Tales from the Crypt, a popular HBO series that aired from 1989 to 1996, was a long-running hit. It is a horror anthology series based on a 1950s comic book of the same name. Before being produced by HBO, these comics were produced by EC Comics and were quite a hit in pop culture. The Crypt Keeper, the show’s puppet host, has become a beloved figure from horror anthologies and opens each episode.
The series was adapted for the big screen as a result of its success. Universal Pictures produced these spin-off films. Their already established fan base aided the economic success of their first film, Demon Knight, released in 1995. Following that, Universal released two additional films in the franchise: Bordello of Blood in 1996 and Ritual in 2002.
Ritual, on the other hand, was not made as a Tales from the Crypt spin-off, although it is nonetheless regarded as an unofficial entry. For example, while Sam Raimi’s Spiderman series, starring Tobey Maguire, is not officially part of the MCU, non-comic readers can consider it an unofficial inclusion because the franchise has all the specifics regarding how Peter Parker acquired his abilities.
Let us speak about what happens in each of these movies and break them down now that we have got a trilogy to go through!
Demon Knight (1995)
The 1995 film Demon Knight was the first time the Tales from the Crypt franchise stepped onto the movie world. Starring Billy Zane, Jada Pinkett Smith, William Sadler, CCH Pounder, Dick Miller, Brenda Bakke, and Thomas Haden Church, it is a comedy horror, directed by Ernest Dickerson.
The soundtrack is pretty intense and a true testament to what was cool in the 90s, with some heavy metal and alternative rock.
Plot: Breakdown
The movie begins with The Crypt Keeper who is trying to direct a television show installment of the franchise despite not liking the lead actor. He hopes to get into Hollywood and the story begins from there.
Frank Brayker (played by William Sadler) is a drifter, involved in a chase on a New Mexico road with a pursuer, the Collector (Billy Zane). The vehicles of both the guys crash into one another, causing Brayker to flee. He meets up with Uncle Willy, who is the local drunk guy. You know, how every place has one.
Willy takes him to a decommissioned church, serving as a boarding house for many of the townsfolk. He rents a room there and observes the residents, like Irene, the owner, a prostitute named Cordelia, the postal clerk Wally, and Jeryline, who is an itinerant convict out on work release. There is also Roach, a misogynistic cook, who arrives at the scene and informs the people present about an attempted theft on his employer’s car, unaware that it was Brayker himself. Irene gets suspicious and calls the local sheriff.
Sheriff Tupper, accompanied by his deputy, Bob, comes into contact with the Collector. The Collector convinces them that Brayker is dangerous and after receiving Irene’s call, sets out to find him. On reaching the boarding house, they find out that both the cars were stolen so, they arrest Brayker as well as the Collector.
The Collector, who is desperate to save himself punches Tupper through his skull and kills him. Brayker uses a key-like artifact that he possesses to drive the Collector out but the latter performs some crazy ritual. He draws his own blood on the sand and uses it to call upon an army of demonic creatures. Talk about an arrest story gone wrong.
Brayker uses the blood from the artifact to do some damage control. He creates seals on the windows and the doors to help keep the creatures out and advises everyone in the boarding house to wait it out inside for the night.
These seals prevent the Collector from getting in so he uses his psychic powers to seduce Cordelia. He possesses her and kills Wally. He also cripples Irene but is subsequently killed by Brayker. The rest of the group desperately tries to escape through the old mine tunnels under the building. Unfortunately, the other people in the town were also under demonic possession and they drive Brayker and co. back into the decommissioned church and upstairs to the point where they are stopped by the seal on the landing.
The residents are quite obviously surprised due to the supernatural nature of the events and demand an explanation from Brayker. He is reluctant but eventually reveals the truth. After God created Earth, the demons dwelling in the darkness wanted the power of the cosmos in their own hands. They used seven keys to focus it. God, on discovering it, created light that scattered the keys and the demons across the universe. The demons had procured six of them back already but Brayker had the last one, which was the artifact. God had a thief named Sirach who filled the artifact with the blood of Jesus Christ to prevent the demons from reclaiming power. He filled it during the crucifixion and this blood creates the seals that help repel the demons.
