"....but not as brightly lit!"

In Best Buy the other day, I nearly dropped coin on this, the first season of Tales from the Darkside:



As I walked toward the register, some cold, hard facts began trickling into the thought box. Wait, dumbass....Tales from the Darkside's episodes are terrible overall. Why waste cash? Sure, I love television genre anthologies more than anything, but why I own every other one, so why fuck with this crap?" Common sense got the best of me, fortunately, and I set it back on the shelf, where it seemed like every single copy was available (not exactly a hot seller, I suppose).

Even the fact that the great George Romero's name was listed as a producer on the series couldn't save it from the pits. Can't say I've seen every episode, but I have watched a great deal, enough to make an educated assessment that the show was wildly uneven. For every semi-creepy horror entry there'd be a painfully-unfunny horror-comedy tale; for every bootleg special effect there'd be piss-poor acting by C-listers and other faces you'd recognize from random movies ("Hey, isn't that the Italian dude from Fast Times from Ridgemont High?).



What pains me the most about my distaste for Tales is that its "father" is Creepshow, a flick that I adore in vast ways. Imagine that, directly resulting from The Dark Knight's mondo success, a new CW channel series starring Frankie Muniz as Batman premieres and gathers enough viewers to sustain a five-year run, gradually and mercilessly beating down your affinity for the flick that started it all. That's how the truly-shitty episodes of Tales from the Darkside treat my Jordy Verrill-loving heart.

Thanks to the Chiller network, I've been able to catch up on Tales from the Darkside, which originally aired from 1983 to 1988, more than I should ever want to, and over time I've grown to appreciate the show's camp value, at least. It's never less than pretty-entertaining, even when an episode's quality leaves you wishing you were watching The New York Ripper instead. If I had to single out one problem area that pisses me off most about Tales from the Darkside than any other, it's be the elegraphed plot twists that jump the shark within the first five minutes of every fucking episode. I'd say I've watched about 40-or-so episodes thus far, and I'm not joshing when I say that I've called 40-or-so impending twists. No one man should possess such Nostradamus-esque foresight. A clear sign that the writers behind the show were either full-fledged hacks or just lazy as sin.

The only redeeming quality that deserves recognition and praise: the show's opening title sequence. A rather disorienting, haunting, sticks-in-your-head score layered with Paul Sparer's voiceover that places second after Rod Serling in the pantheon of genre anthology preambles:



If not for ever-so-generous Youtube, I might have submitted to temptation and purchased the Tales DVD just so I could rewind and re-watch that opening sequence at will. Unnecessary now, thankfully. Youtube is even gracious enough to offer some of the show's best moments for ogling consumption, such as this, from "Inside the Closet," a terribly-dated yet still cool monster-in-my-room entry directed by the giant-in-my-mind Tom Savini:



If that scared you, then you'd love Tales from the Darkside. You'd also be a pussy, but that's neither here nor there.

Wanna know the sad part? If somebody were kind enough to give me this Season One set as a gift, I'd be happier than a cat in litter. Just because something is crap doesn't make unworthy of my DVD collection. I see you, Resident Evil: Apocalypse.