Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.
This is Rob and I'm Joe, and today we are going to unscramble the cable signal and tune into some Tales from the Crypt.
That's right, Yeah, we have another slice of nineties genre cinema for you this week. Except this one's far cheaper than Free Jack. I think, ultimately a more enjoyable film, but it is, of course the initial cinematic spinoff of HBO's Tales from the Crypt. It is Taiales from the Crypt, Demon Knight from what nineteen ninety five?
That sounds right, Yeah, it looks very mid nineties. So I guess this one and last week's are a little bit more mainstream than we usually go.
Yeah, yeah, they're more mainstream. But Demon Night is also one. I mean, Freejack is definitely a film that it did not perform to expectation and was kind of just thrown out there and died and was forgotten by many. Demon Night is a film that I think also is you know, we're talking about this before we started recording, you know, maybe a little underappreciated, though it certainly has its following and oh yeah, and you know, continues to be popular
to this day. But you don't hear it championed that often as being like a great piece of horror horror comedy from the nineties.
I guess it's hard to argue that it's great, but it is really fun. This is a really fun, r rated, frisky piece of horror comedy.
Yeah, it's It's essentially a siege movie. So the basic structure is pretty pretty nailed down, you know, like you're gonna have characters go somewhere, they're gonna hold up there, and then things are gonna try and get in and get them. It's the basic Night of the Living Dead scenario.
Yeah, it's Night of the Living Dead, evil Dead assault on Precinct thirteen, that kind of thing.
Yeah, so well, let's just jump right into the elevator pitch on this one just now. This is the elevator pitch for the basic movie itself. The Unholy Demon Lords have six of the seven keys they need to drag the universe back into darkness, and the only thing standing in their way on Planet Earth for that last key is one immortal drifter and a ragtag bunch of losers. In a rundown hotel in the middle of the desert.
Uh huh, in a place called Wormwood, New Mexico. I looked it up. Not a real place.
It sounds nice and biblical, though, which is good because there's a lot of biblical nonsense going on in this particular movie.
Yeah, and this movie is just jammed with drifters.
Yeah, yeah, it's all it's basically all drifters. I mean, and I've actually seen it discussed in the sense that it's like the meek shall inherit the earth, and this is the meek. These are all the sorts of losers that Jesus Christ himself would have hung out with in life.
Maybe not Thomas Hayden Church. He's not that meek, but he's a scumbag in this So yeah, that's true. So the Pharisees come to Jesus and they say, hey, you sit down to eat with the sinners and tax collectors and even with Thomas Hayden Church.
All right, well, let's go ahead, have just a little bit of the trailer audio here, and there's probably gonna be a little criptkeeper in there.
Universal Pictures is proud to present the Motion picture Directing debut of.
One of America's most talented and respected artists.
Hot Cat.
Oh hello kitties, So glad you could join me? Your pal. The Cryptkeeper has gone Hollywood in a big way. I'm directing my first feature film, Care for a Little Shriek preview.
My Big Scream premiere.
I wanted lots of suspecse, special effects, sex, the kind of thing you could really sink your teeth into, frights, camera and ladies if you think demon nice gross and yucke. Thank you.
All right? So yeah, basically the idea here, but the whole Tales from the Crypt thing is, you know, Tales from the Crypt was like the show on HBO back in the day, and we've talked about it on the show before here on like some of our horror anthology
specials around Halloween. You know, it's basically it's based on the old horror comics, and each little story in the horror comic would be about some horrible person getting their come uppance, and so each episode of Tales from the Crypt generally revolves around that as well.
Yeah to me, the opening theme music of Tales from the Crypt, I think it's composed by Danny Elfman. It just sounds like the nineties, and it sounds like being a kid in the nineties trying to watch stuff that you're not allowed to watch.
Absolutely, it's like it's the.
Sound of I think we may have made this comparison before, but it's the sound of a scrambled cable channel that you don't get that shows are rated depravity all night and every day.
Yeah, yeah, it really does. And I guess one of the interesting things about this is, like you can imagine the studios came in there, some folks behind the scenes were like, Hey, this show's really successful, we should do
a movie. The thing is, Tales from the Crypt doesn't really lend itself well to that kind of format, unless you're going to do an anthology film with just a bunch of little stories, much like the original Tales from the Crypt film, the nineteen seventy two anthology picture from Amicus.
Oh, I don't think I even knew that existed.
Yeah, it has the Cryptkeeper in it, but the Cryptkeeper is played by Sir Ralph in like a hood.
That's nice. Yeah, But so, as you mentioned, the standard format of a Tales from the Crypt episode, and you know, there's some variation but the most common format is that you have basically a sleazy salad of gratuitous gore and nudity in which a morally bankrupt person does something evil, they think they're going to get away with it, and then they get their just desserts via the vengeful wrath of a monster, demon, ancient curse, haunted scarecrow, chainsaw freak or whatever.
Yeah, it's in a way, it's it's like horror in a very simple form, fulfilling a societal need. You know, we need the villains in our world, in our life to suffer, and these little stories provide that suffering along with some you know, gratuitous violence, maybe a little nudity in maybe a few laughs as well. A lot of gallows humor finds its way into these episodes.
And lot of puns. I mean, the crypt Keeper loves to make death related puns.
That's right, because, of course, the big thing about the HBO series is hosted by the crypt Keeper, this wonderful puppetry creation of a reanimated corpse that just gleefully takes you on this journey to hear all of these tales.
You know who the crypt Keeper is, It's the preserved remains of Jeremy Bentham. I couldn't stop thinking about that this time. I mean, like God, that rotten looking head. It's almost perfectly the crypt Keeper.
Well, let's start with the Cryptkeeper. Talking about people involved in this one. The Cryptkeeper's voice is, of course John Casser born in nineteen fifty seven. He's a longtime actor and voice actor, but he's most well known as the voice of the Cryptkeeper from Tales from the Crypt on HBO from eighty nine through ninety six, as well as the cartoon Tales from the Crypt Keeper nineteen ninety three through nineteen ninety nine three Tales from the Crypt movies.
Will get a touch on that in a bit, but basically, just with the crypt Keeper, we have a great voice coming together with an amazing puppet, at least for most appearances, and all this based on one of the EC comics horror hosts. You know. Other hosts included things like the Vault Keeper and the Old Witch.
But those were just in the comic right, They were not on the TV series.
I don't think so. Though. Occasionally the crypt Keeper has a guest that's not a corpse in those little segments, and we'll touch on some of those examples as we go here. But of course in this movie Tales from the Crypt Demon Night, the crypt Keeper is just there to set things up to say, hey, we can hear it is for you a movie. And the movie itself is pretty self contained. It has a few nods to Tails from the Crypt within it, but still you could watch it on its own, without the intro or the
outro and you'd get it. So I guess the first person we should talk about is the director. This was
directed by Ernest Dickerson. Dickerson was born in nineteen fifty one, and he was a classmate of Spike Lee at the Tisch School of the Arts, and so he went on to work as a frequent collaborator with Spike Lee as a cinematographer on various Spike Lee joints including School Days, Do the Right Thing, Mo Beetter, Blues, Jungle Fever, and Malcolm X. He also worked as a cinematographer on films from John Salis, the film Brother from Another Planet, and
Jonathan Demi, and more recently you might have noticed his name as a director on a number of TV projects, including multiple episodes of The Walking Dead, Tremay The Wire. He seems like one of those TV directors that just works all the time, and he's also done a lot
of work in the horror genre. He was a cinematographer on the TV series Tales from the Dark Side, an anthology series, and while Demon Knight was his first horror or sci fi film as a director, he went on to direct nineteen ninety eight's Future Sport, which looks interesting, and the two thousand and one Snoop Dogg ghost movie Bones, which I haven't seen, but I was reading a little about in it. It seems like it has its following, so maybe it's worth trying out. Yeah, Okay, I mean
it's Snoop is always entertaining. Yeah. So Demon Night, though, follows up on Dickerson's nineteen ninety two film Juice, which starred Tupac Shakur, and also the exquisite nineteen ninety four film Surviving the Game. Do you remember this one, Joe, Of.
