Tales From the Crypt Season 3, Episode 13: "Spoiled"

A complete episode guide to Tales From the Crypt? That sounds lame.

I’ve been thinking a lot about parody, as you might imagine. I’m nearly done with the epic, 500 + page expanded version of The Weird Accordion to Al, my epic tome about the music, television, film and live career of American pop parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic. 

I’ve been watching a lot of films or television shows that combines elements of parody, like UHF, Comedy Bang! Bang!, The Weird Al Show and Zoolander and it has made me appreciate just how difficult it is to pull off pop culture spoofery even if you’re very good and very experienced at it. If you are not, successful spoofery is damn near impossible to pull off.

As I’ve written about extensively in this column, Tales From the Crypt can be very funny when it’s organically extracting bleak laughs out of the ghoulish gallows humor of its sordid, sin-laden scenarios. But it can be downright painful when it strains too hard for chuckles of the zany variety. 

I’ve learned to be skeptical of “funny” episodes of Tales From the Crypt, because the harder it tries to be funny, the less it tends to succeed. It would be hard to think of a genre further removed the show’s sweet spot of pitch-black, blood-splattered dark comedy than a multi-layered, very meta soap opera spoof. 

Yet “Spoiled” nevertheless chooses to give a form of entertainment that already exists in a deep, permanent state of perpetual self-parody a lukewarm razzing through both a fictional soap opera whose empowered, sexually aggressive and rule-breaking heroine inspires a bored, sexually frustrated housewife to follow her lead into the land of debauchery and infidelity and the decidedly soap opera-like life and loves of the horny housewife, her earthy cable repairman lover and her distracted scientist husband. 

Add layer upon layer of winking double entendre and groaningly self-referential gags and you have an episode that’s way too pleased with itself and too clever by half. 

Anita Morris of Ruthless People stars as Fuchsia, a soap opera siren and femme fatale who swaggers through the soap opera There’s Always Tomorrow in a state of eternal arousal, hungrily pursuing a hunky younger man when her workaholic businessman husband rejects her fevered sexual advances. 

We then pull out from the TV soap to a nondescript suburban home where a pair of friends watch in a state of near-orgasmic excitement and arousal. Fuchsia gives bored, sexually unsatisfied soap opera buff Janet (Faye Grant) a script for rebelling against the stifling limitations of her sexless marriage. Fuchsia even provides the words for Janet (Faye Grant) to use when trading in a passionless home life for the soap opera ideal of hot extra-marital sex with a muscle-bound lower-class stud. 

The characters in “Spoiled” are well-worn cultural archetypes, stereotypes we’ve seen most often in soap operas but in other histrionic forms of entertainment as well: the bored, curious wife, the distracted, non-sexual husband with a mind a world away from the subject of his wife’s sexual needs, the supportive friend and the well-muscled worker who specializes in servicing lonely, horny wives as well as their cable systems. 

Janet wants to jump mad scientist husband Leon’s (Alan Rachins) bones when he comes home from work but he’s too obsessed with becoming the first doctor to perform a successful brain transplant to acquiesce to pay attention to her carnal cravings.  

Janet has got a body and a mind for sin. All her hubby cares about, however, is science. Janet finds a more receptive audience for her lust in the form of Abel (Anthony LaPaglia), a cable repairman who is skilled in the ways of double entendres, television repair and love-making. 

Abel’s profession provides what little pretext Tales From the Crypt needs to make jokes about itself. When Janet’s reception goes out, her friend Louise (Annabelle Gurwitch) implores, “Janet, when are you going to join the rest of us in the twentieth century and get cable? The picture is so much better, PLUS you get HBO and everything! It would REALLY improve the quality of your life.”  

This pays off later when Leon comes home to find Abel in his home and he boots up the pay cable as an illustration he’s on the job and the telltale cackle of the Crypt-Keeper can be heard before the joykill hubby gruffly tells him to turn it off, proving that he truly is the enemy of fun. 

Janet is less interested in cable than in cable guy Abel, who favors steamy banter like “It’s not the size of the tool, ma’am. It’s how you use it” where he seems to be referring to both the tools employed in installing cable and his own “tool”, or penis.  

Perfumed and clad in sexy lingerie, Janet succeeds in seducing the cable guy and they begin a passionate, soft-core affair behind the scientist’s back. 

Leon’s obliviousness makes the illicit lovers cocky. So they get careless and keep going at it even after Leon wanders into the room, moaning lasciviously about how they want each others’ bodies. The heartbroken doc decides to make their wishes come true in the most groaningly literal manner possible by attaching their respective heads to each other’s bodies using his revolutionary new procedure for brain transplants. 

The macho stud ends the episode with the body of a sexy woman while the unfaithful housewife now has the rugged physique of a macho dude. The distractingly bad special effects are the maraschino cherry atop the triple scoop sundae of ridiculousness that is “Spoiled.” 

True, it’s intentionally overwrought and heavy-handed in keeping with its satirical subject, but that does not render it any less eye-roll inducingly hokey. “Spoiled” may be purposefully bad, but in the end it’s just bad. 

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And, this is VERY exciting, but you can also pre-order the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL with loads more illustrations and a new cover as well as over a hundred pages of new material covering every facet of Al’s career, including The Complete Al, UHF, The Weird Al Show, the fifth season of Comedy Bang! Bang! and the 2018 Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour for just $23.00, signed copy . tax + USA domestic shipping included here release date: July 27th, 2020

And, if you like deep dives into pop culture, you’ll want to pick up The Weird Accordion to Al, my epic exploration of the complete discography of “Weird Al” Yankovic, with an introduction by Al himself and 52 gorgeous illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro here or here 

AND you can also pre-order the 500+ page expanded version here as well