Welcome to the weekly TV thread.
The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is a bunch of Ry Cooder score cues from 1989’s electrifying “The Man Who Was Death.” Tales from the Crypt’s very first episode was cleverly directed and co-written by the legendary Walter Hill, whom Cooder regularly composed film scores for—I love Cooder’s scores for the Hill movies Southern Comfort and Streets of Fire—and it contained another enjoyable score by Cooder. “The Man Who Was Death” is one of five first-season Tales from the Crypt episodes I just watched for the first time on Prime Video.
Three months after I expressed how pleased I was that it was going to make its streaming debut on the horror streaming service Shudder, Tales from the Crypt—the subject of film critic Kristen Lopez’s eagerly awaited and upcoming Welcome, Boils and Ghouls!: The Complete Oral History of Tales From the Crypt—is no longer a Shudder exclusive.
Until the end of July, Shudder is allowing the first five episodes of the first season of HBO’s series of loose adaptations of old EC Comics horror or crime stories to be free to Prime subscribers to lure them to join Shudder. But anyone who’s not interested in Shudder can also now watch all seven seasons of Tales from the Crypt for free on Tubi.
The one streaming service that’s the closest thing to a now-defunct and quirky video store like Lost Weekend Video (the combination video store and comedy performance space I used to frequently travel by Caltrain from San Jose to San Francisco for, just to rent a bunch of out-of-print DVDs I was dying to watch) added Tales from the Crypt’s entire run to its offerings on July 17. (Tubi rules—mostly because I have an ad blocker. That makes Tubi much less of a pain to use.)
I love that it’s now on Tubi because I’ve been watching a bunch of Tales from the Crypt episodes for the first time via digitized videotapes of HBO airings of the show that are up on Internet Archive—I don’t subscribe to Shudder—and the “not in 4K but looks alright as long as the episode was shot in 35mm” prints of Tales from the Crypt that are up on Prime and Tubi easily trounce those VHS copies. (The 1972 Amicus version of Tales from the Crypt is also up on Tubi and Internet Archive. I’m also looking forward to watching that for the first time.)
However, I’m going to miss the presence of the early ’90s HBO promos that are attached to many of the Internet Archive copies of Tales from the Crypt episodes. The sonorous voice of Victor Caroli, whom I best remember as the narrator of the first Transformers animated series (“The brutal Decepticons were driven by a single goal: total domination”) and Hasbro’s Transformers toy ads, always popped up during at least one ’90s HBO promo.
The old promos take me back to always watching HBO free preview weekends on basic cable when I was a kid. I always caught those free preview weekends because my dad unsubscribed from HBO in 1982 (our family had HBO—which was where I first saw The Great Muppet Caper and then watched it repeatedly there—for about two years), and he never subscribed to it again until after I moved out to attend UC Santa Cruz. They were the only way I could watch HBO without having to subscribe to it. (A free preview weekend was how I watched the first Sopranos episode I ever encountered. It was “College,” and it was amazing.) One of the Tales from the Crypt episodes on one of the humongous files I downloaded from Internet Archive is preceded by a promo for the HBO premiere of Rocky V.
The promo for Rocky V is very 1991, and it made me smile because one of my favorite memories of being on Twitter was briefly talking about the 1990 sequel in 2013 with sports journalist Dave Zirin, who said that he likes the least-loved out of all the Rocky sequels. I tweeted that I never watched Rocky V and will do so now after I saw Zirin point out that Eric from Entourage gets his ass whupped in the movie. The beating of Kevin Connolly remains one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen.
Zirin wrote, “For anyone who hate-watched Entourage, it is too sweet for words to see ‘child-E’ get knocked down to the pavement.” The rest of Rocky V is still not as sweet as that.
Tales from the Crypt is also as sweet as an unlikable Entourage cast member getting punched in the face. If I wanted to introduce someone to Tales from the Crypt, the gateway episode I’d go with is 1993’s “People Who Live in Brass Hearses,” a robbery-gone-wrong story that guest-starred the late Bill Paxton as a short-tempered felon who eats nothing but entire sticks of butter. (His all-butter diet is more terrifying than any of the gory murders in the episode.) I watched the Russell Mulcahy-directed “Brass Hearses” for the first time in June on Dailymotion (before it was deleted), and it’s one of my favorite episodes of the show so far. It perfectly illustrates how gnarly and genuinely funny Tales from the Crypt could often be when it was in horror comedy mode. (So does the Robert Zemeckis revamp of “And All Through the House.”)
I have a friend in the Bay Area who is obsessed with The Twilight Zone. She watches Syfy’s New Year’s Eve marathon of The Twilight Zone every year. Tales from the Crypt currently does for me what The Twilight Zone does for her as a half-hour anthology show she considers to be comfort TV.
Like with any one of the multiple incarnations of The Twilight Zone, not every episode of Tales from the Crypt works. For instance, I wanted the Fred Dekker-directed “The Thing from the Grave,” which guest-starred a pre-Seinfeld Teri Hatcher as a supermodel, the late Miguel Ferrer as her abusive fiancée/manager, and a pre-Homicide Kyle Secor as the mild-mannered photographer she’s in love with, to be a punchier episode than what I saw because look at that cast, man.
But Tales from the Crypt has something The Twilight Zone lacks, and it always redeems any episode that doesn’t quite hit the mark: a scenery-chewing puppet host who always delivers dad jokes (“Good help is so hard to fiend, isn’t it, kiddies?”) and sometimes kills people right before the credits are rolled.
The puppeteering of the Kevin Yagher-designed Crypt Keeper (by a team of puppeteers that included the late Van Snowden, Pee-wee’s Playhouse’s lead puppeteer) is remarkable stuff, and I love John Kassir’s voice work as the little guy. I went back to pursuing voice acting after a 17-year hiatus from taking voice acting classes, and none of the aspiring voice actors I met or have done scenes with during voice acting classes on Zoom are competitive and mean, which is kind of astounding. We all have a few things in common. For instance, we’re always rooting for each other. And we, of course, all want to have a steady gig that’s as fun as what Kassir got to slew as the Crypt Keeper. [Crypt Keeper cackle.]
Today’s prompt: Is there a prematurely axed HBO show that you miss a lot? I wouldn’t be surprised if I see Looking, Carnivale, or Rome pop up in the comments section. The HBO Max shows Warrior and South Side are shows I first watched long after they were prematurely canceled, and I wish they were uncanceled. But Warrior and South Side don’t count because they were HBO Max originals, not HBO originals, so my answer to my own question is Deadwood—even though I’m satisfied with the occasionally moving 2019 Deadwood reunion movie that David Milch was able to write and complete despite already being in the throes of Alzheimer’s. During Deadwood’s second and penultimate season in 2005, I really thought Milch’s western series was going to have a long and healthy run like Gunsmoke and Bonanza did. Deadwood was that good.