Dinty Moore goes to see a psychic on her lunch hour.  Madam Vorma has the second sight and reads vibrations.

Vorma reads her as a secretary wasting her life away, waiting to meet Mr. Right or Mr. Rich.  She says Dinty will lose her job and get another one today.  Dinty says her boss is out of town so this is impossible.  But Madam Vorma knows her stuff.

Dinty is fired (by Sarah Connor’s shrink) for for taking 25 minutes too long at lunch.  Walking down the sidewalk, a strip club manager offers her a job.  Sadly, as a waitress.

Dinty goes back to Vorma.  She “sees” Dinty getting married, and her husband inheriting a lot of money shortly after they are married.  After he inherits the money, he will die violently.

Back at the club, Miss Nude Nebraska 1948 is introduced.  Thank God this was not set in present day.  Dinty sees George (or possibly Oscar) Bluth waddle into the club.  He begins hitting on her.  Jeffrey Tambor, not a looker on his best day, is padded out in a repulsive fat suit, blubber and prosthetic nose.

Dinty is disgusted by him but her greed out-weighs her nausea.  Soon they are dating and married.  Unexpectedly, Dinty wins $1 million by being the one-millionth customer at the automat.  Taking place 50 years ago, this must have been the combined revenue of every automat in the country.  That’s probably what killed them.

Vorma is proven correct in her predictions and, as always, justice is served like apple pie at an automat.  Sadly, though only to Dinty —  Tambor is really an object for pity in all of this.  A hideous hulk who actually thought he was going to be happy with a beautiful wife — what a maroon.  And though he did kill her, it was her greed and cruelty that propelled him to old sparky.

The episode ends ominously with another customer coming to Vorma.  Yet another botched ending as it suddenly shifts perspective to make Vorma the focal point of the evil.  All she did was correctly predict the future.

Still, a good twist and some excellent performances from the leads make this a great episode .  Also some great make-up on Tambor, and some great style — fashion, make-up, hair — from Dinty.  She really comes off as a classic movie star.

Post-Post:

• This aired just as Demi Moore was becoming huge — Ghost was the same year.  A Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal and Disclosure would open in the next four years.
• She really was nothing short of perfect in this.  It’s too bad she didn’t use that comedic talent in more of her roles.
• Howard Deutch also directed the episode Only Sin Deep.

Starring M. Emmett Walsh and Audra Lindley, my first thought was Christ, don’t let there be a love scene.  I just saw one with Tony & Carmella Soprano and my stomach can only take so much in one week.

Walsh is a surly, bitter old man who has just faced mandatory retirement after 47 years on the job.  Now he and Lindley have more time to spend with each other, and that is not good news for either of them.  Lindley is probably legitimately nuts with her animal obsession, and this makes Walsh even nastier.

Eventually he takes up a new hobby — taxidermy — and the ending pretty much writes itself.  His first object d’art is a dog that Lindley had named after him.  He stuffs it, and further horrifies his wife with a remote that can make the eyes light on and off.  Tacky.

The only question is which of these 2 annoying characters will end up stuffed.  You’d hate for it to be Lindley because she seems to have a real psychological problem.  You’d hate for it to be Walsh because . . . well, that would actually be OK with me.

Yet another botched ending as the character who gets stuffed absolutely should have been given the same blinking-light eyes that the dog had — leaving that out was just sloppy.

Post-Post:

• Directed by Mary Lambert the same year she directed Pet Sematary.  Nothing much interesting since, although Mega Python vs Gatoroid sounds promising.
• Co-written by Battle Davis who IMDb says died 5 years after this aired, at age 42. Also co-written by A. Whitney Brown; a very funny guy who seems to have disappeared from comedy.  Maybe this episode is cursed.
• Please let this have been a joke, just so this episode has something going for it (even though there is no pike in the tank).

Not a good week for TV.  After the fiasco of White Light Fever, Tales from the Crypt also came up with a huge loser.

Honey Bunny from Pulp Fiction and Fabio have just gotten married.  Her aunt Edith accuses her new husband of only wanting to marry her for her money.

As they drive off for their honeymoon, they are stopped by a tree which has fallen across the road in a storm.  Luckily there is a house nearby where they take refuge.

After making the love, Fabio has a dream of Honey Bunny meeting another man and inviting him into the house.  After they make out on the sofa, Honey Bunny grabs a battle-axe off the wall and hacks away at the man.  Fabio tries to stop her, but goes right through her ghostly image.  And then he wakes up.

