#who would've thought it in a Roth adaptation

[lizardsfromspace]

Greetings, boils, ghouls, skele-thems and non-bone-ary individuals! Tonight's terror tale is called "I just finished watching Tales from the Crypt and here are my thoughts on the series". Horror pun

Season One

Season one was just six episodes, and aired in June 1989. The whole season, because the first three episodes aired on one night, which would be the case for every season but the last. This season isn't quite there yet, notably the Cryptkeeper animatronic is less expressive and the character himself is less silly.

Best Episode: "And All Through The Night". The most important episode, because it set the tone for the series (the premiere is good, but not very representative, being a crime story with a fourth-wall breaking protagonist). It's the story about a woman who kills her husband, and then finds herself stalked by a evil, killer Santa. All from the director of Back to the Future.

Honorable Mentions: "The Man Who Was Death", "Dig That Cat...He's Real Gone", "Collection Complete"

Worst Episode: idk "Lover Come Hack to Me" is p. forgettable

Season Two

Season two is a step up in length (18 episodes!), the Cryptkeeper (more expressive and more cackly), and stars (Arnold Schwarzenegger directs the second episode). It set the pattern for what the show was: a ghoulish, bloody horror anthology, done with high production values and featuring Hollywood's biggest stars and directors.

The one problem, and it's one that will haunt the rest of the show's run, is that Tales from the Crypt also features a fair chunk of non-horror crime stories, and they're pretty bland on the whole. Luckily, the show's producers know not to do them all the time...yet.

Best Episode: "Television Terror". Tales from the Crypt was rarely scary, or really trying to be. It leaned more towards "fun", and as for scare factor, well, these were adaptions of comic books designed to scare children (and even though it was a very R-rated HBO show, kids loved Tales from the Crypt, enough for it to get both a Saturday morning cartoon & a kid's game show spinoff). But "Television Terror" is one of the few episodes that actually tries for grim, serious horror, and it's the show's scariest episode. It also stars sleazy 80s talk show host Morten Downey, Jr. as a sleazy talk show host, real stretch of a role there.

Honorable Mentions: "Cutting Cards" is another of the show's best episodes; "Three's A Crowd" has one of its best dark twist endings; "For Cryin' Out Loud" features Lee Arenberg as a murderous band promoter taunted by his conscience, Sam Kinison; "Four-Sided Triangle" features Patricia Arquette as a woman in love with a scarecrow; "The Ventriloquist's Dummy" is a twist on the cliche featuring Don Rickles; "Lower Berth" is a romance between a circus freak and a cursed mummy, with a surprise twist; "Mute Witness to Murder" is one of the show's few great noir episodes; "My Brother's Keeper" is a story of Siamese twins.

Worst Episode: "Dead Right", the season premiere. Demi Moore is a gold digger who marries a man when a psychic tells her he'll inherit a large sum of money, then shortly die. There's a decent prophecy twist, but man, so much of this is devoted to showing off how gross the man she married was.

Season Three

Around season three, a spinoff called Two-Fisted Tales was proposed, which would've adapted EC Comics' pulp action & adventure stories. It was never picked up, but the pilot's segements were folded into Tales, with one in season three and two in season four.

Best Episode: "Abra Cadaver". Beau Bridges gets revenge for his brother's prank by trapping him in his own body. Great, ghoulish POV work here.

Honorable Mentions: "Carrion Death" features Kyle MacLachlan as a fugitive handcuffed to a dead cop who swallowed the key to the cuffs; "The Trap" is a crime story with a good twist; "Top Billing" features Jon Lovitz as a struggling actor who will do anything to get a part in Hamlet; "Easel Kill Ya" has Tim Roth as a starving artist turned killer; "Undertaking Palor" is a kids-on-bikes story featuring Aron Eisenberg and Ke Huy Quan; "Mournin' Mess" has the guy from Wings investigating a group helping the homeless whose name is literally GHOULS; "Yellow" is one of the Two-Fisted Tales stories, featuring Kirk Douglas as a WWI general and his son Eric as the general's cowardly son.

Worst Episode: "Spoiled". It's a soap opera parody. Enough said.

Season Four

Season four and five are the show's peak.

Best Episode: "Split Personality". Goofy horror-comedy. Joe Pesci is a con artist who pretends to be twins so he can marry a pair of twins who. Don't want to share.

