TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE (1990)

This film has an interesting pedigree.  Its based on a TV anthology series created during the resurgence of that genre in the 1980's; there was the new Twilight Zone, Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories, the new Outer Limits, Monsters and more.  Eventually even kids got in on the action with Are You Afraid of the Dark? and people who thought these stories couldn't be told properly without copious gore, liberal cursing, and tons and tons of tits had HBO's Tales from the Crypt.  But enough TV talk, what does this movie have?  The frame story is a modern day take on the Hansel and Gretel legend, the first segment is based on a Arthur Conan Doyle short story (sorry, no Sherlock), the second segment is based on a long unpublished Steven King short story with a script by George Romero so it couldn't possibly be the worst (spoiler it is) and the last story is, I don't know, a documentary about when some guy met a gargoyle.  If that's not enough to pique your interest, just wait til you find out all the people in this.

Debbie Harry is a witch preparing to cook Matthew Lawrence for a dinner party while he chills out in a big cage she had in her otherwise normal kitchen.  Oh and it has a person sized oven but other than that, pretty normal.  He tries to distract her to avoid being dinner by reading stories from a book called 'Tales from the Darkside'.  Does that mean the audience is the witch?  Are we in Blondie now?  I used to think Blondie was the name of just one woman and not a whole band but then I learned otherwise and there's a chance you just did too.  We come back to visit these two between the other stories and again at the end, but its nothing special.  Almost anyone could see what happens coming a mile away if they've ever heard the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale; remember, its not the story of a heroic witch who ate some mean little children.  Anyway she starts sharpening her child-carving knives, the kid starts the first story and we're off!

The first segment concerns a college student obsessed with mummies who uses mummies to get revenge on people and turn them into mummies.  Mummies.  The first mummy is decent enough looking, but I guess I expected better.  Later mummies look an awful lot like the people they were before they got mummied.  What redeems this one?  The cast.  There are only about 4 roles in most of these stories, and this one has 3 people who would become more famous so its fun to watch them muck around in such a ridiculous story.  The vengeful college student is Steve Buscemi, the same year he was in Miller's Crossing.  His future costar in The Big Lebowski Julianne Moore turns up as a conniving mummy victim with gigantic hair and ugly spandex workout clothes.  Also Christian Slater is here.  Why?  Wasn't he already a big enough star to not appear as a supporting character in one segment of a horror anthology movie?  Was he already on the down-slide or did this start it?  Who cares?

This tale is lackluster; definitely not an example of starting strong out of the gate.  Creepshow opened with a family-murdering zombie who wanted cake; learn from the masters!  Even by movie standards, nobody looks like a college student or even a graduate student, and Buscemi paws through the innards of his beloved new mummy like someone hand-shoveling mulch from a garbage bag.  Maybe they forgot to update the standards of academia and science from the 19th century short story this is based on; after all, Arthur Conan Doyle believed in all sorts of outlandish shit (Houdini thought he was the most gullible schmuck who ever lived) and one of his Sherlock Holmes stories has someone use rabbit bones to fake the death of a human in a house fire so I doubt his knowledge of the burgeoning field of Egyptology was all that accurate.

Lets fuck up the order and talk about the third story next.  There's this shitty artist who finds out his agent wants to dump him so he gets drunk with his friend and when they're leaving the bar his friend gets dehanded and decapitated by a gargoyle.  Here is where the effects really start to shine.  When you see the KNB group in the opening credits of a film, you know you're in store for something great.  KNB stands for Kurtzman, Nicotero and Berger, who are quite possibly the finest living makeup artists working in film.  Their credits are far, far too numerous to list, even trying to make a list of favorites would be difficult.  Suffice to say, they have made pretty much everything on screen that you've ever seen.

The artist is played by James Remar, a favorite of director Walter Hill who appeared in his films The Warriors, The Long Riders, and 48 Hours.  He was also Raiden in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation but don't hold that against him, a man's gotta eat.  His agent is played by comedian Robert Klein for some reason.  It's certainly not a comedic role.  It's almost entirely expository.  After the gargoyle kills his friend, it spares Remar but makes him promise to never speak of it again.  Gargoyles can talk?  And they make weird deals?  This story also has a fairy tale vibe in that aspect.  The monster is pretty impressive, but less so when it talks.  Remar agrees to its terms and runs off.