Whoever is the guardian of the key is immortal while holding it but eventually has to pass it on after refilling it with their own blood after death. During World War I, Brayker had received the key from a superior officer of his.
This guy called Danny suddenly disappears and Jeryline uses this opportunity to rally everyone to look for him. During this, Roach stealthily sneaks the key out from Brayker’s satchel. Irene and Bob, who are in the attic, find out that Wally had planned to attack the post office. He had a trunk full of weapons including a suicide grenade vest which would make the job easier for him.
The Collector uses his psychic powers once again to possess Uncle Willy and uses his body to attack others. Roach battles Willy during which he makes deal with the Collector – he would trade his life for the key. But, of course, the Collector double-crosses him and once Roach removes the seal, kills him.
Fortunately, Brayker manages to retrieve the key during the battle while Bob and Irene use the grenade vest to kill the remaining minions of the Collector but sacrifices themselves in the process. The Collector finds a new prey in Danny and corrupts him through his comic book. Danny turns into a demon and overpowers Brayker, mortally wounding him. Jeryline comes to the rescue and kills Danny. Brayker uses his remaining strength to initiate Jeryline as the next guardian of the key or the Demon Knight. He presses the key to her hand and she has a vision from the past. The seven-star tattoo gets burnt into her hand as Brayker dies. The blood seals get deactivated.
Finally, the Collector and Jeryline encounter each other in the climax of the movie, and Jeryline spits blood from the key on the Collector’s face. He then turns into a large demon before ultimately being destroyed.
At dawn, Jeryline uses Brayker’s blood to refill the key and boards a bus. While on the road, the bus halts to pick up a passenger who refuses to get on. Jeryline notices that it was dressed just like the Collector and carried the same suitcase and realizes that this is the next Collector. The stranger follows her on foot after exchanging a glance and whistles the theme song from the Tales From the Crypt TV series.
The Crypt Keeper arrives at the premiere of his movie but is lashed by a guillotine.
If you’re looking to add a new, cool, interesting movie to your Halloween Horror Movie list, your search ends here. You’ve got Demon Knight. What’s funny is, the movie is not critically acclaimed, at all and yet, has a cult following. Because at the end of the day, the audience wants to be entertained and director Ernest Dickerson has successfully managed to maneuver the film around the audience’s pulse.
One of the coolest things about the movie is undoubtedly Billy Zane as The Collector. There’s an air of duality surrounding him. Of course, he is annoyed that he’s not getting his hands on the last key but also, his attitude is so relaxed and playful. Take away the demonic activities and he is quite the cool guy.
Now, if you’re a sci-fi nerd, you’re gonna see things that you don’t like, and by that I mean, the old-school CGI. It looks fake and is nothing compared to the stuff you’d see in a modern-day superhero movie but hey, it’s the 90’s alright. Technology was ancient back then.
Those who love gore will get to see a bunch of severed heads rolling on the floor, splattered across buckets of gore. The ideal sight for lovers of horror. If you’re looking to be scared or even experience jump scares, Demon Knight does not excel in those categories but it is not that kind of a movie. It’s more of a horror-thriller that is supposed to be entertaining and keeps you waiting for an action-packed resolution.
Bordello of Blood (1996)
The 1996 film Bordello of Blood is a comedy horror. It succeeds Demon Knight in the Tales from the Crypt movie franchise and has a pretty compelling cast with Dennis Miller, Angie Everhart, Erika Eleniak, Chris Sarandon, and Corey Feldman.
The movie was directed by Gilbert Adler and he retained the gory elements from Demon Knight for this movie with lots of vampire violence, R-rated language, and nudity.
Plot: Breakdown
A man named Vincent (played by Phil Fondacaro) is exploring a forest with his associates. They are trying to find a cave with a coffin that had Lilith’s skeleton. She is the mother of all vampires.