Honorable Mentions: "None But The Lonely Heart" is a story of a serial murderer of old women, directed by...Tom Hanks?; "On a Dead Man's Chest" is a tale of heavy metal and moving tattoos; "Seance" is another good noir episode; "Beauty Rest" is "Top Billing" but about a beauty pageant; "What's Cookin'" stars Christopher Reeve as a chef who discovers a new source of meat; "The New Arrival" is another of the show's legitimately scary episodes, featuring child psychologist David Warner going to the home of patient Zelda Rubinstein; "Strung Along" features Donald O'Connor as a puppeteer trying to make a comeback, but is his new assistant what he appears to be?

Worst Episode: "This'll Kill Ya". This one is just...bad? It opens with a protracted rip-off HOMAGE of the 1950 noir D.O.A., before diving into a boring weird science story, and ending with a contrived twist.

Season Five

Best Episode: "Death of Some Salesmen". TIM CURRY IN THREE ROLES!

Honorable Mentions: "Forever Ambergris" features Steve Buscemi and gnarly melting efffects; "Food for Thought" is a gothic circus story with Ernie Hudson and Joan Chen; "People Who Live in Brass Hearses" features Bill Paxton and Brad Dourif as crooks trying to rob a ice cream man; "House of Horror" features Wil Wheaton as a college student being put through ghostly hazing; "Creep Course" is a tale of mummies.

Worst Episode: "Came the Dawn". It's a worse Psycho, which means an evil-alternate-personality twist. Pass.

Season Six

OOF.

Season six starts fine, with two great episodes. Then...

OOF.

The show suddenly becomes comedy episodes and crime stories all the way down. Where are the ghouls? Where are the vampires? WHERE ARE THE WEREWOLVES??? (though the show never produced a great werewolf episode and I am Disappointed by that)

We do get some towards the end of the season, but this is the show's worst, by a lot.

It ends with "You, Murderer", a first-person story notable for resurrecting Humphrey Bogart (and, in the frame story, Alfred Hitchcock) via CGI. Which probably seemed more fun at the time, when it was a passing tech fad and not...a thing studios were actually trying to do

Best Episode: "Only Skin Deep". It's weird that such a silly season gave us one of the show's scariest episodes: the tale of a creep who picks up a masked woman at a costume party, and discovers it's the biggest mistake he'll ever make.

Honorable Mentions: "Let the Punishment Fit the Crime" is a Nothing But Trouble-y story of Catherine O'Hara as an ambulance-chasing lawyer facing strict justice in a small town; "Staired in Horror" is a gothic curse story with a goopy ending; "Comes the Dawn" features CREATURES in a proto-30 Days of Night; "99 & 44/100% Pure Horror" is a story of the wife of a soap manufacturer, and also has a goopy ending.

Worst Episode: Many contenders, but one obvious winner. "The Pit" is a story of MMA fighters being pushed into a cage match by their wives. Nobody dies, and nothing even slightly horrific happens. It's just. Boxing. I have no idea why the Cryptkeeper is telling me about this

Season Seven

The seventh and final season suddenly moves the show to London. Yes, the entire season is produced in Britain; if you're expecting big British 90s stars, though, think again - apparently, British actors refused to do the show in Britain because of high taxes. It does feature not-yet-famous actors like Ewan McGregor and Daniel Craig, though.

I was told this was the worst one, but while it's nowhere near the peak, it's...better? This season does something unique by merging the crime stories and the horror stories into one, leading to many episodes that start with criminals, who then encounter something paranormal. It's also tilted more towards Actual Horror

The Cryptkeeper segments in this one feel perfunctory, though; after they started to sprawl out in the last couple seasons, he's barely in these, and there's only two that are Britain-themed despite the show pushing the British setting hard (the show's never had so many establishing shots). But the Cryptkeeper gets his largest role of the series in the series finale, "The Third Pig", the show's only animated episode and the only one narrated by the Cryptkeeper.

Best Episode: "Horror in the Night". A man shot in a heist finds his way to a hotel, which quickly turns surreal. Another of the show's scary episodes, and one featuring a kind of hallucinatory horror it rarely did.

Honorable Mentions: "Cold War" seems to be a crime story, but with a paranormal twist (this is the one with Ewan McGregor, who's American); "Report from the Grave" features a parapsychologist whose experiments in afterlife contact turn fatal; "About Face" is a bit of gothic Victoriana about a corrupt priest's illegitimate daughters; "Confession" stars Eddie Izzard as a suspect in serial killings.

