Tales From the Crypt Season 3, Episode 9: "Undertaking Pallor"
After an auspicious and prolific career in television, Tales From the Crypt Executive Producer Richard Donner made a blockbuster leap to the big screen with 1978’s The Omen, a wildly influential surprise smash about the original brat from hell, Damien.
Donner solidified his A list status with 1978’s Superman, a motion picture about the popular children’s hero Superman, before specializing in films involving children and shenanigans like 1982’s regrettable The Toy, which was brutally unfunny but also super-racist as well as 1985’s The Goonies, 1987’s The Lost Boys, which he was slated to direct before passing those duties onto Joel Schumacher while remaining an Executive Producer and the famously troubled 1992 child abuse drama Radio Flyer.
Tales From the Crypt loves in-jokes and winking references so it is not surprising that “Undertaking Pallor” opens with its roster of foul-mouthed, horror movie-loving B-list Goonies strolling out a movie theater showing Radio Flyer, past a poster for Donner’s Lethal Weapon.
Donner did not direct “Undertaking Pallor” but the show got an acceptable substitute in Donner protege Michael Thau, who worked as an assistant to Donner on The Goonies before taking on various roles in multiple Donner productions.
“Undertaking Pallor” is a product of 1991 but spiritually it belongs unmistakably to the Steven Spielberg and Stephen King-led 1980s boom in child-friendly and kid-centered horror, adventure and science fiction that led to such beloved modern classics as E.T, Gremlins, Stand By Me, The Goonies, Back To the Future, Monster Squad, The Explorers and The Lost Boys and inspired Stranger Things.
“Undertaking Pallor” instantly won me over by opening with a child swearing. “Damn, shit, son of a bitch, fuck” are the young person’s exact words. He’s disappointed by the lack of Junior Mints in the package and not, presumably, the quality of Radio Flyer but he and his buddies want to do more than just watch movie directed by Tales From the Crypt bigwigs: they want to make them as well.
They want to be horror filmmakers specifically. To help them get into the right frame of mind to become fright masters one of the little rascals proposes going to the morgue so that they can see a real dead body, not unlike the pint-sized protagonist of the Stephen King novella “The Body”, its film adaptation Stand By Me or Boyz N The Hood, which people don’t remember is half unusually accomplished Stand By Me knockoff.
At the mortuary the boys look on with mortification and horror as nattily attired undertaker Sebastian Esbrook (John Glover) conducts a one-sided but spirited conversation with a school librarian he lusted after and now has exactly where he wants her: on a slab, where he can do whatever he wants to the body.
This being Tales From the Crypt, that has an unmistakably sexual, necrophiliac undercurrent, particularly with the creep cooing come-ons like, “Come on, old girl, give us a smile” but the morbid mortician giddily takes a sledgehammer to the dead woman’s face instead of defiling her.
Glover is perfect for Tales From the Crypt: a sinister cult icon who specialized in playing creeps, villains, weirdoes and Donald Trump surrogates. As a dead body basher with all manner of unsavory, unethical entanglements the Gremlins 2 star makes the undertaker a figure of real horror and dread, a demented sociopath who sings along lustily to opera, lost in a world of his own, conducting an aria of insanity.
Sebastian Esbrook is a bad, bad man who does evil, unconscionable things to the bodies he’s tasked with making presentable but he does not work alone. The funeral fiend has an arrangement with an equally amoral pharmacist whose dorky, bow-tied and pipe-smoking exterior hides a core of pure, calculating evil.
The pharmacist gives his clients poison in place of medicine, then collects kickbacks from the undertaker based on the money he receives for the funerals. There have to be MANY easier, less lethal and evil ways for a funeral home to scare up business but Glover’s mad mortician is clearly in it for the murder as well as the money.
The funeral home’s funny business becomes personal for the boys when one of their fathers gets a lethal dose of “medicine” for his asthma from the pharmacist in league with the evil corpse cosmetician so they decide to expose his evil chicanery through the medium of film, or at least grubby home video.
The boys grab their video cameras and head back to Sebastian’s house of horrors to catch him in the act and then expose him to the police but things take a turn when the mortician kills his pharmacist co-conspirator and then the boys end up accidentally dealing a dose of fatal justice when Sebastian gets his innards sucked out through one of his own fiendish tools.
“Undertaking Pallor” is primarily shot like a conventional Tales From the Crypt episode but part of the episode is filmed from the perspective of the morbidly curious kids, through primitive video technology that gives it an unmistakable mockumentary/Blair Witch Project feel.
In that respect, this is at once a throwback to the much-loved kiddie horror genre of the 1980s and the Blair Witch Project-inspired horror mockumentaries of the aughts and teens while at the same time feeling unmistakably like Tales From the Crypt in his prime thanks largely to a gloriously theatrical performance by the perfectly cast Glover, a more than worthy addition to the HBO horror anthology’s rogues gallery of villains and monsters, literal as well as figurative.
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