Vincent had a box containing all four sections of Lilith’s heart. He puts it in her body and she reanimates but then, she rips the hearts out of the others and charges at Vincent. However, he subdues her with an artifact which is the key from Demon Knight.
The Crypt Keeper is seen playing rock, paper, and scissors with the Mummy, who slashes his hand. They laugh and the movie continues.
Katherine (played by Erika Eleniak) is a devout Christian. She gets into a fight with her brother Caleb (Corey Feldman) and he goes to a bar against her wishes. There, he learns about a brothel disguised as a funeral home.
He goes there with his friend Richie, unaware that it is now run by a reanimated Lilith. The women working there are all vampires who are lustful and evil. Lilith uses them to seduce men and feast on them. The boys pick their women for the night and are visited by Lilith. She kisses Richie and kills him by extending her tongue down his throat, forcing his heart out of his body. She then eats it and then turns Caleb into a vampire.
There is a week-long time skip where we see Katherine visiting the police in search of her missing brother. She hires the cynical private investigator Rafe Guttman (Dennis Miller), reluctantly, as his office is an old adult movie theatre.
She gets clues about Caleb’s whereabouts where she works along with Vincent. Rafe tracks down Caleb’s trail to the bar and manages to get to the ‘funeral home’. Because the brothel was closed that night, he is denied access but he manages to sneak in. He finds out that the brothel workers put the money from the clients into Christian organizations but that is just a guise for their shady business. The brothel was run by Reverend Current from Katherine’s church but he was unaware of the vampire business.
He crosses Lilith as she interviews another woman. After a while, he hears her scream as her body thuds to the floor. He also finds Caleb’s nose ring there and escapes.
The next day, he shows Katherine the nose ring and tells her about his plan of staking out at the funeral home that evening. He goes back and gets inside the brothel, as it was open that night. He sees the woman who Lilith was interviewing, Tamara, and picks her for the night. However, this time she was much more lustful and seductive compared to the last time (of course, she was one of Lilith’s minion vampires now). He uses trickery and straps her to a torture rack so that he can investigate the funeral house. He finds Jenkins, one of Lilith’s servants, decapitated in a coffin. He flees the place but accidentally drops his wallet in the process. Too bad Lilith can find his address now.
Tamara had managed to scratch off some of Rafe’s blood and Lilith tastes that. She takes an interest in him. She tracks him down and tries to seduce him but it does not work. At that very moment, Katherine visits Rafe to check how far the case had proceeded. Seeing Lilith, she leaves, thinking that they are flirting but he follows her to fill her in about the brothel activities.
Rafe and Katherine confront Vincent and Lilith and take the matter to the police. However, the police find no evidence to their claims and label Rafe as a fraud. But the evidence had just been covered up. Meanwhile, Vincent turns Lilith immortal by destroying the key he was using to subdue her.
Catherine investigates the footage of the confrontation but sees that Lilith was not visible. She realizes Rafe was not lying and calls him. She receives a call from Caleb who asks her to meet at the power plant and finds out that he is a vampire. She flees with Rafe but he falls out of a window onto the car of the police chief. The vampires bring Katherine to the brothel.
Rafe is nearly killed by Tamara posing as a nurse in the hospital but he kills her by exposing her to sunlight. Meanwhile, at the brothel, Katherine begs Caleb to free her but he refuses as he is now Lilith’s pawn. He watches Lilith prepare to feed on Katherine.
Rafe loads Super Soakers with holy water and raids the brothel. He kills Vincent and McCutcheon. He meets Reverend Current, who now realizes that the place is run by vampires and teams up with Rafe to rectify it. He tells Rafe that Lilith’s heart had to be cut into four pieces after being removed from her body. The two spray holy water at the vampires (including Caleb) and they burn and explode.
Lilith mortally wounds Current and attacks Rafe as he attacks her using an axe. He then finds Katherine and rushes to her church to make people aware of the vampires using the media gear.
