Tales from the Crypt Episode Guide

Season 3

#25    Loved to Death     (Originally aired on 6/15/91)

Starring: Andrew McCarthy, Mariel Hemingway, David Hemmings and Kathleen Freeman

Directed by Tom Mankiewicz

An aspiring screenwriter slips a beautiful actress a love potion.  The love potion causes her to become obsessed with him, and she won't ever leave him alone.  Desperate, the young man tries to poison her, but he ends up drinking the poison and dying.  The actress finds him in the afterlife - it seems she commited suicide by jumping out of a window, and she looks the worse for wear from it.

#26     Carrion Death     (Originally aired on 6/15/91)

Starring: Kyle MacLachlan and George Deloy

Directed by Steven E. de Souza

A violent criminal is being chased through the desert by a policeman and a hungry vulture.  The cop slaps the cuffs on him, but the criminal gets the upper hand and shoots the cop, but not before the cop can swallow the key to the cuffs.  The crook drags the corpse through the desert, and almost makes it to safety, but in the end, he ends up vulture food after falling from a high rock and becoming paralized.

#27     The Trap     (Originally aired on 6/15/91)

Starring: Teri Garr, Bruce McGill, Bruno Kirby, James Tolkan, Carroll Baker and Michael J. Fox

Directed by Michael J. Fox

Lou hatches a plan to bilk his life insurance company out of money by faking his own murder.  With the help of his unhappy wife and coroner brother, the plan works, and the sleeze escapes the country.  The man has plastic surgery, and returns home to claim his money only to find his wife and brother have shacked up with the cash.  He causes a scene and is arrested, causing the police to discover his fingerprints on the weapon that "killed" Lou.  Ultimately, he is convicted of his own murder and fries in the electric chair.

#28     Abra Cadaver     (Originally aired on 6/19/91)

Starring: Beau Bridges, Tony Goldwyn and Tom Wright

Directed by Stephen Hopkins

A young doctor plays a prank on his older brother - also a doctor - that causes paralisis of the older man's hand.  The older brother believes that the brain stays alive long after clinical death.  He poisons his younger brother to proves this theory, and we see most of the episode from the point of view of the "dead" brother.  In the end, we find that the older brother was playing a prank on the younger one by injecting him with an experimental drug that keeps the brain alive when the rest is dead.  Sadly, this induces a heart attack, and the younger brother dies anyways.

#29     Top Billing     (Originally aired on 6/26/61)

Starring: Jon Lovitz, Bruce Boxleitner, John Astin, Louise Fletcher, Kimmy Robertson, Paul Benedict, Gregory Cooke and Sandra Bernhard

Directed by Myles Berkowitz

A plain-looking actor gets a double dose of bad news when he's dumped by his girlfriend and his agent.  Desperate, he tries out for a role in a way off Broadway production of Hamlet.  When a better looking rival actor shags the part, the plain actor kills him and gets the part.  He suffers the unkindest cut of all though when the director gives him the axe - Literally!

#30    Dead Wait     (Originally aired on 7/3/91)

Starring: Whoopi Goldberg, John Rhys-Davies, Vanity and James Remar

Directed by Tobe Hooper

A conman moves in on a sick old man who owns a rare, priceless black pearl.  In the process he teams up with the old man's money hungry girlfriend, who he is warned away from by a local voodoo priestess.  He murders the old man, and finds that he must dig through the corpse's disease infested insides for the pearl, because the old man swallowed it before he died.  After dispatching of the girlfriend, the voodoo priestess helps the conman escape, but her intentions are not good since he now has something that she craves more than any pearl.

#31     The Reluctant Vampire   (Originally aired on 7/10/91)

Starring: Malcolm McDowell, Sandra Searles Dickinson, George Wendt, Michael Berryman and Paul Gleason

Directed by Elliot Silverstein

A vampire who hates to kill gets the perfect job: night watchman at a blood bank.  When the blood starts to run low, threatening to put the place out of business, he is forced to kill criminals to replenish the supply.  When his unscrupulous boss finds out what's going on, he tries to blackmail the vampire.  With the help of a lady friend, the vampire arranges it so that the boss ends up getting a stake put in his heart by a vampire hunter.