Course I do. Surviving the I don't think Surviving the Game is as good as Demon Knight, as comparing Dickerson's violent thrillers here Surviving, But one thing that is great about Surviving the Game. Basically, it's an adaptation of the short story The Most Dangerous Game about a group about like a rich guy on an island who hunts human
beings for sport. This adapts that to the modern world, and it's a movie about a character named Mason played by iced T, who is like homeless and depressed, and he gets offered a job by a guy who he meets somewhere I think maybe at a like a like a place where they're feeding the homeless, and he gets recruited for this job to be a wilderness guide for a bunch of rich dudes played by people like Rutger Howard, Charles Stutton, Gary Busey, f Murray Abraham, John C. McGinley.
It is a real powerhouse cast, like every person who could have played like, you know, the cocaine king of the Week in an eighties crime movie. They're one of these, one of the party of the hunters in this movie. And then of course the twist is once they get out in the woods, they tell iced T Okay, well we're gonna hunt you now, but iced T outsmarts them all.
Yeah. So I remember catching this one on cable, I think, and I remember finding it irresistible, just drawn right.
Int Yeah, And I gotta say Iced Tea has a very weird charm in this movie. It's hard to describe exactly what it is, but he plays a He plays a very rude and sympathetic protagonist as he's like chugging along through the forest while they're chasing him on ATVs.
Yeah. So, so it's some notable films from Dickerson there. Now, coming back to Demon Night, there's a there's an excellent Shout Factory slash Screen Factory Blu ray of this film that came out, and that's that's what I watched for this.
But it also includes some some really cool features, including interviews with Dickerson among others, and one of the things that came out of it, aside from him just being really chill and apparently easy to work with and open to some of the lunier ideas that the actors brought to the table, he was also a major force behind having a more diverse cast on this film, including the casting of African American actors Jada Pinkett, C. C. H. Pounder, and Mark David Kinnerley who plays a very small part
towards the end, but also presumably First Nations actor Gary Farmer who will touch on here in a bit. And it's worth noticing that even our secondary minority characters in this film survive quite far into the picture, right.
The cliche long being that in many horror movies it is and for the cast to be all white except for one black character, and the black guy dies first.
Right. So yeah, it seems that having a black director at at the front of this thing really helped out in that regard. For instance, the main character, the character the Jada Pinkett plays, you know, Jada Pinkett Smith plays in this like that was I think the studio wanted I forget which actor, but they wanted a white female actor for the role, and he insisted on this, and I think it's a better film for it.
Yeah.
Now, the screenwriters on this were Ethan Rife, Cyrus Voris, and Mark Bishop, so that this trio. They had written a post apocalyptic movie called Escape from Saithe Haven in nineteen eighty eight and that was directed by Bishop, and Bishop didn't seem to go on to do much else in film, but Rife and Voris went on to do quite a lot, including two thousand and eight Kung Fu Panda. They wrote that and you'll find their names attached to
anything involving Kung Fu Panda. They also twenty ten's Robinhood that's the Ridley Scott version starring Russell Crowe.
M I didn't never saw that.
Yeah, No, and Demon Night was apparently a spec script that they had out there and people were excited about it, and it got picked up by this Tales from the Crypt trilogy idea, like they were. The basic idea is like, let's do three Tales from the Crypt films. We'll find the screenplays and we'll we'll just you know, put to some crypt keeper at the beginning, some crypt Keeper at the end, and he got yourself a franchise.
Now, unfortunately, being a feature film instead of being made for TV, it does not have commercial breaks for the crypt Keeper to come in in the middle of the movie and comment about what's currently going on in the story. He's just at the beginning and the end. But even with only the beginning and the end of Brackets, the crypt Keeper is a very welcome presence.
Yes. Now, apparently I was watching some of the making of and apparently there was some push and pull on the idea of like what the movie itself was going to be. The screenwriters really thought, this is more of a hero movie, This is about a hero's journey, et cetera. And then everyone else was like, well, but it's a monster movie. It needs to be a monster movie. It's Tales from the Crypt. And then, you know, ultimately it goes back to what we said earlier, like this is
not a come upance film. It's not a film about a horrible person getting their come upance. It ends up really being more of a hero's journey kind of a story with monsters, but with the Tales from the Crypt branding.
But also, I mean, I think Dickerson handles it exactly right in that it is not overly serious in any way, Like it is a very loose, fun, frisky movie that does not ever stop to take itself too seriously. And the scenes that do get kind of serious addressing, like the you know, the recurring hero motif or whatever, those are brief enough to be kind of welcome, and then it quickly gets back to goofy gory jokes.
Yeah. Absolutely, Well, let's start talking about some of these heroes again. Jada Pinkett, who would become Jada Pinkett Smith later on Sheep Hero and this is jerry Lyne Jerry Lynn, like Jerline Jerrelene. It's one of those where I got prepared for it to be pronounced a certain way and then it was not in the film.
Well, actually, I think different characters in the movie pronounce her name different and you might say, hey, that's not consistent, But then hey, have you ever known somebody whose name as written could be pronounced different ways? People pronounce it different ways.
Yeah, but we're going with Jerline Jerlene. Okay, jery Lene. I'm gonna try and be consistent. I may just say Jada Pinkett anyway. Yep, she's in this. She had not yet married Will Smith, but she was on the rise here. She was coming off of the Hughes Brothers Minace to Society as well as Jason's Lyric, and she would apparently go on to like really break out in nineteen ninety six is the Nutty Professor. Then she was in Scream two, the Matrix sequels, just to name a few.
I saw that she's going to be in the upcoming new Matrix movie, so I forget who her character is, but whoever she is, she must survive the third film.
Yeah, Now, let's see this is not a hero. This is our main antagonist in the film, but we have Billy Zaine as the collector.
Billy Zaine is just wonderful in this movie.
He is he's I mean, Zayin has a very punishable face and a lot of roles and oh he's so punishable in this he's he he just he hams it up so much like he's great playing like a smug, privileged sob and in so many other films, I mean, especially Titanic comes to mind, but yeah, he's he's like a Looney Tunes character in this in all the right ways, with the in the appropriate in the appropriate ways. He is just like a cartoon character.
Oh well, you included a detail that he I think revealed in one of the making of features. You said you were watching that once. Once I read it, I was like, oh my god, that's absolutely right, the one about Aladdin.
Yes. Yeah, he says that he approached the role like he was playing the genie from Alatin, except evil, and then you see it in everything.
It's exactly what he's doing. He's almost Robin Williams, but a little bit less manic and more smooth, but smooth in a very sinister and silly way. He's perfect in this role.
Yeah, this is this is apparently one of his favorite roles that he did, and yeah, he really shines in it. You know, no matter what your opinion is of Zain in general, you know, he's been in some real some real stinkers for sure, but yeah, this says just the right amount of Billy Zay. And oh and this was fun too. This was revealed on one of the featurettes. This was apparently Zay's first film without a hair piece. Huh.
So yeah, apparently he came in to meet Dickerson and he brought in like a little suitcase and he opened it up, uh, and he was completely bald, you know, shoes and shaved down, and he showed him the hair pieces. He's like, which one do you want me to wear for the film? And Dickerson's like, I don't know, I like what you've got going on there, And so that's what they which.
