TALES FROM THE CRYPT:
VAULT OF HORROR
Damn near turned my living room into a vomitorium
This tape is so much better than that other collection of TFtC episodes, Night Of Horror, it's...well, it's quite amazing, really. And it also marks the first time, EVER, that I've actually come close to vomiting just from sheer disgustingness. I felt my gorge rise, guys. My carpet breathed a sigh of relief when the feeling subsided. Yeah, maybe the intestine scene in The Gates Of Hell went further, but it didn't do it for me like this one did. Man, I don't even like thinking about it.
The first segment is called "Split Personality". I've never seen Joel Silver DIRECT anything before, and all things considered, he does a pretty good job here. Joe Pesci plays a conman, with all that Joe Pesci slime we all love, who dreams of scoring with twins. Needless to say, he gets his wish, and needless to say, he wishes he didn't. The credits for this one are quite impressive - Silver directs, Fred Dekker wrote, cinematography by Jan de Bont (back before he started directing), and Stuart Baird does work in there too, somewhere. It's pretty predictable, but no less fun for it.
The second one, "People In Brass Hearses", is a real hoot, especially for those of us who adored A Simple Plan. Bill Paxton stars as an ex-con who plots, along with his mildly retarded brother (Brad Dourif), the heist of the ice cream warehouse (!) which sent him to prison for stealing. Paxton's great (he eats sticks of butter the way Homer Simpson eats cookie dough), Dourif's really good as well, and it's fun to watch the weird little similarities and differences to ASP, which of course don't really mean anything since ASP was the better part of a decade away when this was made.
"Dead Wait", the last story (grruuummble goes my stomach), stars a red-haired James Remar as a thief who takes a job at a rich man's plantation in an extremely unstable island nation. His goal is to steal his boss's unique, giant black pearl, but he soon expands his goals to include stealing his mistress too. Whoopi Goldberg's in this one too, in a very Guinan-like role that requires her to smile beatifically, appear wise and generally be mysterious. Anyway, to make a long story short, this episode contains not only one of the most real-looking severed heads I've seen, but the gorge-rising scene involving innards and worms and I just don't wanna talk about it. I dunno, I've seen more realistic stuff than that, more extreme stuff than that...but it got to me nevertheless. Maybe Tobe Hooper hasn't lost it after all. (hand rushes to mouth)
Give it a look - they're definitely superior episodes from this series. All that, a chainsaw in the crotch and siamese twins joined at the ass too. What more can you ask for?