Only Sin Deep

"This face is my meal-ticket, honey!" Sylvia Vane

There is a certain sinister perfection in each episode of Tales from the Crypt. Based, as it is, on the ghoulish O. Henry twists and plots predicated on well-deserved cosmic justice, as first presented in the infamous Fifties horror comics published by EC (Tales from the Crypt, Haunt of Fear, Vault of Horror, Shock SuspenStories, etc.), the series takes its comic twists and turns quite seriously—until the ghoulish cackling starts to resonate down the hallway of the black-hearted and black-humored viewer with a paean to morbid wit. Or whatever. (It's my job to sound like I know what I'm doing. Much as in this telefilm that follows, I am all surface. Below, who knows what lurks? It's the point of horror.)

Here, a voodooistic pawnbroker that looks like Randy Quaid and Brent Spiner had an abortive offspring is keeping, in the manner of Count von Cosel, a rather hideous, desiccated trophy wife in a pine box, her delicate, decaying arms folded lovingly across her stillborn chest, no heart of chocolate candy or otherwise beating within the cage of those yellowing rib bones.

I think you rather get the picture. But even if you don't, you soon will.

Lea Thompson, an actress who managed to survive the scourge of Howard the Duck (a comic book movie adaptation so abysmal even hardcore bad movie cultists avoid it as if it were a disease-carrying fowl), is a prostitute with a tough, inner-city, low-class brogue and quite an attractive exterior. She works outside a high-rise owned by Ronnie “Price” (Brett Cullen), the name here implying that, yes indeed, ladies and germs, there will be one to pay later.

She works this side of the street with friend Raven (Pamella D'Pella), and she violently violates the very pimp (G. Smokey Campbell) that comes to do something to her in an alley in a scene that leaves one wondering (at the fact that this sort of thing is a little unusual overall).

She steals Raven's pimp's jewel-encrusted watch as if she had just rolled 2d6 and robbed an orc. She takes it to the pawnbroker/occultist played by Britt Leach, but he steadfastly refuses to buy hot items. He instead makes her an offer she can't refuse: ten thousand dollars in exchange for her beauty. Who wouldn't jump immediately at such a stupendous deal?

Making a curious, inscrutable plaster bust of her, he gives her the money, and she quickly uses it to make herself over into a dreamboat, all the better to attempt to snag millionaire Ronnie, whose Trump Tower-like building she formerly sold herself in front of.

She has some success at this at first, but quickly realizes, looking at her debased skin in the mirror, that there is something wrong here. Her beauty is slipping away rapidly, and thus she dons a black veil and some sort of funeral mourning attire, and goes to visit the pawnbroker again.

Her beauty has been "transferred," you see. A vampiric state of affairs, to be sure. The pawnbroker, who really does have rather bad teeth, it seems, makes her a second offer, one she can't quite refuse.

We refuse to give up the ghost, or the details, of how this sour saga of sordid sagacity and scintillating, sexy suspense terminates. But, as the rapidly dissolving face of Lea Thompson would suggest, it sure isn't pretty.

The fear exploited here is ugliness, as a metaphor for social climbing and class struggle. The subtext nearly smacks you across your rotten, Reagan-era kisser. All horror nightmares are buried subtext. We imbue these fears with life, like the body of a woman in a backroom box.

The TV is the nightmare window of all our ugly dreams.

Tales from the Crypt | S01E04 | Only Sin Deep

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