He ducks in an alley to hide, and pulls in a women walking by, ostensibly to protect her, but since he can't say from what, I'm not sure what she thinks is going on.  The woman is Rae Dawn Chong, who has a specialty for being literally pulled into movies by their protagonists.  In Commando for example, Arnold Schwarzenegger finds her in the airport, grabs her arm, says 'Dis moofie needs a voman' and then she's there through the finale. Well once everything is safe, Chong and Remar fall in love and the story jumps ahead ten years.  Remar is successful and he and Chong have two wonderful children.  Hope nothing terrible happens.

So after a decade of holding it in, Remar can't resist telling his awesome story about the time he saw a gargoyle murder his friend.  Only his wife isn't too happy to hear it.  Turns out spoiler she is the gargoyle!  Just to make sure he didn't break his promise, she turned into a sexy lady and married him and had two kids with him and stayed not-a-gargoyle for ten years.  Well actually, she says she really was in love with him.  Right from the start?  When they first met all she saw him do was cry, bang on windows, and not help his friend while he got murdered, but their kids look pretty old so they must have gotten along well with each other from the beginning.  But now that he's got a big mouth, you might just say she has irreconcilable differences.

The transformation scene of Chong into Gargoyle-Chong is similar to a grisly werewolf transformation in something like The Howling or An American Werewolf in London.  It goes by a little too fast, and then something happens which either ruins the story or makes it a thousands times better, I'm not sure yet.  Remar and Chong's two kids run in the room, transformed into the most adorable gargoyle children I have ever seen.  With their mouths agape and their eyes wide with wonder, I'm almost positive we weren't supposed to be scared of these precocious little ragamuffins.  The kids join their mom in butchering their father and then fly off to a peaceful rooftop where they transform into stone. 

So what was Gargoyle-Chong's motivation at any particular moment in this story?  Did she want regular children or gargoyle-children?  Did she want to stay human?  Why did she kill Remar's friend?  Did she really like his crappy art?  Why was Robert Klein in this?  Did she really love Remar?  What's the deal with the weird, decade-long trust games?  Don't you think he would have been more likely to keep a secret for the love of his life versus a monster he only met once that killed his friend for some reason?  When it comes to gargoyle-human mating, are the kids always that cute?  I have tons more unanswered questions about this, but there's more important business at hand.

Now the second story is... Oh boy.  Lets see where to begin.  Steven King teamed up with George Romero to give us Creepshow, and perhaps they thought they could recreate the magic on a smaller scale with just one segment instead of a whole film.  They were wrong.  Lets cut to the chase.  This is the worst story, but in the best possible way because its absolutely fucking ridiculous.  It's called The Cat from Hell and title almost does all the reviewing right there.  IMDB claims this story was intended for Creepshow 2 but dropped for budgetary reasons.  Really?  Not suck-etary reasons?  Its just a cat for Christ's sake!  It is not scary.  Not accidentally scarily, not occasionally scary, and not ironically scary.  This might have worked better in print.  It does not work here.

So an evil old man calls an assassin to his house and tells him he needs to kill a cat.  It seems this cat showed up in his house and slowly slaughtered his family and his staff until he was the only one left.  This particular homicidal feline wants revenge for all the cats that the old man killed when testing this weird painkiller/sedative/hallucinogen he made his fortune selling and which he enjoys popping himself.  The story is ludicrous and the effects are non-existent until the end because, hey, its just a cat.  The cat runs and hides, and then jumps out at you.  For most of the story he doesn't do anything that a cat couldn't or wouldn't do.  How do they get movies cats to drink milk?  I don't think I've ever seen a real cat drink milk.

The cat trips an old lady down the stairs, sucks another old lady's breath out while she sleeps (wait, can cats really do that?) and causes the fakest looking car crash I've ever seen by leaping out of his basket at the face of the driver; seriously, they just spun the camera around and zoomed in on the driver's screaming face.  I don't want to blame the victim here, but these people really put themselves into these dangerous situations.  I mean, an old drunk lady in slippers descending a humongous marble staircase at midnight probably doesn't need a cat to hasten her trip to the grave.

