Tales From the Crypt: Season Five, Part Two

Well Cooked Hams: Before The Prestige, there was this standout episode featuring a perfectly cast Billy Zane as an incompetent magician in the 1920s. He meets an older illusionist (Martin Sheen, playing way against type) with a fantastic trick and longs to have it for his own repertoire. But if you're going to steal from a magician with actual talent, you better make sure you do it right. It's highly engaging and may come as no surprise that two years later, writer Andrew Kevin Walker would craft the brilliant screenplay for the classic serial killer film Seven. A

Creep Course: A college jock (Anthony Michael Hall) asks bookish girl Stella (Nina Siemaszko) for help passing a mid-term after a pompous professor of Egyptian history (Jeffrey Jones) threatens to have him kicked off the football team if he fails. From the start, it's obvious Stella is being manipulated and the first half of this episode is generally unpleasant. Maybe it's just me but I've never been comfortable with stories where someone's insecurity is taken advantage of. Things pick up a bit in the second half, when Stella ends up confronting an ancient mummy and manages to turn the tables. The mummy looks great and the final sight gag is good for a chuckle. C+

Came the Dawn: This was one of the most acclaimed stories from the old EC comics and having read it makes me ambivalent about this episode. Perry King plays a man on the outs with his wife who retreats to a cabin in the woods. On the way, he picks up a stranded woman (Brooke Shields) and later hears reports of a killer on the loose. Is his new friend dangerous or is he just being paranoid? It's a passable episode on its own but an awful adaptation of the comic, which had a poetic simplicity and a real sense of tragedy. For whatever reason, it was turned into yet another story of selfish jerks being awful, complete with a stupid twist out of a dozen better stories. This one deserved better. C

Oil's Well That Ends Well: A weak episode starring Lou Diamond Phillips and Priscilla Presley as con artists who get a group of men at a bar excited when they claim they've discovered oil under a nearby graveyard. This series often goes outside traditional horror stories and it's usually fine, but in this case it's just a story of deception without any blood or scares. It almost seems like an episode of a different show, complete with acting that's much worse than what we've come to expect. John Kassir does double duty in his one - in addition to his usual gig voicing the Crypt Keeper, he plays a small role in the story itself (which of course the Crypt Keeper takes great pains to point out during the outro). C-

Half-Way Horrible: That's more like it. The great character actor Clancy Brown gives an epic performance as Roger Lassen, a chemical exec about to unveil a miraculous preservative. At the same time, his business associates are being murdered by someone who seems to know a lot about the new formula. The answer lies in the past when Lassen and the others journeyed to Brazil to acquire the stuff from the natives. It's a solid mystery with some satisfyingly nasty moments near the end. B+

Till Death Do We Part: In the season finale, Kate Vernon plays a waitress having an affair with a mobster (John Stamos, He Who Does Not Age). The trouble is that he's also involved with a murderous older woman named "Ruthless Ruth" (Eileen Brennan) who has some very gruesome revenge in mind. What elevates this one above an average crime episode is a unique structure, cutting between past and present and then shocking the viewer with a brutal twist worthy of David Lynch. B+

So that's Season 5. On the whole, I'd say it was a little better than Season 4, although the back half had several weak episodes and it was surprisingly light on the supernatural elements that I prefer. I'll be back with Season 6 in 2019. Enjoy your Halloween, kiddies!