While many of the Amicus anthologies straddle the fine line between straight (albeit tame) horror and outright camp, Tales From The Crypt has no such intentions.
Instead, it's a straight horror, Ralph Richardson's hammy turn aside. Sure, there are bits which won't stand up as well today, such as a zombie who writes greeting card verses in his victim's blood, but this is all played straight. What's more, there are even one or two genuinely scary moments in there, particularly if watched very late at night in the dark.
It's helped by the fact there are so many vignettes... the three Amicus anthologies surrounding this one dropped the number to four, causing the pacing to feel a little leaden. With five they all move along at a brisk pace, managing to flesh out their characters well despite only lasting around fifteen minutes each. Picking a stand out is hard as they're all particularly strong, though its notable how far the visceral horror goes in this one, with a shot of a disembowelling being edited for some releases.
Over thirty years before Saw brought torture to the masses, we have here a man being given a choice... eaten alive by his starved, crazed Alsatian or run to safety down a corridor of razor blades with the lights switched off. It's intense stuff at times, almost hard to watch, such as a man being kept alive forever while the pain of embalming fluid flows through his body in perpetuity. Okay, it doesn't actually make sense - the man in question is brought back by his wife to the moment before he died, which wouldn't include any embalming fluid - but the sheer horror of the situation makes this easy to overlook.
It's not all raw horror, too, with all of the stories having a twist of sorts, and some stellar performances from the likes of Peter Cushing, who starred in seven of the nine movies. The ending of the framing sequence doesn't really come as a surprise, given that it was done in the very first Amicus anthology and would be done so again in the final one produced under the official Amicus banner. But such things are not a detraction of the film in and of itself, and this one stands as a genuinely good piece of work.
Instead, it's a straight horror, Ralph Richardson's hammy turn aside. Sure, there are bits which won't stand up as well today, such as a zombie who writes greeting card verses in his victim's blood, but this is all played straight. What's more, there are even one or two genuinely scary moments in there, particularly if watched very late at night in the dark.
It's helped by the fact there are so many vignettes... the three Amicus anthologies surrounding this one dropped the number to four, causing the pacing to feel a little leaden. With five they all move along at a brisk pace, managing to flesh out their characters well despite only lasting around fifteen minutes each. Picking a stand out is hard as they're all particularly strong, though its notable how far the visceral horror goes in this one, with a shot of a disembowelling being edited for some releases.
Over thirty years before Saw brought torture to the masses, we have here a man being given a choice... eaten alive by his starved, crazed Alsatian or run to safety down a corridor of razor blades with the lights switched off. It's intense stuff at times, almost hard to watch, such as a man being kept alive forever while the pain of embalming fluid flows through his body in perpetuity. Okay, it doesn't actually make sense - the man in question is brought back by his wife to the moment before he died, which wouldn't include any embalming fluid - but the sheer horror of the situation makes this easy to overlook.
It's not all raw horror, too, with all of the stories having a twist of sorts, and some stellar performances from the likes of Peter Cushing, who starred in seven of the nine movies. The ending of the framing sequence doesn't really come as a surprise, given that it was done in the very first Amicus anthology and would be done so again in the final one produced under the official Amicus banner. But such things are not a detraction of the film in and of itself, and this one stands as a genuinely good piece of work.