Tagline: Death lives in the vault of horror! / Everything that makes life worth leaving!
Curiosity: Edgar Wright loves ’em.
Plots: In Tales from the Crypt, a group of British tourists get lost while checking out an underground crypt. Trapped in a strange and ancient altar, they meet a familiar looking hooded figure who reveals their future…
Meanwhile, in Vault of Horror, the same thing happens again, only with five dudes trapped in a basement because the elevator doesn’t work.
Thoughts: By today’s standards, Tales From the Crypt is a little slow and technically simplistic. Aside from a few fleeting neat-o makeup effects, it’s a very dry horror film. But the anthology faithfully recreates several of EC Comics’ finest horror stories (Even though they’re not all strictly from Tales From the Crypt the comic book). I’m so used to horror films that jolt me, but Tales actually works by honoring its namesake and delivering lots of twists.
Obviously, I can’t go into detail, but the five vignettes shown each contain a nice twist that makes them worth viewing. While these scenes aren’t necessarily “scary,” they establish a nice mood, and the twists usually are kind of clever. While the overall story of the tourists is meant to just be connective tissue linking the vignettes, a final twist actually them all to a rather satisfying conclusion.
Vault of Horror follows the same template, so it suffers a little by comparison. It recycles the final twist, more or less, only this time I saw it coming well in advance. It’s also less technically accomplished. Oh sure, there are more instances of special effects, but certain scenes suffer from technical limitations of the era, as well as censorship. Yeah, Tales looks a little fake in spots (Joan Collins’ scene has some of the worst neon-colored fake blood I have ever seen), but that movie still holds up way better.
Reflection: “AND THEN?!”
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