Like stand-up comedy, chillers can attract enough of an audience to put a tingle of enticement in the spines of cablecasters. "It's just as well," reasons the Crypt-Keeper, "the critics would have cut him to pieces." All of which allows the supporting cast - John Astin, Sandra Bernhard, Louise Fletcher and Paul Benedict - to devour the scenery with unrestrained glee. But I won't tell you who ends up in the part of Yorick's skull. Lovitz decides that "from this time forth, my thoughts be bloody." And he's not kidding. Lovitz goes to audition for a way-off Broadway production of "Hamlet."īut the Boxleitner character ends up getting the lead because, as the director explains, "he has the look." Mr. Bruce Boxleitner is his hunky actor friend who gets by quite nicely on his looks.
Jon Lovitz plays the serious thespian who, physically, is unfortunately rather nondescript. Tonight's new episode, at 10, is "Top Billing," a clever and predictably gory essay on the sometimes nasty business of acting. Perhaps in tribute to "Silence of the Lambs," the character mutters at one point: "I didn't mutilate a single one of those women until after they were dead." The piece ends, as so many do, with dismembered limbs and plucked eyes.
DeSouza, whose previous writing credits soared with the "Die Hard" movies and plummeted with "Hudson Hawk." In this one, Kyle MacLachlan ("Twin Peaks") plays an escaped convict who, while running for the Mexican border, winds up being handcuffed to a dead policeman and followed across the desert by a very persistent vulture. It demonstrates that actors aspiring to other jobs should not choose conspicuous showcases for their apprentice work.Īmong the better "Tales From the Crypt" entries this time around is "Carrion Death," written and directed by Steven E. One new episode, "The Trap," was directed by Michael J. Top performers are still recruited but, not surprisingly, the product is noticeably more uneven.
#CAST DOWN FROM THINE DARK CRYPT SERIES#
The series was begun a couple of years ago by a consortium of established Hollywood directors - Richard Donner, David Giler, Walter Hill, Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis - who now remain primarily as executive producers, which means the actual producing and directing chores are left in relatively less experienced hands. That's the kind of performance that prompts Crypt-Keeper cackling among the pay-cable crowd. On one recent evening, immediately following the premiere showing of "Gremlins 2" on HBO, the cable network's audience for "Tales From the Crypt" jumped by 50 percent. Its "Tales From the Crypt" series is back with new episodes, and the ratings are humming. Meanwhile, NBC failed to induce mass goosebumps with its revival of the cult soap "Dark Shadows." A "Horror Hall of Fame" has been established to bestow awards on "the movies and the artists who have brought our nightmares to life." Once you get past such obvious names as Boris Karloff and Vincent Price, though, the pickings turn a bit slim.īut at least one form of horror is selling briskly these days. In the movies, "Darkman" and "Tremors" seem puny when stacked up against classics like "Psycho" or "Night of the Living Dead." On television, some Stephen King adaptations have worked, most notably "It," and others haven't.
These are curiously unsettled times for the horror genre.