Alright, alright, I've been holding out on mentioning the cast because its so exciting.  Not like the mummies-gone-wild story or gargoyle-in-love story with their collections of future stars and has-beens.  No, these actors take a more discriminating eye to recognize.  The hitman is played by David Johansen, Buster Poindexter himself, whom I will always know as the cigar-chomping taxi-driving Ghost of Christmas Past in Scrooged (Niagara Falls, Frankie).  One of the old biddies is played by the librarian from the opening of Ghostbusters (My uncle thought he was Saint Jerome) and the butler is Mark Margolis, best known for his appearances in all of Darren Aronofsky's films and as the sinister Tio on Breaking Bad.

But the real highlight is William Hickey as the evil, old, cat-plagued, wheelchair bound, millionaire, pharmaceutical tyrant.  It's not even a very good part at all, but Hickey is a just plain fun to watch, whether in his awkward exposition scenes or his spoiler insane death sequence.  Hickey died in the late 90's at the ripe old age of 69 after a multi-decade career of playing men in their 70's.  Hard living or good acting?  He shows up in the original version of The Producers as the drunk that Bialystock and Bloom kill time with during the premiere of their musical, but that doesn't necessarily mean that his prematurely pickled features were caused by alcohol.  Hickey had a bit of a late-career renaissance after receiving an Oscar nomination for his role as the fossilized Don Corrado Prizzi in John Huston's Prizzi's Honor in 1985.  The part required him to show off his amazing ability to appear absolutely ancient; in scenes with his costar Jack Nicholson it is sometimes impossible to believe that they were born only ten years apart.

Hickey had over a decade where he was in high demand.  He was on an episode of the Darkside TV show as well as a memorable Arnold Schwarzenegger directed episode of Tales from the Crypt (and even an episode of the new Outer Limits).  He had a recurring role on the sitcom Wings and an appearance as the title characters' grandfather on The Adventures of Pete and Pete.  He was in My Blue Heaven as a fellow assassin in hiding that befriends Steve Martin, he was the mean old man that wanted to ruin summer in One Crazy Summer (spoiler he fails), he created the evil puppets in the original Puppetmaster film, he smokes cigars and causes fires in Christmas Vacation, he owned a string factory in Mousehunt where his funeral became a master exercise in slapstick, and he was the voice of the mad scientist in The Nightmare Before Christmas.

I could go on about Hickey all goddamn day, and I had to leave out plenty just to make this somewhat manageable, so lets just get to his death.  The hitman fucks around the house for a while, setting traps that don't work and opening fire on the cat only to have his bullets seem to go right through the damn thing.  For his part, the cat hands the hitman his ass on a little silver cat platter.  Every time the cat leaps up at the hitman's face, he seems to slice open a new vein.  We see first person shots of the cat jumping up at his human target, and then we cut to the hitman, just drenched in blood.  Where is hitting him?  He looks like a normal sized cat, so I don't think he has velociraptor claws or anything; maybe he's carrying a switchblade.

I knew I was gonna spend too much time talking about this one.  Eventually the hitman screams so much that the cat jumps down his throat.  Good call, kitty.  It takes him a good while, and I'm not really sure whether or not to say the effect is 'convincing'.  I'm reminded of something Ang Lee bluntly told fans when they complained his Hulk looked 'unrealistic': Hulk can't look realistic because there are no real twelve foot tall green men.  So how realistic can it look when a cat crawls down a man's throat?  Potato?  At least its a real cat and a fake man most of the time, and not the other way around.  I hope they paid that cat a lot. 

Hickey rolls back home just in time to find the dead hitman but the cat is nowhere to be seen.  Then it crawls back out of the guy's throat which gives Hickey a heart attack, or a stroke, or a plot-induced death of some kind.  He struggles to get his pill bottle open, although I'm not sure how sedatives/painkillers/hallucinogens help when you're fucking dying, and ends up spilling the pills everywhere as he dies while the cat just sits on his lap acting like a cat.

But then I gots to 'over-thinking it', a favorite past time of movie watchers.  If those pills are hallucinogens, does that mean Hickey just imagined the cat because he was a mean old man who felt guilty about killing so many cats?  The old ladies could have just died from being old ladies, his butler could have just crashed his car the old fashioned way (crashing it), and maybe he just imagined the hitman and his subsequent battle with a revenant pussy cat.  That would explain why the cat kills Hickey with fear instead of just fucking his shit up like he does to everybody else.  I might be giving too much credit to a story that I think Stephen King wrote during the years that by his own admission he doesn't really remember what he was writing or why.  Stay off drugs, kids.  Unless you want to be as rich and famous as Stephen King.  Then do them for a while but then quit.