Is bald right? Which yes, yeah, yeah, his bald head is exquisite. And I wonder if that inspired the scenes in the film where he's carrying around a suitcase or maybe that was part of the script anyway, I mean, so we should say that. In the movie, we said he's the villain, but he is the titular demon Knight.
He is a hell beast who's a kind of smooth talking prints of the infernal realms, who wants to do some kind of apocalyptic magic, and it involves him frequently getting out a suitcase and asking people to put a thing inside it.
Right, Yeah, yeah, So he does have a suitcase around, so presumably a very similar suitcase that held his many different hairs.
Now, you've got a lot of films listed as Billy's An credits that almost none of which I had any idea Billy z An was in.
Oh yeah, he was in nineteen eighty five's Back to the Future.
I didn't know that.
He was in nineteen eighty six's Critters. I had no clue on that one.
Yeah, no idea.
I guess he really stood out. I guess one of the early roles where he really stood out would be the nineteen eighty nine thriller Dead Calm alongside Sam Neil and Nicole Kidman. And he's he's quite good in that.
I've never seen it.
Oh it's good. It's a really good, solid thriller.
Uh huh? Was that the one where he plays like a he's like an evil guy on a boat.
Yep, yeah, it's a thriller.
That's probably oversimplifying it.
But yeah yeah, I mean I haven't seen it in forever, but I remember it as being quite good.
It's like you take the end of Cape Fear and make it a whole movie.
Yeah, yeah, I guess so, yeah, Zay And of course did a lot of TV work as well. He was on Twin Peaks, he was in the film Tombstone, and of course we can't forget his starring role in nineteen ninety six is The Phantom, because there was that whole period in the nineties when Hollywood decided that old timey characters like Dick Tracy and the Shadow were the next big thing.
Uh huh, and that was a weird time. I kind of wait, So was the Phantom an old property that was being revived or was it a new property in the style of the old adventure serials?
The Phantom was an old character?
Yeah, oh okay, yeah, I know the Shadow was. Didn't Alec Baldwin play the Shadow and the Uh.
Yeah, yeah that one. I do not remember that one as being good, but it had Alec Baldwin and it was directed by Russell McKay. So I'm sure if I were to watch it again, I would I would find some some lovable, weird things in it. But I don't know, Uh, there are other Maquay films I would rather see.
Now. I know you have unspeakable love for Dick Tracy. Do you want to talk about that?
Uh? Well, I wouldn't say it's unspeakable love because I
haven't seen it since I was a kid. But it it was one that was not as good as anticipated, perhaps, But it had such weird mobsters in it, Like all the mobsters, you know, in a way they're they're trying to create the kind of the like rough charactertures of the of the of the Gold comic, and in doing so they created these monstrous, mutant gangsters that were just, you know, you're resistible, and also just so weird, Like it's so weird that the movies filled with them.
Wasn't there one called Little Face who had a huge head with a little face in the middle of it.
Yeah, yeah, there was Flat Top, and.
I think there was one called No Face who didn't have a face.
There's one called the Brow with just this enormous, grotesque brow Like, it's just tons of those type characters, most of which they did nothing with. Most of them are just I think like they have like a good dozen of them that they kill in one scene just in passing.
Yeah, they just have like the Star Wars canteena scene but it's mutant mobsters.
Yeah. So I feel like that kind of ruined me for traditional gangster films to a certain extent, because you're like, oh, well, you know, Godfather's good, but he didn't have any mutants in it. Oh.
I like the Godfather.
God Godfather is good, but yeah, but I'd like to see mutant gangsters come back. I feel like that's the that's the takeaway from Dick Tracy.
I agree, a little bit more boiling acid version of The Godfather.
All Right. We said that there was an immortal drifter in this, and there is the character breaker played by the always excellent William Sadler.
Oh Man, William Sadler, he's got one of those faces, right, That's just he has an inherently evil looking face, which makes me assume that in reality he must be a nice guy, because I recall there being a bit about this in the novel Around the World in Eighty Days, which I haven't read since I was a kid, but I remember there's a part where a police detective is talking about how people who have criminal looking faces have no choice but to be honest, because you know, everybody
looks at them and suspects they're a criminal. It's only people who look very trustworthy who can really get away with great crime. So I don't know for sure, but yeah, Sadler, he just has that face where he looks like a devil person. And there are other people like this who just kind of naturally look like a cartoon devil, like Malcolm McDowell kind of looks like a cartoon devil. There's a Prosperity Gospel TV preacher Mike Murdoch who just looks like a cartoon demon.
Well, Sadler, Yeah, he definitely has that sort of face. He's played a fairly fairly diverse amount of roles. I don't know, he does tend to sort of play your rougher characters. He's he's played villains of differing varieties, Like he's definitely played the the suit wearing villain, but he's also played the you know, the sort of you know dirt kicker kind of a villain as well.
Yeah.
Yeah, for instance, he's he might be best known for his role as the Seventh Seal inspired death in the Bill and Ted movie.
Right, yeah, the Reaper. Yeah, they melvin him yep.
And and also, interestingly enough, his rendition of that character shows up on Tails from the Crypt at one point in the Crypt Keeper sequence where he's like playing a game of chess with the Cripkeeper or something. But he was in Shashankrediction, he was in the Second Diehard movie.
Yeah, he's the guy. He's like the new martial arts Kernel. I remember he's in the hotel room doing like naked yoga or something, and then he I think at some point he like punches out a TV screen.
He he was on Tails from the Crypt. He appeared in in what I believe was the pilot episode The Man Who Was Death, And he also played the host of a Tale from the Crypt spinoff, the title of the Two Fisted Tales. This apparently wasn't picked up. They ended up just using the three episodes. I think that they shot using them as Tales from the Crypt episodes. But he had this whole persona of mister rush a crazy old cowboy in a wheelchair and if you look it up on YouTube you can find clips of it.
It's like he's just completely over the top in the role, as one should be.
Oh yeah, Williams. Saddler is always like a high tension cable, you know, He's like one of those like steel cables that a tram car rides along.
Yeah yeah, but yeah. Throughout his career he's played very serious characters and he's played just yeah, real live wires. He seemed to have a tremendous amount of range there, but you don't see him, I guess, playing the hero as much in this in this one.
Because he's got an evil looking face.
Yeah yeah, but it works here because he's supposed to be. He's a I mean, he's a guy on the very you know, margins of law and society.
M yeah, all right.
Some of the rest of the cast here. C. C. H. Pounder we already mentioned. She plays a character, Irene. She's a She's a talented actor, probably best known for her role on the Shield. She was in Avatar, she was in RoboCop three, and a lot of TV work.
I think she does one of those big crime TV shows. Now didn't she like in CIS or something.
I think so, yeah, she That's the sort of show that she seemed to get a lot of work on. Now, another character actor in this is somebody who recognized from previous episodes of a Weird House, and that is Dick Miller, who plays Uncle Willie. That's right, Yeah, I would say this, whatever you expect of a Dick Miller character, you will get it from this film. He's not really playing against
type or anything, but it's a substantial role. And I found out on the special features for this one this was his first time in his entire career in which he wore a prosthetic makeup.
Oh wow, I assume this is for the part where he turns into a demon, not for his regular regular appearance, because here he is, like you say, playing perfectly to type. He is just a whiskey guzzling drifter.
Yeah.
And there's some great drifter to drifter relations between him and William Sadler.
Yeah, yeah, they have. They have some good scenes. Apparently, like Dick Miller was, you know, in all these old older films, He's Corman films and all. So apparently the effects guys and Dickerson himself, they were just super thrilled to have Dick Miller on the picture because you know, this is a guy who was in all those old films that they grew up watching. So that's pretty much.