Turns out the woman in the dream was actually Honey Bunny’s mother murdering her father on their wedding night, which was also the night of her conception.  Then Honey Bunny does the same.

The positive reviews online for this episode just confirm my theory that everything is someone’s favorite (a corollary of the larger “People are Idiots” theory).  No characterization, no motivation, just nothing going on.

I rate it a 3.

Post-Post Leftovers:

• So the tree just happened to have fallen by the same house where her mother killed her father?
• Really not worth wasting another second thinking about it.
• And, bloody hell, I just ordered season 2!

Amazonian shrunken head — check, African tribal mask — check, dorky white guy — check.  Wait, what?  These things don’t go together.

Lea Thompson plays hooker Sylvia Vane.  She is tired of hanging out with her pimp and her hooker friend who is even more obnoxious than the pimp.  Across the street, she sees a successful man getting out of a limo — Goodwin from Lost — and decides it is time to make some changes.

To get some quick cash, she pulls out pistol, pwns her pimp, pawns his jewelry.  In the pawn shop, she sees an veiled crone barge in and take a swing at the pawnbroker.

Before

The pawnbroker suspects the jewelry is stolen, but makes her another offer.  He will give her $10,000 cash to make a mold of her face, or “beauty” as he says.  Like any item left in his shop, she has 4 months to reclaim it.  She agrees, and he begins ladling goo on her face to create a plaster mask.

Oh, and he keeps a casket in the backroom with his dead, withered husk of a wife.  But Lea didn’t see that, so no reason for her to be at all suspicious of this Randy Quaid lookalike offering her big money to put goo on her face.  Probably not a first for her; not even that day.

Lea de-tarts herself, washing off the make-up, getting a new-doo, removing that thing on her cheek, spitting out the gum, toning down the lipstick, and dumping the hookerwear.  She then goes on a shopping spree for new clothes which are far sexier than her hooker uniform.  I don’t understand why hookers don’t get how unsexy their clothes are.  And how they never have correct change.  Sadly, she does not change the single most repulsive thing about her — that god-awful accent.

After

Lea crashes Goodwin’s party and introduces herself as “Sylvia Vane, as in weather vane.”  He introduces himself as “Ronnie Price, as in everyone has theirs.”  This is a little jarring because they were clearly going for symmetry here, but completely missed the target; maybe twice.  OK, she’s vain, we get it.  Why bring up a weather vane?  He is presumed to be shallow and greedy, thus the “price” comment.  So his name is fitting, whereas hers is just a homonym.  Plus, I don’t see any real signs that he’s a bad guy, and it isn’t necessary for the story.  In fact, in this kind of story, he should be a good guy to make her sins even worse.

Title card, predictably:  “4 months later”.

Taking a bubble bath, she notices some lines on her face in the mirror.  I couldn’t really detect anything hideous viewing the DVD.  I’m not sure how visible it was on an RCA set 25 years ago.

The next morning, it is more detectable, although it really just looks like she is wearing no make-up.  Presumably later the same day, she goes to a dermatologist.  The condition is now very prominent as lines on her face, and she has started wearing a black veil.  Maybe the subtle onset gave her condition more credibility.  The ramp-up, combined with subtly of the make-up make this aged face much more effective than the older Lorraine McFly.

The doctor jogs her memory about the deal she made 4 months ago, and she returns to the pawnshop.  She confronts the pawnbroker, but it has been 4 months and 1 day.  However, he can make an exception for a mere $100,000.

She loots Goodwin’s apartment.  He catches her, but her condition has worsened so much that he does not recognize her.  He calls the police to report a burglar, and she goes all Ana Lucia on him.  I understand she is a little on edge, but she puts 12 slugs in him?  What did he do wrong?

Lea manages to scrape together $100k of cash and jewels and high-tails it back to the pawnshop.  It is locked, but she is in no mood for that.  She breaks in and sees the pawnbroker’s wife.

The pawnbroker says he can give her beauty back if that is what she reallllly wants. But he produces a newspaper with the headline, “Playboy Iced by Gold Digger” and her picture, which was published quicker than the Oswald story in New Zealand.