Lilith finds them and handcuffs Rafe to a railing. She then attacks Katherine but Rafe hits her in the heart with a laser and cuts it into four parts. But, Lilith remains alive since the heart was still in her body. She takes on a monstrous form and attacks Rafe. Katherine stabs out her heart with a candle stand and Lilith’s body burns. It collapses to the ground and the two lock away the box with the heart.
In the ending scene, Rafe fondles Katherine. He pulls back her skirt but sees bite marks, realizing that Lilith had turned her into a vampire when she was her hostage. Katherine flashes her fangs at Rafe and bites his neck. The movie ends.
Bordello of Blood has some cool moments here and there but was a colossal box office failure. It also received extremely negative reviews by critics. However, do not disregard it yet.
It can be quite funny. There are no punchlines that hit the mark but the movie is like a religious satire. Some things are a bit stupid, for example, the laser at the church dissecting following a cross pattern and Rafe filling Super Soakers with holy water.
Every time you hate a character, it means the actor did a fantastic job. Corey Feldman does a great job portraying Caleb, particularly because the character is insufferable, both as a human and as a vampire. Sexy vampires working as prostitutes, call it ‘Vamp’ire. Angie Everhart does a great job as Lilith. She is attractive, dominating, scary, and an over-the-top villain.
Dennis Miller as Rafe is unfortunately not as compelling. His presence feels a tad uneasy but hey, that guy had to spray holy water on supernatural villains using Super Soakers. Cut him some slack.
Ritual (2002)
Following the terrible performance of Bordello of Blood, Ritual was released as a standalone film. However, after being distributed on DVD, it was incorporated with the Tales from the Crypt movie franchise.
Similar to Demon Knight and Bordello of Blood, Ritual is also a horror-comedy film and it brings the trilogy to a close, well, so far. It is kinda based on the 1943 horror movie I Walked With a Zombie. Avi Nesher directed the film and the cast comprised Tim Curry, Kristen Wilson, Craig Sheffer, and Jennifer Grey.
Plot: Breakdown
The movie opens with some..pretty..R-rated shots while The Crypt Keeper is seen enjoying Jamaica, speaking in a Jamaican accent, and sporting dreadlocks. Let’s hope the guy is not white.
Doctor Matthew Hope (Tim Curry) is at an estate party in Jamaica and is ridiculously distracted by the attractive woman beside him. The estate is owned by Paul and Wesley Claybourne. Unfortunately, Wesley is not a part of it as he is down with some creepy sickness that makes him have hallucinations of some weird ritual. And there are split-second shots of machetes so yay, gore. The movie does not hide the fact that it is R-rated and gives the audience plenty of fanservice.
Two people die terrifying deaths. While the girl is chased with a machete and killed, this man bursts out as his skin warps and corrodes until he turns into a glob-like corpse. However, the following shot shows that he’s just a regular dead body and the blood and stuff were a vision?
The movie skips to New York where we meet Dr. Alice Dodgson (Jennifer Grey). She tries to cure her terminally ill patient with untested medicine. The plan backfires and of course, the patient dies. Guilt takes over and she hallucinates, suffering from visions of the now-dead girl. Her license is subsequently revoked and she relocates to Jamaica as a nurse for Wesley Claybourne (Daniel Lapaine), the guy who has weird visions.
Alice connects with her contact JB and drives around Jamaica with him. She notices that everyone’s got machetes for work and protection (and killings, it’s a horror movie after all).
She meets with Paul Claybourne who has hired her for Wesley. He tells her about him having brain seizures and then he finally tells her what’s up. Wesley has a strange problem where he thinks that he is a zombie. In all honesty, Wesley is truly a victim to obnoxious amounts of jump scares.
Alice meets Caro (Kristen Wilson). Caro asks Alice to be her model for sculpting.
Later that night, Alice notices Wesley leaving the house. She tries to see what’s going on but Paul comes and stands behind her. Suddenly, something pulls her from the side and gags her mouth. It then pours a bunch of poor-CGI spiders over her while another man slashes Caro with a..you guessed it..machete.