Was you a vacuum salesman in a movie I saw when I was a kid. Yeah, and you get taken down to the furnace by by the Marlborough man.
It's like, I've seen you die so many times, how about one more time? Let's see Thomas Aiden Church is in this plays a character named Roach. Kind of Church is kind of like a younger handsomer William Sadler in some ways.
Yeah, in this movie. So he plays this swaggering creep, but with a swaggering creep with a luxurious like Jethro tull Roady hair, and he's also wearing a Trent Reznor style see through T shirt.
Yeah. Yeah, he's He's absolutely hateable in this role in all the right ways. Like he really really makes you hate this character. This was only his third film role though.
Wow.
Yeah, he'd go on to I mean he was I think he'd already been on the show Wings and that's what he was mainly known for. But he went on of course being Sideways and Spider Man three.
Now the movie, of course, like any good horror movie, especially any good horror movie from the nineties, has its share of useless cops.
Yeah, and we have two useless cops in this, one of which dies pretty soon. The other is the deputy deputy Bob Martel, that survives very long into the film. And this is played by character actor Gary Farmer. And here is your absolutely solid Overdrawn in the Memory Bank connection, because he was in over Drawn in the Memory Bank.
Really I didn't know that.
Yeah, yeah, that, of course was a nineteen eighty three American playhouse rendition of over Drawn in the Memory Bank that starred Rawle Julia And he just has a small, ultimately kind of awkward role in it. But he went on to be in a ton more stuff. So he was born in fifty three. He's a Canadian First Nations actor. And let's see something like, for instance, he went on to be in Dead Man the Western with the Johnny J.
Jarmusch movie, Yeah yeah.
And then also in his film Ghost Dog Way of the Samurai. He actually plays the same character in those two films. He plays his character named Nobody. Okay, Yeah, And he was also apparently under consideration for the role of doctor Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but that didn't come together for some reason.
Oh, that ultimately went to what's his name, Benicio del Toro, Yes, Benicccio del Toro.
Yes.
Oh you know what, Actually I should go back on what I said earlier, because I said that this movie has useless cops, and it is a very reliable trope of horror movies, especially like horror movies of the nineties. But it's it's pretty much always there that you can just count on cops to not be useful in them, you know, like you run up. You never have the scene where you run up to a cop and say there's a monster chasing us and they whip out their
gun and say where get behind me. No, it's always like, oh, calm down, missy, and then there's just like a claw sticking through their face or something. But in this movie, Gary Farmer's deputy Bob, he actually he becomes more useful as the movie goes on than is actually kind of heroic by the end.
Yeah. Yeah, even though he you know, as a character actor, he has this kind of like bumbling quality to him. You know, it plays well to comedy, and he does some good comedy in this. But yeah, he also they do more with the character than just have him fumble a gun and get killed by a monster. All right. Another interesting character we have in this is Charles Fleischer, who plays his character Wally. I think this is a character.
A lot of you may not recognize his name. Some of you may not even recognize a picture of him, but you would recognize his voice, at least one voice that he does because he was the voice of Roger Rabbit.
Wow.
And outside of that, he often plays weirdos. He has a real kind of like weirdo look to him. You know, he plays that kind of character. Well, he doesn't disappoint in this film. He plays another weirdo.
He plays a very awkward guy in yeah movie.
But I've seen him in a number of things. He had a fun role recurring role on Jonathan Ames TV series Blunt Talk. So he's always a treat when he shows up. But it doesn't seem he doesn't show up a lot in things I watch.
Now. We know that Ernest Dickerson was himself cinematographer on a bunch of other movies, so he's directing here. Who does the cinematography.
One Rick Boda or Bata Bota, who went on to direct not one, not two, but three direct to video Hell Raiser sequels Ride in a Row, Hell Seeker, Debtor, and Hell World.
I believe that's gonna be your numbers six, seven, and eight in the Hell Raiser series. I would say that is not a high point of the series. But it's weird because so those are not very good Hell Raiser movies. But I like his cinematography style in the movie. It's nothing, you know, it's nothing all that artistic, but it's very fluid. I mean, like it's good in the sense that it's the kind of good filmmaking that don't you're not thinking about technique.
Yeah, yeah, And it has some some nice use of gels in places that they kind of give it that tales from the crypt vibe without like overdoing it right. Like you see a similar thing done in what was Stephen king Creep Show, where it was also an homage to horror comics of old, But there are scenes in that where they just go crazy with the gels to create these kind of comic book colors, and so there's a little lot of it in here, but it feels a lot a lot more restrained.
So Hell World is the Evil Dead or not Evil Dead the I've totally forgotten what it's called hell Raiser hell hell World is the hell Raiser movie where the tagline is evil goes Online. Oh man, it's the one where they go to So I think it's supposed to be that the Pinhead is in a computer or something, but then nobody ever really goes online in the movie. I was talking to my friend Chuck about this not too long ago. He pointed out that it's really a
very offline movie. It's about a party. People go to a big party at somebody's house and Pinhead starts killing him.
Oh wow. Well, yeah, I never saw any of those, those these three hell Raiser films in particular, but they all had Doug Bradley and then at least a little bit, so they have that going for him.
I guess Hell World also has Lance Hendrickson.
Oh yeah, yeah, Oh, I think I read about that where they were able they were able to get him for the role because he happened to be in I want to say, these were filmed in Romania, and he was in Romania already filming some other role and they're like, hey, we can get Lance Henderson. He's got another day or two on his hotel room.
And they did it perfect serendipity.
Yeah.
Now, we mentioned that the cinematography of the movie is quite effective. It's nothing too flashy, but it's fun and it's loose and it's very fluid and you're just right in there in the action. I would say the same thing for the makeup effects in the movie, which are quite good.
Yeah. Yeah, the makeup and the monsters in this are great. And we have the Todd Masters Company to think for this.
They did all the special makeup on the picture. They did the monsters, and Masters was ideal for this because he was a Tales from the Crypt veteran already at that point, and he's done a lot of film and TV work, and he did a great job on the monsters in this film as well, from like a just from like a conceptual standpoint, because apparently in the early stages the monsters were going to be more zombie like or just kind of like possessed people, and he ended
up pushing for a different design, a design that ultimately I think ended up being cheaper, which the studio liked, but it leaned heavily on body paint and lean actors in stilts with just prosthetic heads and some interesting like growin and tail features that we'll get to here in a bit. The monsters are terrific, but Masters has been involved in a number of different films that have great practical special effects like Necronomicon, Book of the Dead, Hell Raiser, Bloodline,
The Resurrected. The Resurrected is the good Lovecraft movie that I was trying to remember in a previous episode. He was in the fifth Nightmare on m Street movie. He was in Return of not In. He did the effects for them, Return of Swamp Things, Slither Star Trek, First Contact. He did the borg stuff in that with the you know, the boorg Queen. He was responsible for that. And apparently he's going to do a movie according to IMDb, about
giant leeches. So bringing the giant leeches back. I think they've been absent from cinema for well, what since the fifties or something.
Oh, bring them on. But yeah, I agree with everything you said. I really love the monster design in this movie. It's simple. They look great. They've got green glowing eyes and mouths. That's excellent.
All right, Well let's jump into the film itself. Let's let's roll through the plot.
Well, so, first of all, you have a classic Tails from the crypt opening, which is, you know, your Dolly shot through the Cobweby mansion, and then you go down a secret passageway into the dungeon and it looks like it's the layer of Doctor Faustus. And then the crypt keeper he pops up out of the coffin and cackles at you. And as I said before, all the sound effects here, it's the Tales from the Crypto music is playing,
and then you get there crypt keeper laugh. That is that is such a powerful auditory queue to nineties childhood mindset.