Way After

A cop comes in, and she overhears him telling the pawnbroker they found the murder weapon with fingerprints matching a set they already had on file for soliciting.  There is no going back to that identity.  Lea steals the plaster model of her face, although what she can do with it is not clear.

In a city of 10 million, her former obnoxious hooker friend (former friend, still obnoxious) rudely bumps into her, knocking the mask from her hands.  Then we get a very out-of-place crane shot of the four corners of this intersection, and a LOT of extras.  It really looks like maybe this location was set up for a movie and HBO just asked if they could borrow it for a minute.

As the camera rises from Lea picking up the fractured shards of her beauty, we cut back to the Cryptkeeper, who actually looks kind of hot relative to the disgusting women in this episode.

I rate this girl a 7.

Post-Post Leftovers:

• Written by Fred Dekker who also wrote And All through the House.
• Lea Thompson got off to a great start in movies.  Back to the Future was her 5th movie, coming after Jaws 3D, All the Right Moves, Red Dawn and The Wild Life.  She strategically leveraged this career momentum to score the non-titular lead in Howard the Duck.
• Not that there’s anything wrong with Lea Thompson, but she really wasn’t pretty enough to believably seduce Goodwin from across the room.  The uncredited blonde he was talking to when Lea crashed the party was much hotter.  And certainly when Goodwin heard Lea’s accent, that should have sent him running back to [uncredited blonde].
• OK, I know why they never have correct change.

Full title: “Dig that Cat . . . He’s Real Gone”.  But I wasn’t sure it was worth that much headline real estate.

This gets off to a very rough start.  Oddly, the calliope score here did not work for me as well as it did in The Man Who was Death despite this episode being set in a carnival.  I guess that’s why you pay extra for Ry Cooder.

Things do not improve with the 1) the use of a distorted lens, 2) having the camera be directly addressed as a carnival goer and 3) the appearance of Robert Wuhl.

Even Wuhl’s patter is awful.  He somehow entices the rubes into his show saying that it is “100% natural, no pesticides, but perhaps a homicide.”  The homicide part makes sense, as we will discover; but for the couplet to work, there has to be some point to saying pesticide other than just that it rhymes.  I expect more from a carny.  It’s like vaudeville for people with missing fingers — they use the same routine for years, generations; passed down from father to son, brother to brother; sometimes in the same transaction.  They would have had it polished to perfection around 1920.

He promises “two shows in one — the tragedy of death and the miracle of resurrection!”  He introduces Ulric who will be buried 6 feet under, and return to life 12 hours later.  Things immediately take a turn for the better as Ulric is played by Joe Pantoliano. Once settled in his grave, Ulric addresses the audience, flashing back on how he acquired this talent.

Ulric was a bum, er, Homeless-American when Dr. Manfred offered him cash to participate in an experiment.  Manfred came up with a way to transfer a cat’s 9 lives to a human.  Rather than sell this discovery to Big Pharma, or to some aging billionaires, Manfred decides the big money is to be made in smelly tents from rubes eating corn-dogs and funnel cakes.

Ulric is skeptical that the operation actually accomplished anything other than killing the cat until the doctor pulls out a gun and shoots him in the head.  When he reawakens, he is angry until he realizes that the doctor was telling the truth.

So they split the take as Ulric is killed on a nightly basis by drowning, electrocution, hanging, arrow to the heart, etc.  I can understand Ulric not fearing death, but it’s hard to believe he would subject himself to such painful events; unlike Cypher, he is coming back.  These things have got to leave a mark.  And is that bullet still in his head?

As usual, there is a great twist and justice is served.  Suffice it to say, Ulric finishes his story in the same coffin where he began it; just in a much louder voice.

This series and its source material revel in going over the top.  Robert Wuhl and much of the direction had the energy, but in this case were just too annoying.

I rate it 4.5 out of 9 cat’s lives.

Post-Post Leftovers:

• Not a biggie, but Ulric is introduced as Ulric the Undying.  Technically, he dies every night; he just doesn’t stay dead.
• Wuhl is best known, ironically, for a show that no one watched.  Arli$$ was on HBO for 6 years, and the joke was always, “Who is watching this?”  Literally, no one knew anyone who watched this show; it just wouldn’t go away.  It was Arli$$ the Undying.
• Wow!  Writer Terry Black wrote Lethal Weapon, and wrote & directed Iron Man 3.  Oh, wait.  Oh, that was his brother Shane.  Awkward.