Something Weird on TV

Tales from the Darkside Part Ten – Mummies & More Mummies

And, just like that, we’re starting the final season of Tales from the Darkside. The series would wrap up on July 24, 1988, though we hadn’t quite heard the last of it at that time – Tales from the Darkside: The Movie would hit screens just two years later, on May 4, 1990.

Before we get to that point, though, we have to finish the final season, which kicks off with another story by Robert Bloch. This one’s a pretty familiar yarn about the perils of greed, as an amateur Egyptologist falls afoul of a mummy’s curse. It’s just that the curse is a little unusual, hence the episode’s title, “Beetles.”

Bloch also wrote the teleplay for this episode, adapted from his short story of the same name. It may not be much, but after the disappointing end of the third season, it’s a nice enough place to start from. “Mary, Mary,” on the other hand, is your standard story. Boy meets girl; girl has severe self-confidence issues and lives in an apartment full of toys and mannequins, who she records for video dating services; girl turns into mannequin herself.

While that twist definitely seems like something Bloch could have written, this episode comes from the pen (or word processor, more likely) of Jule Selbo, who has previously written a number of other series episodes. Perhaps more interesting, it is the sole director credit of Katarina Wittich, whose credits as second unit or assistant director include no less than 23 episodes of this very show, as well as Day of the Dead and Creepshow 2, among others. As pretty much a one-woman show, the episode relies heavily on the acting chops of the late Margaret Whitton, who played the villainous team owner Rachel Phelps in the first two Major League movies.

“The Spirit Photographer” sees a man invent a “ghost attractor” (an idea that has never once gone wrong) so that he can photograph ghosts. Helmed by series regular Bill Travis, you have to dig a bit to find the oddity in this one’s pedigree, but it is there.

You see, Mark Patrick Carducci, one of the two credited screenwriters on this episode, also wrote the screenplays for Neon Maniacs and Pumpkinhead. His co-writer, Brian Thomas James, also has something of an interesting filmography. He not only directed a couple of episodes of the TV series Monsters – the natural inheritor of Tales from the Darkside’s legacy – a few years later, he’s also the co-writer/director of the 1988 body horror flick The Rejuvenator.

Luckily, it’s also a very good episode in search of a better ghost effect to make it great. Aside from that, though, it’s surprisingly touching at the end and even a little spooky until the ghost shows up. “The Moth,” meanwhile, stars none other than Blondie’s own Debbie Harry as a dying witch named Sybil who returns to the home of her mother because she hopes to be resurrected. She just needs her mother to capture her soul, which will escape her mouth at the moment of her death in the shape of a moth.

As the second-to-last series episode written by Michael McDowell, there’s some good folklore elements in “The Moth,” even if the mother (played by Jane Manning) spends way too much of the episode saying “Sybil” over and over. Also, that is definitely a butterfly, not a moth.

The next episode is a rather unlikely thing called “No Strings Attached,” that’s sort of like if Tales from the Darkside tried to tackle Ligotti – or at least James Wan. T. J. Castronovo plays a mobster who kidnaps a puppeteer and forces him to put on a special, private show. The catch is that the puppet is the corpse of one of the mobster’s rivals, recently dispatched by him.

This rather grisly idea comes from the pen of writer/director David Odell. His only other directing credit is the 1989 film Martians Go Home, but he wrote the screenplays for plenty of movies, including The Dark Crystal, Supergirl, and the 1987 Masters of the Universe film, not to mention some 48 episodes of the original Muppet Show. There’s another string (pun intended) tying this episode to The Dark Crystal, as well. The puppeteer is played by prolific actor Barry Dennen, who provided the voice of the Chamberlain in that film.

The result is a fairly effective EC Comics-style horror story with a surprisingly macabre logline for this show – one that is informed and strengthened by an understanding of the physical realities of puppeteering. Along with “The Spirit Photographer,” it’s probably in the running for the strongest episode on this disc, and is certainly one of the more memorable in the series.

There’s only one more episode left on this disc and it’s about… another mummy? So it would seem. “The Grave Robber” is a comedic episode about a couple of cowardly would-be tomb raiders who awaken a centuries-old mummy who challenges them to a game of strip poker. The grave robbers are played by Darren Kelly and Polly Draper (TV’s Thirtysomething) while the mummy is none other than comedy mainstay Arnold Stang.

As comedy episodes go, it’s not bad and you’ve got to admit, most anthology shows don’t give you two mummy episodes in a whole series, let alone two on the same disc. So I can’t complain too much…

That’s it for tonight, but be sure to join us next time, because we’re going to be kicking things off with something I’ve been waiting all series for: an episode adapted from a story by Clive Barker himself! Until then, try to enjoy the daylight…