#32    Easel Kill Ya     (Originally aired on 7/17/91

Starring: Tim Roth, Roya Megnot, Nancy Fish, Debra Mooney and William Atherton

Directed by John Harrison

A struggling artist can only find inspiration to paint by killing peoples.  He finds a twisted art dealer willing to pay big bucks for his paintings.  When his girlfriend uncovers his crimes, she runs out in front of a car and suffers severe injuries.  In order to pay for the surgery, the artist kills a man outside the hospital and sells the painting to the dealer.  Ironically, the man he killed was the doctor who was going to save the girl's life, and she dies.  The artist ends up in hot water when the cops find his prints on a paintbrush left at the scene.

#33    Undertaking Palor    (Originally aired on 7/24/91)

Starring: John Glover, Graham Jarvis, Aron Eisenberg, Scott Fults, Jason Marsden and Jonathan Quan

Directed by Michael Thau

Four teenage boys discover a deadly plot between the town's mortician and the pharmacist to poison people's medication and reap the money from the expensive funerals.  When one of the boys' father becomes a victim, they set off to expose the dirty deeds by catching it all on video tape.  They set the mortician and the pharmacist off against one another and eventually the mortician kills the pharmacist, and the boys kill the mortician in self defense.

#34     Mournin' Mess    (Originally aired on 7/31/91)

Starring: Steven Weber, Rita Wilson, Ally Walker, Vincent Schiavelli, Nick Angotti and Frank Kopyc

Directed by Manny Coto

A womanizing reporter digs into the mystery of a killer stalking the homeless.  A new cemetery is built for the deceased by a charity group called the Greatful Homeless Outcasts and Unwanteds Layaway Society - or GHOULS for short.  After some digging - Literally - the reporter discovers that the society really IS made up of flesh-eating ghouls, and he becomes their next meal.

#35    Split Second    (Originally aired on 8/7/91)

Starring: Brion James, Michelle Johnson and Billy Wirth

Directed by Russell Mulcahy

A sleezy woman marries the insanely jealous owner of a logging company.  Out of boredom, she attempts to seduce a handsome employee to get her husband riled up.  She gets more than she bargained for when her husband beats the young man senseless after catching them together.  The young employee goes blind from the beating, but the other employees rally together to teach him how to cut wood with a chainsaw without sight.  Little does the employee know, but his boss is bound and gagged inside the log that he is sawing.  After cutting the boss to bits, he turns his sights on another log, this one with the slutty wife trapped inside.

#36     Deadline      (Originally aired on 8/14/91)

Starring: Richard Jordan, Jon Polito, Richard Herd, John Capodice, Rutanya Alda and Marg Helgenberger

Directed by Walter Hill

A down on his luck reporter decides to turn his life around after an affair with a beautiful woman.  His old boss tells him he's better bring in a good story if he wants to keep his job.  He thinks he's hit the jackpot when he wanders into a diner when a man is crying because he thinks he has killed his wife.  It seems, the man's wife was having affairs all over town with drunks and bums to humiliate him.  The reporter goes to see the corpse, and finds that it is the woman he had turned his life around for, and she is still very much alive.  The reporter strangles her to death to make it look like her husband killed her, but he of course ends up getting caught.

#37     Spoiled      (Originally aired on 8/21/91)

Starring: Faye Grant, Alan Rachins, Anita Morris, Tristan Rogers, Annabelle Gurwitch and Anthony LaPaglia

Directed by Andy Wolk

A woman, obsessed with a soap opera, decides to imitate her favorite character and have an affair to spite her workaholic scientist husband.  The husband works around the clock in a basement lab perfecting a new drug.  The woman has a hot affair with the cable installer. Just when everything is going her way, her husband catches them in the act and makes them a part of his twisted experiment.

#38     Yellow      (Originally aired on 8/28/91)

Starring: Kirk Douglas, Eric Douglas, Dan Aykroyd and Lance Henriksen

Directed by Robert Zemeckis

During WWI, a young military man embarrasses his father the General by being deemed "yellow" for his acts of cowardess during battle.  Sentenced to die because of one of these acts that resulted in the deaths of other soldiers, the man appeals to the General for help. The General tells his son that he will face the firing squad, however, the father will make sure that all of the guns are filled with blanks, the son just has to play dead.  The son faces the firing squad with courage, making his father proud.  However, the General lied, and the son ends up being executed.

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