off his undead attacker because of a more carnal desire of the flesh rather than a more cannibalistic one. But Til Death leaves the best until last when a suicidal Logan us brought back from the grave himself to face an amorous wife who not only is now more skull than face, but has a big, fat, swollen, undulating tongue ready to give him a gruesome kiss.
While Chris Walas had all the ingredients to tell a truly chilling story (imagine someone wanting to fuck you after they were dead), the fact that he went down a more broader route means that Til Death is in danger of being buried in a grave marked “mediocre”. However, the superlative zombie effects really do perfectly evoke the kind of living dead you’d frequently in EC Comics (see also: George Romero’s Creepshow) and that final shot is legitimate gross enough to resurrect it into something more memorable.
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