Review of Tales from the Crypt

As a kid I frickin' loved this show with a fiery exuberant passion, I worshipped it, the sting in the tale just desserts style of the horror where the bad and guilty were generally punished gruesomely in priceless and delicious twist endings came to be what the ideal version of horror is to me, grim, deadly, but with a certain underlying sense of fun and sly humour about itself and has a subtle sense of twisted karmic justice. This has always been for me by far the best horror anthology show out there and always thoroughly blew all others of its ilk clear out of the water and its sharp tone and kick-ass attitude, as well as the healthy degree of the gleeful gory old Grand Guignol spirit put into it, all resonated with me in a huge way and a lot of those earlier season episodes went right into my memory and stayed there, this show was one of the main things that ignited my lifelong appreciation of the genre. As a show today it remains such a gem of pop horror culture, and a lot of that is down to John Kassir as the one and only Cryptkeeper. What a rotten cackling old sweetheart, what a voice, what a laugh!!! With a limitless supply of lovably groan-inducing horror-related puns and plays on words, he brought the fun and wrapped up the tales as only he could. It just wouldn't have been the same without our dear old Crypty! To me, at least the first three seasons had so much heart and wicked love for the craft put into them that you could really feel that they were trying to express in film the dark fun style of the old E.C. comics the same way that the 1972 Amicus film also named "Tales From the Crypt" and the 1982 anthology masterpiece "Creepshow" had previously done so perfectly. I tried to never miss an episode and even if it had been a bad one I wouldn't have noticed! You got the really tongue-in-cheek fun schlocky tales that are noticeably trying to showcase the style of the source material and do to me really feel like macabre crazy comics come to life, like "And All Through the House", "The Switch", "Till Death", "Loved to Death", "The Ventriloquist's Dummy", and the truly excellent "Carrion Death". Most were horror comedies, but there were more haunting and foreboding horrific offerings such as "Three's a Crowd" "Fitting Punishment" and especially "Abra Cadaver", which sure as hell gets my vote as the scariest episode because it feels like it holds a chilling grain of truth... It really took off fantastically in the second season which I consider the best because it has the biggest concentration of episodes that I personally consider great. The quality sadly did decline a little with each season with spots of greatness here and there, until we finally hit the abominable seventh season, a season that I find so monstrously awful that I don't even care to own it, it was just that cheap and terrible and just so distinctly UN-Crypt. It's the reason I consider there to be 6 seasons of the show, and one runt! Anyway for the majority of its run it was just wonderful and had so many awesome moments that were liable to leave you shocked or in stitches, and it was tailor made for the horror lover who was young at heart. For the most part they got it dead right and captured the precious macabre magic that they intended to. Not perfect, but it took care of the things that really mattered. Thanks for all the laughs screams and happy memories Cryptkeeper!