Worst Episode: "Last Respects". The director of the 1972 Tales from the Crypt film returns to direct...a much worse version of one of that film's segments? Not sure what happened here.

Anyway should you watch Tales from the Crypt in 2023? YES!!! Tales from the Crypt filters through just about every genre of horror at some point (there are even a couple episodes that are proto-found footage) and even if it's rarely 'scary' it's almost always fun. It's also cool to see such a high-profile horror show, such a unabashedly pulpy and gross horror show, made in a time where horror was increasingly a dirty word. Now if only they could work out the rights issues so we can get our boy the Cryptkeeper back on his throne (pronounced like bone)

[opheliaintherushes]

Oh, HBO, look what happens when you spend money on great writers and period costumes instead of ice dragons.

[dangertoozmanykids101]

'What It Feels Like...'

*links are in blue.

The title of this article is "What It Feels Like: Changing Your Sex, Having Narcolepsy & Being Attacked by an Alligator." It was published in Esquire Magazine on Jan 29, 2007. I stumbled upon it because I wanted to read Jimmy Kimmel's essay about being a narcoleptic.

I'm narcoleptic. I've mentioned it several times randomly here and there. It's not that big a deal. I don't really know any different and until my early 20s I had no clue other people didn't struggle like I did/do to stay awake, because everyone experiences being tired. Right? But narcolepsy is different than just being tired. Unfortunately Jimmy Kimmel's essay is a bit bland compared to many of the other essays collected here. Of course, narcolepsy is not a really exciting disorder filled with whizbangs and whistles, but this does now inspire me to write my own essay.

It's difficult to pick a favorite essay from this collection, but I am super impressed how fascinating I found several essays when I had no prior interest at all in the topic. Who would've guessed that the 'stealing home base' essay would be one if my favorite essays in this collection, even thoughI have zero interest in baseball.

Well, aside from Charlie Sheen in Major League.....

The women in League Of Her Own.....

Amd Tim Robbins with Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham. Mmmmmm......

Here are the essays in this article that I linked to, listing just the essaytitle and summary or just authors. SERIOUSLY these are super interesting AND will especially be great for writer research. The first essay alone has me going back to make changes to an progress fic where Loki is falling.

What It Feels Like...to Parachute from Space

By Joe Kittinger, 74, retired Air Force test pilot, who has held the world parachuting record, 102,800 feet, since 1960, as told to David Pfister.

What It Feels Like...to Change Your Sex

By Amanda Kent, 49, marketing manager, as told to Bryan Mealer

What It Feels Like...to Be a Dominatrix

By Storm, 24, TV producer, as told to Genevieve J. Roth

What It Feels Like...to See Music

By Sean Day, 41, college professor, as told to David Jacobson

What It Feels Like...to Steal Home

By Rod Carew, 57, baseball player, as told to Mike Sager

What It Feels Like...to Be in a NASCAR Crash

By Mike Harmon, 45, Race-car driver, as told to John Korpics

What It Feels Like...to Survive a Fire

By Phil Barr, 21, student, Bates College, as told to Daniel Torday

What It Feels Like...to Be in an Earthquake

What It Feels Like...to Have Size DDD Breasts

By Anonymous, 30, recruiter, as told to Aimee E. Bartol

What It Feels Like...to Have Narcolepsy

By Jimmy Kimmel, 35, host of Jimmy Kimmel Live, as told to Brendan Vaughan

What It Feels Like...to Be Paranoid

By Mark Twain, writer, adapted from the account of the 1868 San Francisco earthquake in Roughing It

What It Feels Like...to Be a Kleptomaniac

By Anonymous, as told to Kevin McDonnell

By Ian Chovil, 49, consultant, as told to Tyler Cabot

What It Feels Like...to Be Attacked by an Alligator

By Don Goodman, 59, director of the Kanapaha Botanical Gardens, Gainesville, Florida, as told to Jeff Klinkenberg

What It Feels Like...to Surf the Biggest Wave on Record

By Mike Parsons, 38, professional surfer, as told to Daniel Torday

What It Feels Like...to Be Trapped in a Submarine

By Allen C. Bryson, 85, machinist on the USS Squalus, which suffered valve failure on May 23, 1939, and sank off the coast of New Hampshire. Twenty-six men drowned immediately; thirty-three were trapped on the ocean floor for thirty-nine hours. As told to Ted Allen

@caffiend-queen @nildespirandum @redfoxwritesstuff @wolfsmom1 @emeraldrosequartz @latent-thoughts