I showed that, just the opening to my son to see how he would dig it, and he did not dig it. He found it, Oh, he found it. They found it frightening, and he did not want any part of it.
That's probably all for the best. This movie is not for kids.
And I'm not to say he was traumatized by it or anything, but I was like, you want to check this out for Halloween, and he's like, okay, sure, and then he saw it and he's like no, thank you.
Now. I don't know if we even mentioned this before, but the movie starts with an opening segment that is not connected to the rest of the plot. I guess we did mention that there were brackets, but it starts you off in media res with stuff going on with
other characters you like. Pan up and it's on the scene of a woman reclining in lingerie talking on the phone about how she has just murdered her husband, like his bloody clothes are still all over the place, and he's and we see he's downstairs dissolving in a tub of acid in the basement, and she's tall looking to her lover on the phone about how much they're going to enjoy spending all of the dead guy's money, and then, of course, pretty much immediately the tub corpse wakes up,
and then it climbs the stairs and it has a hatchet in its hand and it charges in on her in a psycho style scene where she's in the bathtub and he's like ah, and then we get a cut, cut, cut, and it turns out it's a movie within a movie. The corpse man is being played by John Laura Keett, which is just excellent wait, did we already talk about John Laura Keett.
We didn't. But of course he's most famous, or at least for older TV viewers, for being the lawyer what was the name Felding on Night Court?
I never saw Night Court Handfielding.
I'm sorry.
He also plays a lawyer at some point on The West Wing.
Yeah, he played a lot of characters like that. But for horror fans, he of course was the narrator on the original Texas Chainsaw Masker, that opening scroll that sets the tone for the film, and he did that at least in the the follow up in Texas Chanceallmascer two. I'm not sure if he did any of the sequels beyond that. I think he did, but most notably that first one though, really the first thing you hear in that picture.
He's good at playing a kind of like a thundering, conceited, pompous wind bag exactly.
Yeah, that's that's That's everything that he played to a tee.
But in this movie, it's funny because he's just got this bit part where he plays an actor playing a tub corpse who's about to hatchet his his scheming ex wife to death. And then but it turns out it's a movie within a movie. And then we pan up on the crypt Keeper, who's sitting in the director's chair, so imagine Jeremy Bentham's preserved remains and start he starts screaming at John Larroquette about how he can't act at all. He's like, you're no Gory Cooper, You're not even a Robert Dadford.
And he was an ambitious bit of special effects here, because they clearly had a live actor doing some sort of like green screen head and then they put the puppeteered crypt keeper head over that in post so it looks and it looks maybe a tiny bit rough. You can tell there's some ambitious special effects going on here. But it's still amusing, which makes sense. You know, this is Tales from the Crypt the movie. You should go for it right.
Right, And it's great because so this opening film within a film thing is perfect. It is a Tales from the Crypt episode. You know, it's a c detail in which a bad person gets what's coming to them.
Yeah.
But so then of course we get the crypt Keeper introducing the main story. He's you know, I can't remember exactly what he says, but he makes a bunch of puns and then he's like, I call this one demon night, and then we cut to the opening credits over a car cruising on a dark desert highway with the most perfect nineteen ninety five soundtrack choice.
That's right, it's filters hey Man, nice shot, which is also in the trailer I think, which I think is just mandatory. This was just us law that if you had a film that came out in ninety five, you had to use hey Man I shot.
Yeah, I was. It was hard to contain the laughter while that was going on. And then of course we see William Saddler driving and he's you know, looking over his shoulder as if pursued by the hounds of hell. But no, it's even worse. It's Billy Zane and a
cowboy hat. And it's very funny when it first reveals Billy Zayne's smirking face in the in the car that's chasing William Saddler, and so William Sadler starts to run out of gas on this desert highway and there is a highway showdown slash shootout, like Billy z Ane's riding up on him, and William Sadler gets out a rifle it's like a lever action rifle, and starts shooting at Billy Zanne's car. Eventually the car catches on fire, but
Billy Zayn, undeterred, just rams straight into Saddler's car. Saddler gets out of it at the last second, and there's this huge fiery ramming explosion. So William Saddler escapes the flaming wreckage. And I guess we're supposed to assume, as the naive audience, that Billy Zain has been killed in the explosion, I guess, But why would we actually believe that? I mean, would it make sense for Billy's aying to
be killed. No, it doesn't, doesn't. But William Sadler he looks at his palm and he sees a bunch of dots. I think they're a little like star tattoos on his palm, and some of them are glowing and others are not. And then he just sort of ambles on through the night. He's got drifter energy.
He's got places to be apocalypses too for event.
Right, And so he ambles on into Wormwood, New Mexico, again not a real place, and goes up to a diner called the Halfway House Cafe and immediately starts trying to jack cars, Like he gets out a butterfly knife and is sticking it in the keyhole of a car outside in the parking lot, and a kid comes out and he's like, hey, are you stealing my daddy's car? And he's like, no, I'm just testing the lock.
Wormwood, New Mexico seems like a very interesting place because not only do they have drifters, it seems to be exclusively populated by drifters. Like I want to meet other drifters that make up this town, like Mayor Drifter and the rest of the post office, Like everybody's kind of like a suspect, a drifter type character.
It's a drifter community. Like the characters in the town who are not drifters, they're written in such a way that they're like one decision away from being a drifter.
Yeah, I mean we all are, really, but especially these characters.
So anyway, a bunch of people run out of the diner. I think one of the people who runs out is Thomas Hayden Church. But a bunch of people run out and then they run William Saddler off, so he's chased off into the night where he runs into Dick Miller as an old drunk and they share some whiskey and commiserate for a bid and then Dick Miller tells him that, hey, I know a place where you can bed down for the night, and so they're funneling him toward this old church.
You can immediately tell the sort of plot mechanics that are happening here. We're sivving all of the characters into this one fortress location.
Now, fact about this location, it looks really great, it lose phenomenal. But when they went to put the film together, Dickerson particularly did not want to film at night and have like really long nights of shoots for the cast and crew. So that was one of the reasons that instead they got an airplane hangar, and in it they built that building and the immediate surroundings oh nice like in its entirety, so that they could just film during the day at their leisure and have complete control over
the lighting. But there was one issue. Pigeons were already living in there in the airplane hangar, and you know how pigeons are, They're constantly making noise, making these pigeon noises.
So they couldn't get rid of the pigeons. But what they ended up doing is every time before they would the roll the camera, before they'd say action, they would fire off a blank They would fire off a gun in order to just frighten the pigeons and get them to shut up, so they could they could have this window of time in which they could film before the pigeons started to their ruckus. Again.
Oh, that's funny. Somehow I feel like I could kind of sense that it was that it was indoor for outdoor, even though it's a vast expanse, like you can't see the walls of the airplane hangar or anything.
But that's good.
And I think I've said this on the show before. I for some reason always really enjoy a good indoor for outdoor set. Well.
It can make a very surreal environment, you know. And it makes sense for this film because the only exteriors we have were this loathsome former church in the middle of a desert at the end of the world, and then one flashback to the Crucifixion. So yeah, so it makes sense that that we have this alien environment created by shooting everything inside of an airplane hangar exactly.
But so what is this church? Dick Miller explains to us that it's a church that isn't a church anymore. He says they decommissioned it in the fifties due to lack of interest.
That's the official monology on the decommissioning.
Form, right, Yeah, it was like interest on who's part, like on the preacher there, or.
I think it was the town. There's just you know, it's just a bunch of drifters.
