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| Harriet Von Lupin |
Hi
there! Gosh, it’s just about time! Harriet Von Lupin, your raving
reporter here for The
MonsterGrrls’ Thir13en For Halloween,
and today we’re going to talk about another of these anthology
thingies. This one is one that Mad Doc remembers from watching it on
TV, when he was like our age. It’s called Tales From The
Darkside, and it must have been
pretty good, ‘cause there was a movie
too, and we’re also gonna talk about that!
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| TFTD's title card |
Tales From The Darkside got
started because the movie Creepshow
was successful (I talked about that one here!), and so people in TV
got talking about about a TV series. Because Warner Bros. Studios
owned some stuff in Creepshow,
the guys at Laurel Entertainment (who produced Creepshow)
decided to go in another direction, and came up with Tales
From The Darkside. The new name
kind of went along with what Creepshow
was, which was a live-action horror comic. Even though TFTD
wasn’t comic-booky like Creepshow,
the stories in it were still kind of like that, with bad guys who did
bad things and then paid for it through supernatural means. George
Romero, who had directed Creepshow
and some other famous horror movies (hi there, Night Of The
Living Dead!) executive-produced
the series with Richard P.
Rubinstein (meaning they had
something to do with everything!)
Like other famous anthology series
such as Twilight Zone, Thriller,
and The Outer Limits, TFTD
had famous writers supplying stories for episode scripts. Both of
Stephen King’s short stories “Word Processor Of The Gods” and
“Sorry, Right Number” got turned into TFTD
episodes, along with other stories by Frederik Pohl, Clive Barker,
Robert Bloch (boy, he
sure turns up a lot), Harlan
Ellison, John Cheever and Michael McDowell. TFTD
was a hit with horror fans, and ran for four seasons in weekly
syndication from Tribune Broadcasting, with a lot of loyal viewers
(even though they aired it after midnight!). After TFTD
wound up, a similar series called Monsters,
also produced by Laurel Entertainment and Richard Rubinstein, came
out, and it was a hit too! (Maybe we’ll talk about that one a
little later!)
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| The poster for TFTD: The Movie |
In
1990, Tales From The Darkside: The Movie came
out, and because both Romero
and King were involved (one of the stories was scripted by Romero
from a story by King) a lot of people started calling this one the
unofficial third Creepshow
movie. It starts out with a modern-day witch (Debbie Harry)
preparing to, um, prepare
a kid she has captured as the main course for a dinner party. (Hey,
y’all, this is Punkin, and I’m here to tell you that don’t no
witches eat no children. That’s just a fib. --P. Nightshade) To
stall for time, the kid (Matthew Lawrence) tells her three stories
from a book she gave him, called Tales From The Darkside.
The first one is a story called “Lot 249,” based on a short story
by Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote all those Sherlock Holmes stories.
In it, a grad student (Steve Buscemi) has been cheated by two other
students (Robert Sedgwick and Julianne Moore) out of a scholarship,
and even framed for theft! So he does what any grad student would do
in his situation: he sends a mummy after ‘em. Like, it’s
even there in the university class catalog. “How To Raise The Dead
For Fun And Profit.” (Ha! That’s a joke!)
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| The star of "The Cat From Hell" |
The second one is called “The Cat From Hell,” and this is the one
that Romero and King did. In it, a really rich old guy in a
wheelchair (William Hickey) calls a professional hitman (David
Johansen) in for an unusual job: kill a black cat, which the old guy
believes has already murdered the rest of his family. See,
the old guy runs a pharmaceutical company, which killed about 5,000
black cats through drug testing, and he thinks the black cat’s
trying to get revenge. Well, you can’t tell about cats
(believe me, buddy, I’m a werewolf and I know), but the
hitman takes the hire, since the old guy’s offering a BIG
paycheck for killing the cat. You probably can already figure out
that this isn’t going to go so well…
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| The gargoyle from "Lover's Vow" |
The last one, “Lover’s Vow,” written by Michael McDowell, is
kinda sad even though it’s scary. It’s both a love story and
a horror story, and it’s about this failed artist (James Remar)
who witnesses a gargoyle killing a victim. The gargoyle
agrees not to kill the artist guy if he swears to never tell
anyone what he’s seen, or try to tell people what the gargoyle
looks like. (Of course, the artist guy agrees because he doesn’t
want to die.) Soon after, Artist Guy meets this beautiful
woman (Rae Dawn Chong) who becomes his girlfriend, and after that
things start turning around for him—his art becomes really
successful, and he starts becoming this rising star in the art
world. But he can’t get the gargoyle out of his mind, and, well,
he’s an artist. And all those bad memories have to go
somewhere, so how long is it gonna be before the secret is
out? And of course, at the end of the movie, we have
to find out what happens to the witch and the kid… is it gonna be a
happy ending, or not?
Both the series and the movie are really cool horror stories, and if
you can find them on DVD or the streaming thingys, they’re perfect
Halloween viewing. And that’s it for me, but we’re gonna have
more stuff going on in the next post for The MonsterGrrls’ Thir13en
For Halloween! OWW-WOOOOO!!!
Love,
Harriet Von Lupin
MAD DOCTOR’S NOTE: Tales From The Darkside
(both series and movie) are available on DVD from Amazon, and TFTD:
The Movie is currently streaming on Amazon Prime for your
viewing fright. You’re welcome.
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| "Hey, you wanna hear a story?" |
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