It turns out to be a bad dream though as Alice wakes up. She opens her closet and sees a bigger spider. Startled, she meets up with Caro, explaining the events. Meanwhile, Caro was in the middle of a sculpting process and appears naked because of fanservice. Caro tells her that Alice is a victim of Obeah (i.e. Jamaican voodoo).
Alice goes to see Wesley who is pretty rude to her because he is a macho man who does not need a doctor. He does not let Alice check on him and storms off.
Next, she is in a vehicle with JB who offers her..marijuana? The perfect solution to voodoo. Turns out JB is under voodoo as well as a scene shows someone piercing something onto something which makes JB itch his neck. It is followed by the tree branches in front of them going haywire like the branches were the tentacles of a giant octopus. However, only JB sees it. Alice thinks it’s the weed. She meets JB’s dad, a voodoo specialist, who says that there’s nothing he can do to help her.
Caro takes her to a party where everyone starts to wild out. Two of the invitees get killed in their car while leaving. Alice leaves the party as she has hallucinations similar to that of Wesley. JB tells her about his hallucinations as well.
A very angry Alice confronts Paul about not giving her proper details about the deaths and the police thinking that Wesley is a possible homicidal maniac. Wesley tells her about having blackouts and attending voodoo ceremonies because he is under some spell. She takes his blood to examine it.
Everyone goes to have fun at the beach and things get frisky at night when Alice and Wesley start to makeout. At night, as Alice sleeps, Wesley sneaks up behind her and begins to stab her with a knife, killing her. However, that turns out to be another hallucination as well.
The reports for Wesley’s blood are out and Alice learns that it is a weird, strange, virus that alters the RNA into DNA, which is really a scientific way of explaining the voodoo virus. Matthew gets killed by some random guy.
Paul and Wesley get into an argument because Paul wants to sell the estate but Wesley opposes. Alice meets with JB’s father for more trivia on zombies. She takes the blood reports to Wesley and tells him that Paul wants to have him killed for the entire estate. Caro and Alice go to this place which has the voodoo-ritual people from the hallucinations and Paul is in fact, an evil guy trying to turn Wesley into a zombie.
But wait, the plot twist turns out Caro is the main bad guy, after all, has caused everything. She is a half-sister of the Claybourne’s who is resentful about Paul and Wesley’s dad killing her mother and then rejecting her, denying her the inheritance. So, she tried to kill the brothers to get the estate all to herself. Alice causes Caro’s plan to backfire and turns her into a zombie.
The movie ends with Alice and Wesley getting married in America while a zombie-Caro has been taken in by the local Police Chief as a zombie sex doll.
Out of all three Tales from the Crypt movies, Ritual is by far the weakest. Even though Bordello of Blood did not do well, it had its moments here and there and the element of horror was prevalent throughout. But, Ritual deals more with fun scenes, chats over the estate, and fake jump scares instead of horror.
The movie is filled with unappealing, choppy editing and jump scare music. All the fanservice do not do a great job at hiding all the problems in the plot. However, it is not all bad. Jennifer Grey as Alice gives us a pretty solid performance. That redeems it a bit I guess. Needless to say, Ritual did not do a great job at the box office or with the critics.
Future of the Franchise
Following the trilogy, M. Night Shyamalan had plans to recreate Tales from the Crypt as a movie franchise but that never materialized. Gilbert Adler tried to make a reboot in 2011 but despite being pitched to several other networks, that did not work out either.
Night Shyamalan proposed to produce it in 2016 for TNT Network but nope, did not work out either. 2017 saw hopes for a 10-episode season for Tales from the Crypt as an anthology series but due to several legal problems regarding rights concerning a new Cryptkeeper in HBO caused this plan to tank as well.
As of now, it is unknown whether the franchise will be expanded or not. Even though it enjoys a cult following and there are several producers and directors, interested in working in this franchise, several legal issues stand in the way.