It's just like, I'm not interested in that reverend. But so, yeah, it turns into it turns out to be this boarding house. It's like a desert hotel sort of. And it's it's like we said, it's like the evil Dead cabin for the movie, the Fortress of Order that will collect the characters and then fall under attack. It's the supernatural Alamo.
Yeah.
Oh, and then meanwhile we also see that Billy Zain is hooking up with the police, Like the police are investigating the crash on the on the highway. The cars are on fire. They're like nobody could have survived that. Those cars hit each other going one hundred miles per hour, which we saw that opening scene. They were not going
one hundred miles an hour, but whatever. So but then Billy Zaine just sort of like walks out from behind the flaming car and he's like, hey, what's up, and they're all like, oh, I didn't think you could have survived that. But so he explains to them that he was chasing a man who stole something, and so they're like, well, we'll help you find him, and so Zayan therefore enlists the police on his team.
Initially, yeah, he's just so ding dang charming, they just can't say no. Yeah. Now, I have to say the film does a great job setting all this up, there's no wasted motion really, and getting us from here into our siege location and beginning to establish the rules for everything. And then the characters are mostly there to fulfill basic tropes in the story, you know again, like the bumbling cop,
et cetera. But you know, I feel like it comes together rather well and also ultimately surprises you with a few choices in terms of like who survives and who doesn't.
Yeah, totally all.
Right, we got everybody more or less bottled up inside this old building. Who are our characters?
Okay, I'm not gonna remember all of them, but so the main ones. I guess. You got William Sadler as this guy who will find out his named breaker. He's the drifter. You've got Jada Pinkett playing Jerlene, who is she is somebody who I think formerly was in prison and now she's working for the boarding house on work release. Then you've got c h. Pounder who is playing Irene, who is the owner proprietor of the boarding house. You've got Cordelia who is a prostitute. You've got Wally who
is a mail carrier. You've got Thomas Hayden Church. I don't remember his character's name, but he's the creep. He's the guy roach right, Yeah, he's like the cook at the diner who is just a nasty backstab and woman Hayten creep. And then a few others.
Well, you got uncle Wally in there.
Oh did we not already talk about uncle We talked about uncle Uncle Willie, Uncle Willy. That's that's that's stick Miller.
Yeah.
And then and then we'll have the police and then oh and there's a kid who shows up later, I think.
But that's basically it. That's it.
Yeah, Oh, okay, I thought I may have forgotten somebody. There's a great scene when we're sort of just getting to know all the characters. There's a scene of Breaker eating this food on the table. It's just bright green slop. It looks like the slime that they used to have on Nickelodeon.
Ye.
So it's just bright green liquid that he's eating with a spoon and he slathers it in ketchup.
Yeah. Yeah, but he's happy to get it. He's just he's clearly famished.
Yeah. And then eventually the police arrive with Billy Zain in response to a report of an attempted car theft. I think that was William Sadler trying to jack the car with his knife earlier. And as soon as Billy Zay arrives and sees William Saddler in the sporting house, it's just like this is like the you know, the lights go off and he's sick in the cops on him. They've got William Saddler in cuffs and Zayne is looking for what Breaker stole, which is an antiquity of some kind.
Yeah, and that's going to be our main plot element here that we'll get to do in a bit. This is the key. This is the thing that the demons want and that the the mortals in the universe absolutely cannot let fall into their hands.
Right, And then Dick Miller sells him out. I felt betrayed. They've got him in the cuffs there, they're like, where is the thing? They've been looking around for it. I think they come across Thomas Hayden Church in the middle of some kind of sex act that involves him getting hooked up to a car battery.
Oh. Yeah, he has a great line, didn't He's like, my nipples are burning.
Yeah. I think he says they're smoking.
Smoking, My nipples are smoking. Yeah, it's good. I hope it's in his reel.
Oh, it's got to be.
But yeah.
Eventually they've looked all over for this thing. They can't find it. Then Dick Miller sells him out. He sells out breaker. He's like, hey, actually the artifact is just here under the table where everybody's standing. Yeah, and it's some kind of key, But it's also like a bottle filled with some liquid, and Billy Zay won't touch it.
It's clear something very significant is going on. What he wants is for Dick Miller to pour out its contents and then put it into a suitcase for him, and Breaker tells him not to do it, and they argue back and forth, and eventually the cops are like, ah, the hell with it. Both of the cars from this car crash were stolen. You're both going to jail and we'll figure it out later. So they try to take
Sadler and Zaane off to jail. But then Zaye I think the a switch flips and he comes off the leash with an excellent punch right through the sheriff's head. Through the sheriff's head Ricky O style.
Yeah, except unlike Ricky Oh, he's got this wonderful awkwardness of the head being stuck on his fist on his arm. Seems like having to try and get that off of his hand.
It's pretty great, yeah, And then all hell breaks loose. Billy fights to get the key, Breaker burns him with it, so it's like a vampire with a crucifix, you know. If you touch the key to his face, it seems to burn him. And then Billy Zaying flies out the window and then stands there while everybody watches him, and he pierces his palm with a fingernail bleeds a bunch of green blood all over the place. The drops of his green blood on the earth make an army of demons to attack the house.
He throws a nice hissy fit first, though, there's a there's a great but yeah. Then he starts summoning the monsters, and man, if you if you weren't already on board with this, once the monsters pop out in this film, you're really good to go, because these are some great monsters. Again, these are like they're They're unlike most monsters I've seen
in other films. They're like these ghastly gaunt grave walker types but with also with the with the glowing green eyes that we mentioned, but also like piercings in places, but but not in like a punk sense, in a like a seemingly like antique sense, like they're creatures of another time. Yeahn you know, Yeah, so they have I feel like they play against expectations in the of the typical demon and zombie trope, like.
Like the jewelry you might find in like an ancient grave or something, you know, like ancient Egypt or something who or something.
Yeah, they have kind of a gin quality to them, and they have a great silhouette to them. You know, it's kind of like when you think of like having a good logo, they say, well, it has to be able to work in black and white. I mean you think of like a iconic characters like Darth Vader, you can recognize him by his silhouette, and these monsters cut a really signature silhouette, which is key because they're often
just shot there. You see some great close ups of them, but they're often just in the background, in the in the shadows, kind of creeping about and all.
Yeah, and that's great also because they provide a sort of textural setting that really allows Billy Zaane to shine because Billy Zain is the front man doing his uh, doing his his funny stick. He's like a you know, a burlesque comedian or something. And then he's got the green eyed goblins all slinking around behind him to back him up. They're his course line.
Yeah. Absolutely. Now on the feature at one cool thing they mentioned, I mentioned how like basically these are these these outfits depend heavily on just body painting, like slender actors, So there's a lot of like skin involved, and there's stilts. But then they have an awesome prosth had it looks kind of like a you know, demonic pickled pig or something.
And then they then they have this they're they're groin and their their there there that area is covered up, and they have these tails, uh, these like stunted tails that wag and apparently those were radio controlled and the actors had to stow the battery like high up between their legs. So it was quite a demanding role a you know, stilts battery between your leg big piece of prosthetics over your head. But the end result looks tremendous.
I totally agree. So so once these monsters are in play and Billy zines outside trying to cause trouble, we've got scenes of William Saddler running around the house trying to seal up the openings, like seal up the doors and windows with blood from this key. And then we get flashbacks of the Crucifixion of Jesus yep, involving green eyed demons and lightning strikes.
Yeah yeah, and again they have a has an excellent otherworldly feel to it, like this could be the Crucifixion on an a world, which especially since it seems a bit different, because I mean, some of you you ever went to Sunday School and you know you've ever read your Bible, You probably don't remember the hooded demons that are showing up and chasing people around at the foot of the cross, but it happens here.
