I have honestly gone back and forth for 2 weeks on whether this is a great episode or just unwatchable shit.  And it’s not even a close call — it is decidedly one or the other.

It uses a garish color palette, something you would expect from Tales from the Crypt.  Well done, if this is what you’re looking for.

The lead character Arky is a skinny, obnoxious, hyperkinetic, man-child with a high pitched voice like very-early-era Jerry Lewis.  Unfortunately, he is about as funny as every-other-era Jerry Lewis.  Yet, I can’t help but be impressed by his commitment to the part.  Seriously, the actor gives it 100% and I think is successful in what he wanted to do.

The dialogue is stilted and wordy.  For example: “Before you have Gus and Bork reduce him to his component parts for shipment, are you interested in hearing his tale of woe?”  Or, when Arky is asked why he made a deal with a demon: “For a first-refusal option on 51% of my immortal soul.”  Yes, I understand that it is purposely so, and I appreciated the musicality of some of the lines, but to what end?

That is just one of many indications that this does not take place in the Twilight Zone universe (ie our universe).  The whole foundation of TZ was that is existed in little cracks of our reality.  The old TZ’s stories took place in dull, B&W 1958-1964 when suddenly BAM! — your daughter falls out of bed and into another dimension.  This uber-styled episode is, again, a better fit for TFTC than TZ.

For some reason, a particularly egregious example of this did make me laugh.  Poor Arky is on the hook to the mob for a loan with 750% interest!  Or maybe this was set during the Carter Administration.

I did enjoy the design of the demon.  It is arguably cheesy, but I found its shifting, yellow, cloud-like form to be fabulous.  It was also given a voice that was a perfect blend of menace and stentorian parody.  That was great as far as it went, but it just kept going and going.  Paradoxically, that’s just how I want my demon to speak, but the constant yelling does get tedious.

The anchor of the episode is its straight man, Anthony Franciosa. As the mobster, he projected cool, confident authority and confidence.  Without him, the episode would have been irredeemable.

This felt like when they used to take an episode of a sitcom and unexpectedly shift the focus to a different family or character as a non-committal spin-off pilot.

So I guess I appreciated more than I liked it.  It is impossible to assign it a number or letter grade.  I rate this one a mauve.