Tales From the Crypt, Season 3, Episode 8: "Easel Kill Ya" — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

In “Easel Kill Ya”, a perfectly cast Tim Roth plays Jack Craig, a starving artist so gaunt and skinny that if he lost any more weight his ribs would rip through his chest. He’s a recovering alcoholic clinging desperately to his sobriety in the face of constant temptation but staying off the sauce and on the wagon in a world and an industry that is continually testing him is clearly taking a toll.

He’s a tightly wound artiste on the verge of snapping, a painfully intense painter who takes himself and his art very seriously but seems to have lost his mojo and his inspiration. As the episode begins, his agent is only half-jokingly encouraging him to go back to drinking because addiction made his work livelier and more passionate.

He’s just barely keeping it all together through the grace of his Higher Power and regular Alcoholics Anonymous meetings where he flirts with Sharon (Roya Megnot) a sexy, buxom fellow recovering alcoholic who sees the good in him as well as the danger and wants to keep her fellow alcoholic from succumbing to temptation, from giving into his demons and his dark side.

To borrow a terrible yet amazing bit of wordplay from the Crypt-Keeper himself, Roth, who played one of the title roles a year earlier in Robert Altman’s Vincent & Theo, goes from being a modern-day Vincent Van Gough to a regular Vincent Van Ghoul when a neighbor tumbles off a fire escape railing to his violent death during an argument about the man’s loud, obnoxious music.

Jack is ghoulishly inspired to paint the fresh corpse but worries about finding a buyer until he stumbles upon wealthy sicko Malcolm Mayflower (William Atherton), who prides himself on having the world’s largest collection of “morbid art.” Atherton, who rose to fame playing legendary creeps in Ghostbusters, Real Genius and Die Hard is perfectly cast as a degenerate who takes one look at the rage-filled painter and sees something remarkable, namely someone willing to kill, and kill again, for the sake of verisimilitude, his art, and, perhaps most importantly the big, big paydays the sinister art collector is willing to pay out in exchange for art with the unmistakable scent of murder.

It’s easy to buy Atherton in this kind of a role; if you were to tell me he had an extensive collection of snuff films I would believe you. In the 1980s, Atherton’s only rival for King of Cinematic Creeps was Jeffrey Jones, and we unfortunately know what kind of stuff he collected offscreen.

Like the reluctant vampire Malcolm McDowel playedl in the last episode, our morally compromised anti-hero figures that if he HAS to kill people then he might as well kill the kind of bad people whose absence could only make the world a better place. Jack’s sinister new benefactor toasts their Faustian bargain with champagne.

Jack’s urge to kill and his urge to drink clearly come from the same dark place. So when his landlord comes skulking around, mocking his sobriety and beckoning him to share a drink with her, he has no problem whatsoever hurling her down a flight of stairs to her violent death, and then documenting the results for posterity in a painting Malcolm happily purchases.

Malcom is the devil on Jack’s shoulder, perpetually urging him to give in to his dark side. Sharon is the angel on his shoulder who ends up getting struck by a car while fleeing him and his darkness, which at this point has already wracked up a body count.

Gratuitous T&A in an episode of Tales From the Crypt? It happened! — Gratuitous T&A in an episode of *Tales From the Crypt*? It happened!

Jack understandably feels guilty about Sharon’s condition. He wants to save her but, in an exchange that stretches credibility just a smidge, is told that paying for a surgeon to save her life will cost a LOT of money but a determined Jack insists that he will raise the money, and quickly.

The murder-happy painter knows just how to raise the money: he just needs to murder someone immediately, paint the grisly aftermath, sell it to Malcolm for six figures and then some good will come from the considerable bad of Jack adding one more murder to the list.

With no time to spare, Jack commits his next murder right then and there, of a gent who gives off an unmistakable “doctor” vibe, partially because Jack spots and kills him at a hospital, where doctors are known to congregate.

Jack kills the poor man only to be informed that in a senseless tragedy, the doctor who would have performed the costly but no doubt successful surgery was brutally murdered by an artistic lunatic for no goddamn reason before he could perform the life-saving operation.

Our angry anti-hero learns that while murder can solve many of your problems, particularly financial and professional ones, it can’t solve ALL your problems. In some ways, killing people actually causes more problems than it solves, that is, if you’re killing people for the wrong reasons.

Thanks largely to Roth’s nuanced, multi-dimensional performance, “Easel Kill Ya” is a grungy, darkly humorous character study about a complicated man fighting and losing a fierce war with his demons that is betrayed by a twist ending equal parts achingly predictable and utterly hack.

Twist endings are of course Tales From the Crypt’s raison d’être as much as gratuitous sex and nudity, gore and ghoulish wordplay, but the twist here is so corny that it damn near ruins an episode that otherwise has so much going for it.