History is written by the victors, you know. The demons lost that struggle, so they got written out of the story. This is funny because it made me think about what is the best Golgotha scene ever in a horror movie? And another one that occurred to me is Layer of the Whiteworm by Kim Russell, which is an awesomely weird movie that we may have to cover on here someday.
Oh yeah, yeah, that one has a good one. I feel like maybe there's at least one other Kim Russell film that has a crucifixion scene in it. Doesn't it show up in His Last Devils? Well maybe in The Devils, but also in The Altered States, right.
Oh, the one where William Hurd is sort of playing R. Gordon Wasson or maybe he's playing what's his name the guy you did in as about.
Oh John C. Lilly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that one has a weird crucifixion in it. There's also an excellent otherworldly crucifixion scene in the Ninth Configuration, the nineteen eighty film directed by William Peter Bladdie and written by him, based on one of his novels. Yeah, it's that one. Who that's a weird film we could discuss, and it's got some great performances in it.
So after this part where the demons are set loose, the rest of the movie you could say it becomes less structured, I guess, because it's just sort of like a you know, you get different sort of vignettes within the supernatural demon siege, Like you get Billy Zane issuing hallucinatory temptations to various characters in the boarding house, and then often this temptation scene will be followed by demon possession of the person, and then there will be attacks
by monsters, human attempting to escape and so forth, and more flashbacks about the backstory of the key. We get to see Breaker in World War One, it seems, looking exactly the same. Age he's in the trenches. A buddy of his gets killed somehow and is bleeding all over the place, and the guy's like, now you are the chosen one, and the I guess the memory of the crucifixion of Jesus gets like downloaded into William Sadler's brain.
Yeah, and he's now part of this lineage of immortals that have to protect the key and carry it through time, right.
And eventually Breaker has to explain this to all the other characters and they're like, wow, that's interesting. You're the chosen one across time and you've been alive since World War One. And Thomas Hayden Church, who I just realized earlier his initials are THHC. But anyway, he comes up. So he's been a jerk the entire time so far. He's been, you know, acting cowardly and cruel to others. And after this story he comes up to a Breaker and he's like, wow, I really admire what you did.
I was wrong about you. But then, of course, what he's really trying to do is get Breaker to let his guard down so he can double cross him, and he swipes the key from him.
Yeah, now he's swiped the key. Meanwhile, the temptations continue because even though Billy's ain and his demon minions are stuck outside for the most part, he can reach out to your mind and tempt you last Temptation of Christ style with something you want, And some of the these
make for some nice, fun little sequences. For instance, when he's tempting Jada Pinkett's character, it's it's the this is the sequence where it's like in it feels like it's in a parking garage and there's this weird scene of her face on a screen and they're like demon hands on the other side pressing against it. And then when that rips open, she's she sees this image of breakers Breaker like being torn apart by the creatures of them eating his entrails.
Yeah, well he's I think Billy Zane's tempting her with the idea that she that he could make her like rich and famous and she'll see the world. Yeah, she'll see the world. Oh, it's like it's like the vivid you know, which they'll like to see the world. And it seems Jada Pinkett really would like to see the world. Like she's interested in this temptation, though she doesn't fall for it. She's got the heroic constitution to resist the temptation.
I'm not sure what would that what would that saving throw be?
In D and D h I guess that would be they'd be like a wisdom saving throw. Okay, so maybe a charisma. I don't know, it depends how you play it. Probably wisdom.
She succeeds on the wisdom saving throw. She resists the temptation, but what he's tempting her with is like, it's not exactly clear, but it seems to suggest like, yeah, you could have your face on the cover of magazines and you could travel to all the capitals of the world and see Rome and everything. Wouldn't you like that?
Oh? And the whole time the grave dig is track one eight hundred Suicide is playing, which is just a great beat in the background.
Yeah, that's an awesome song. I don't does it ever get to the part with lyrics? I don't.
I don't think they that much of it. Yeah, they just use the intro. You got to be looking for it to notice it.
But yeah, that is a great beat. It does not get to the part about confront an alligator let it eat your raw.
Ah man. But there are other temptation scenes as well, right.
Oh, yeah, there's a bunch of them. There's the temptation of Dick Miller is great because his is quite different. His is a world of beautiful naked women offering him bottles of scotch. And then he just sort of like wanders through this crowd of ladies being like, try mine and holds up but they're all holding identical bottles of scotch, I think. And then he goes up maybe maybe Dick Miller is just dedicated to one brand. I couldn't tell what brand it was. They've got the labels turned away.
But then he goes up to a bar. And then it turns out Billy Zain is the bartender in this temptation dream and he so he's a friendly bartender who offers him booze, but I think is also supposed to be Hunter S. Thompson. Was I mistaken here?
No?
I think you're right. It's very very much a Hunter S Thompson. Look he has going on behind the bar there. Yeah, and again it's it's it is Billy Zayane is an evil genie from the Disney movie Aladdin here and in it way works really well.
I can't remember what Billy Zain says, maybe something about the golf shoes, but it works. Oh but anyway, this leads to, you know, as the standard sequence is somebody has a temptation, they succumb to the temptation. They're like, yeah, I want I want what you are putting down. Billy Zain and Dick Miller obviously wants this, and so he turns into a demon and attacks some of the characters.
I don't remember all who, but I think maybe he's fighting with Jada Pinkett and with William Sadler, and somehow his head gets cut off, and there's a great scene where they, oh, the demons are vulnerable in their eyes. The way you can put a demon down is to like shoot it in the green eyeballs. And so the way they stop Dick Miller's severed head from continually commanding his body to attack them is one of the characters grabs his head and shoves it into the antler of a mounted stag.
Yeah. Yeah, there's some great eye violence to the demons in this film.
Yeah. There's also a great scene where Billy Zain is wheeling and dealing with Thomas Hayden Church because I remember thhc is. He's been like, hey, I've got the key, I stole it. You know, I'll give it to you if you let me escape. And so they're they're talking about their deal and Billy's ain is just walking on sunshine. He is so light on his feet and frisky and exciting.
Yeah he is. It's another great scene and it's and you know exactly what's going to happen, you know, and it's it's delightful. This is a scene in which it's it's like Tails from the Crypt classic again because you have a horrible character that's gonna make making this choice. You think he's gonna get away, but no, he's not gonna get away with it because he's gonna be double
crossed by Billy Zaine. Of course, he barely makes it down the stairs before he says, actually, I lied, You're not gonna make it away safe, and all the demons turn on Thomas Hayden Church and Terry's character to be.
The next thing that was really funny was that there is a scene of the next Temptation scene is of the Kid Billy where he is turned into a violent maniac by reading a copy of the Tales from the Crypt comic book.
I like that because on one hand it does it is the idea of like the corrupting comic book, but it also made me think. You know, with the adults, Billy Zain's character, the Collector, he's like, what if I offered you travel? What have I offered you all the beautiful women and booze in the world. But for a kid, he's like, what if I just literally turned you into
a bloodthirsty monster? Would you be down for that? And the kid's like, yes, yes, I vote yes, Let's do exactly that then, And that's what happens, pure honesty.
I love it now. As the characters, it's the kind of standard thing where in one of these supernatural fortress siege movies where the characters are continually driven further and further into retreat, like further back into the bailey or whatever. And so at this point they end up retreating to the attic, and at each point of retreat there's some kind of battle that goes on, and we get some chances for characterists to actually be like courageous and be heroes.
So Deputy Bob and Irene at one point, like the suicide bomb, a bunch of the demons with a vestimate out of grenades.
Yeah, they've been watching aliens?
