Tales From the Crypt, Season 3, Episode 7: "The Reluctant Vampire"
With “The Reluctant Vampire” we once again encounter that most terrifying of creatures: the “funny” Tales From the Crypt episode. Tales From the Crypt is, of course, a very funny show. Heck, the Crypt-Keeper has even been known to indulge in puns and wordplay on occasion. But when the iconic horror anthology is straight-up going for laughs the result is often painful.
“The Reluctant Vampire” is a particularly punishing example of a “funny” Tales From the Crypt episode that isn’t scary in the least but is brutally unfunny as well. It certainly does not help that its title sounds like a Tim Conway Disney vehicle from the 1970s more than a terror tale or fright fable, or that the episode feels at times like a terrible backdoor pilot for an abysmal sitcom about a zany vampire and the kooky characters he encounters at his job as a night watchman at a blood bank.
An exceedingly hammy Malcolm McDowell leads a characteristically star-studded cast as the titular blood-sucker, a milquetoast vampire punningly named Daniel Longtooth. The undead security guard embezzles precious, precious blood from his employer so that he does not need to stalk the streets at night in search of victims to drain.
In classic vampire form, Longtooth sleeps in a coffin. Unlike most vampires, Longtooth uses dentures to hide his fangs and, upon lumbering out of his coffin, grouses, “How I HATE Mondays.”
Him and Garfield both. Longtooth also hates his job, particularly his insufferable boss Mr. Crosswhite (George Wendt), a bully and creep whose management style leans heavily into bullying, sexual harassment and threats.
Longtooth has a schoolboy crush on Sally (Sandra Dickinson), the company bookkeeper, a helium-voiced platinum blonde who functions as a road-show version of Audrey from Little Show of Horrors, with McDowell serving as her lovestruck Seymour Krelborn and Wendt as the Mr. Mushnik figure.
Longtooth lives, after a fashion, for those glorious moments when everyone else is gone and he can drink lustily and hungrily from the blood bank’s rich supply of delicious plasma. Alas, he seems to be hitting the red stuff a little too hard. Mr. Crosswhite warns his staff that there’s just not enough blood in the blood bank to stay in business, and unless there’s a huge uptick in blood donations layoffs are inevitable.
Longtooth is spurred into action. He’s faced with a terrible choice: indulge in his vampire nature and use his special skillset to replenish the blood bank’s supply of red gold or risk losing a job that gives him access to unlimited blood without having to kill anyone. Longtooth decides it’s up to him to save the blood bank, and his crush’s job and his own in the process.
When “The Reluctant Vampire” was made, the AIDS crisis cast a long shadow over horror in general but the vampire genre in particular. In “The Reluctant Vampire”, for example, there is a lame running gag where Longtooth asks the people whose blood he is about to drain the same questions about drug use or dental surgeries that donors are asked before selling their blood to Longtooth’s employers.
Our good-hearted but cursed and tragically pony-tailed anti-hero throws himself into single-handedly saving the blood bank by draining the corpses of criminals and lowlifes and degenerates whose lives add nothing but misery to society. Longtooth vows to “save the blood bank and take a bite out of crime” and soon the blood bank has more blood than it knows what to do with.
Meanwhile a mysterious figure sweeps into town in the crusading form of Rupert Van Helsing of the Van Helsings, the legendary vampire-hunting clan. Van Helsing is played by character actor and horror icon Michael Berryman, best known for his star-making turn as the post-apocalyptic mutant-looking motherfucker in Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes.
Van Helsing informs a cop played by the great but wasted Paul Gleason that the rash of murders afflicting his city are the work of a vampire but he is understandably skeptical. Berryman is a striking physical presence. Even without make-up, he look like a more ghoulish version of Christopher Lloyd’s Judge Doom but unlike other versions of Van Helsing he’s a bit of an incompetent boob, a vampire hunter without a clue.
It turns out that there wasn’t a shortage at the blood bank after all. Longtooth’s evil boss just wanted to see how much blood his unique employee would be able to collect with the right motivation. He sees Longtooth as his meal ticket so he confronts him with a gun full of holy water and ominous intentions but ends up with a stake through his heart after the surprisingly stupid Van Helsing mistakes him for an actual blood-sucker, not just a parasite who metaphorically sucks the blood of the working class.
“The Reluctant Vampire” was written by Terry Black, who is best known for writing the zombie buddy cop movie Dead Heat and being Shane’s brother but who wrote five Tales From the Script episodes, three under the pseudonym Donald Longtooth. As a Tales From the Crypt writer Black has a 600 batting average: he wrote the terrific episodes “Dig That Cat…He’s Real Gone”, “Beauty Rest” and “None But the Lonely” but also this stiff and “Korman’s Kalamity”, another painfully wacky comic episode that wasn’t scary but also delivered zero laughs.
Watching “The Reluctant Vampire” touch on AIDS in an indirect fashion made me wonder how horror will deal with the Coronavirus virus and the fear it is causing. My guess is we won’t have to wait long to find out, as I’m sure the next seasons of The Twilight Zone and Creepshow will tackle the virus and the devastating damage it has wrought in a metaphorical and allegorical fashion, albeit hopefully not in as clumsy and ham-fisted a fashion as “The Reluctant Vampire” comments ineptly on one of the great tragedies of its day.
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