Where did they? Yes, they pull Aasquez and it's kind of sweet.
Yeah, yeah it is, and of course Breaker bites it as well shortly thereafter.
Yeah, he gets maimed. And then of course he's like, oh, oh they got me, They got me. You got to become the new Chosen One to Jada Pinkett and she's like what but she I guess she like catches his blood I think in the key, and it's just understood that yep, from now on, she's just going to be
immortal and carrying this key around. But then then Billy z Ain comes in for one final showdown with with Jada and so, and I got to say, at the beginning of the scene, he's got on sunglasses that make him look like Riddick.
Oh but kind of like ridic.
Yeah wait what kind of ridic.
Like pre Ritic? This would the Riddic didn't exist yet, right.
Oh I guess not.
Yeah, like maybe Vin Diesel eventually he saw Demon nine. He's like that that's the look I'm going.
To steal exactly. No, I'm not saying they're imitating Ritic. I'm just saying he does look like him.
They look kind of like, yeah, almost like wrap around goggles.
Yeah. But there's another temptation scene where I guess he's trying once again. I think he's trying to convince Jeralene to marry him. I didn't exactly follow what was going.
Yeah, that was basically it's like, well, I've won at this point, I'm going to kill you, but if I could turn you instead, if I could, you know, if you marry me, then I'm even more of a success back home in the in the hells. So he's like, I'm gonna I'm gonna shoot the moon. I'm going for it, you know. He's he's feeling on top of it, and he makes the offer.
Yeah, and Billy's saying he is on broiler mode. In this scene. He is like the energy is electric. And there's a part where infernal lightning erupts out of his groin. I don't know if that's explained why he's just been like talking and then like lightning shoots out of his crotch.
That was in the featurettes. It was mentioned that this was Zaane's idea for the character, and Dickerson was like, let's do it, let's roll with it, let's give it a shot.
Good choice. Yeah, And then there's a good climax that involves Jada Pinkett the whole time that she somehow has gotten William Sadler's blood in her mouth, and the whole time Billy Zaane's like asking her, well, what do you say? He's trying to get her to say something, and she won't. And then it's revealed that, oh, she hasn't said anything because she still has the blood in her mouth, the blood of Christ, I believe somehow.
Okay, so yeah, we can go ahead and talk about this real quick. The idea is that this key with the special glass container portion of it here, they it was used to collect the blood of Christ at the crucifixion, and it's like the rail myth. Yeah, yeah, and there's still a little Jesus blood in there, but it's been replenished with other people's blood, especially the blood of the
chosen Ones, over time. And so I'm not sure how the genetics of that works out or if that's important for holy blood, you know, hurting demons, but that's apparently how it's supposed to.
Work, right, And so she's got this blood in her mouth, and what do you know, she spits it all over Billy Zane's face and that that defeats him in the end.
Yeah, great melt. He's a great death scene because he melts a little bit.
Then he turns into a puppet.
He turns into a giant skeletal demon, and then he explodes. They just do all the things, like the FX team just they had no chill on this film. They're just yeah, one hundred miles an hour the whole time.
And so I guess we're just going to assume that now Jada Pinkett is going to live for eighty years or whatever until eventually she has to find the next chosen One to put her blood into so they can go on preventing Billy Zain from taking over the world. Or I guess it's not Billy Zayne. I think he's destroyed. There's just going to be a new collector from Hell chasing her around.
Right, and we see him at the end. Yeah, because she gets on a bus and when she gets on she does the thing with the blood that's done throughout the film where you form a seal that the demons cannot cross. And then this other guy that has a briefcase for the key, he sees it and he's like, no, I'll wait on the next bus. And so the chase continues and it potentially sets up a sequel that we
never got. But man, I think it would have been good, would have been far preferable to Bordello of Blood, which was the actual Tales from the Trip film to follow.
I never saw Bordello of Blood, but I remember a when I was in elementary school, a friend of mine telling me about how his mom had a copy of that movie on VHS, and I was like, I did not know what Bordello meant, and I knew nothing of Dennis Miller.
I mean, yeah, well, yeah, it definitely has Dennis Miller in it. I never saw that one. There was even a third one that was I think is even less worth seeing. I think it may have Tim Curry in it, but it's like a New Orleans zombie kind of a thing.
How could a movie with Tim Curry be not worth seeing.
I don't know. It just doesn't it. I just don't. It doesn't call out to me. Maybe other folks have seen it and they can tell us how it is. But I also understand that like some releases of it didn't even have the Cryptkeeper sequences on it. They released it as its own thing, and then other versions they put the crypt Keeper back on. But it's also not really top shelf Cryptkeeper puppetry going on. So it just sounds it sounds like it would be sad to watch.
I'd rather stick with Demon Night and like the really great tales from the Crypt episodes. Okay, now, in turn, we've already talked to a good bit here about the monsters and so forth. I guess it is worth noting that we do have holy relics that are at least alleged to contain the blood of Christ. I was looking around a little bit. There are a couple of relics of the Holy Blood. There's one in the Basilica of Saint Andrea. There's one that at least was at some
point in Westminster in England. There's the relic of the Precious Blood in Viegotten Abbey in Germany. So the idea of this key containing the blood is it does seem to be based on actual holy relics that allegedly contain holy blood. Yeah.
I think also this ties into the grail legend, like the idea that at the death of Christ that Joseph of Aramathea held a grail that caught the blood of Jesus stripping from the cross, and that somehow later he brought with him like containers of this blood to other places. I think like that's part of the local Glastonbury legend in Britain.
Now. I don't know if any of these have actually been used against demons though, but perhaps perhaps, Man, there's so much they could have done with the sequel though, you know, they could have had a thing where all right, she's on the run as always, the demons are after but then where does she wind up a genetics laboratory? What do they want to do? They want to use the precious blood in the key. They want to try and clone Jesus or something, and then that becomes a whole plot element.
But then he'd be a mutant because he'd be like part Jesus, but then also part William Sadler and part Jada Pinkett.
William Sadler is Jesus Christ in Demon Night two. There's still time.
There's still time, Ernest Dickerson, if you're listening, please make it. I will watch it. I will. I will take all my friends to see it.
I will as well. All right, Well, before we close out, I just want to I'll mention again that You can rent or buy this one digitally most places these days. But that twenty fifteen Blu ray release from Shout Factory Scream Factory Import is really slick and it's loaded with cool content. So if you're a Demon Night fan, that's worth picking up.
If you're a demon Yeah.
We rented our copy from Video Drum, the last video store here in Atlanta, Georgia. So if you live in Atlanta, go check out Videodrum. It's great. And if you don't, look them up online because you can buy some of their cool merch.
Oh yeah, they got great T shirts and stuff. Oh I was gonna say that the T shirt I'm wearing right now is one of theirs. It's not, but it could be. It's of their style.
Oh oh oh, I see it. It says her Zog and then it has the Danzig logo.
Nice Rachel got me this one?
All right? Well, anything else we need to say about Demon Night before we close the crypt down this one?
I think that wraps it up, but I just say again, great fun.
Yeah. Yeah, as always, we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Do you have memories of seeing this when it came out? We're discovering it later on. Do you have particular episodes of Tales from the Crypt that were your favorite, We'd love to hear from you about that as well, or just any of the other elements in this be it Holy Blood or really cool demons. It's all on the table. Dick Miller movies that we should
add to the list. Let us know. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Weird House Cinema, it publishes every Friday in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. Also, I try to put up a blog post about the Weird House series at Samouda music dot com. That's sem Uta music dot com. It's just my own personal blog. We don't have anywhere else to put blog type content these days, so I'm just slapping it up over there.
Long. May you slap blogging and slapping huge Thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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