Tales from the Crypt - Only Sin Deep (Season 1, Episode 4)

Only Sin Deep

Season 1 - Episode 4

from Haunt of Fear #24

Aired June 14, 1989
Directed by Howard Deutch

Worst pun: "Beauty is only sin deep" Yeah I know it's the title, there's not a lot to work with this week. 

A call girl plans to land a rich playboy and pawns her beauty in order to dress to impress. What? She misunderstands the pawnshop's refund offer? Too late to read between the lines (and wrinkles), girlie!

This episode starts with a mirror, mirror on the wall joke. He asks it who's the "fearest" of them all. It cracks. That's all I have to say about that.

Lea Thompson of Back to the Future and Howard the Duck "fame" is a prostitute. When you co-star with a talking duck and the principal from Ferris Bueller before he got caught molesting kids I guess this is the logical career progression. She's constantly checking herself out in the mirror. Don't worry, vanity won't be a recurring theme. She has the most obnoxious New York tough guy accent I've ever fucking heard. It's the type of accent you hear from a shitty comedian the say "So I was just in New York. New Yorkers man, let me tell ya, they're always like..." The entire point of the episode is she's absolutely gorgeous and she and everyone on God's green earth knows it, but the forced accent is so horrendous that it makes my penis shoot inside my body like a scared turtle head. 

She talks to another whore named Raven. They watch a bunch of rich white people going to an expensive rich white people party, and Lea wonders aloud what they've got that she doesn't. Besides, money, nice clothes, and a vagina that isn't riddled with cigarette burns. 

She decides she's gonna Pretty Woman herself and become a classy, rich lady. So she shoots a pimp to death and steals his jewelry and attempts to sell it to a pawnbroker. He refuses to take it, seeing as how this prostitute just walked into his shop with a fifteen thousand dollar diamond encrusted watch. In the middle of this, a crazy old lady with a veil covering her face runs in the store, screams at him, starts breaking shit, then leaves. 

Lea Thompson is about to storm out when the pawnbroker stops her and offers to buy "her beauty." He holds up what clearly isn't ten thousand dollars and offers her ten thousand dollars for it. She's not weirded out by the balding man with decaying teeth offering her cash for something vague and intangible and unable to be proven in a court of law, so she agrees.  

He buys her "beauty" by making putting plaster on her face and making a mold of it. Then when she leaves, he does some voodoo shenanigans and a slow zoom out reveals a corpse of a bride, still in her white wedding dress. Oh dear. 

Shall i compare thee to a summer's oh god what the fuck

So the hooker with a heart of gold gets 10 grand. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Makeover montage. Clothes, jewelry, and more jewelry, all so she can pretend to be a classy rich lady and snag herself a rich man. She can wear as many diamonds as she want, the second she opens her gaping maw and talks like The Duffman's brother from the Bronx, she's getting kicked the fuck out for being the shrieking harpy she is. 

She attends the next rich white person party somehow looking even worse than she did as a hooker and is ogled by all the yuppie scum. She meets the host of the party, who abandons his date to talk to her because his insatiable appetite can only be quenched by the girl who fucked a space duck. There's a bunch of boring dialogue and we learn her last name is Vane, and his is Price. Fucking GET IT? 

She slaps him and walks away, playing hard to get. He runs up from behind and grabs her it looks for a second like he's about to Patrick Bateman her. But no, they just fuck and we jump to four months later.

Four months later and they're still together and madly in love or some shit. You know they're in love because he buys her an expensive necklace and spouts some nonsense about her being the girl of his dreams, who cares. She's starting to freak out though, because every time she looks in the mirror she looks a little bit older. 

Price has to leave for a business trip and nonchalantly mentions all the beauty shit she's been buying. She panics and goes to the doctor, who immediately rules out cancer, allergies, or years of sucking strange dick for money. He tells her her skin is aging at an accelerated rate and asks her if she's come into contact with something weird like mysterious chemicals, sugar, spice, or everything nice. Then she remembers her beauty treatment. Not entirely sure how you would forget something like that, but hey, I didn't try to fuck my own son at a high school dance.

She's aged decades overnight, so she goes back to the pawnbroker to get her refund. Unfortunately, she's past the deadline by one day. Now he wants 100,000 dollars. She panics for the fifteenth time and returns home and wrecks the apartment looking for cash. She grabs a hundred grand worth of jewelry and tries to leave when Price returns home. He doesn't recognize her and calls the cops, because there's a crazy mummy wrecking his house. She shoots him dead and leaves. Oh, and by shoots him, I mean she empties the entire fucking clip in him. 

The pawnbroker's shop is closed when she arrives. She breaks in and finds a bunch of face molds similar to the one she had done. His bride is still in her casket but now looks like an actual human being. She doesn't even come back to life, but now he can stare at her beautiful corpse instead of her decaying one, I don't fucking know. 

BUT THE WACKY TWIST ENDING IS 

He offers to give her her beauty back, but shows her the front page of the newspaper. She's the headline story, wanted for the murder of Price, with her picture front and center. She's a wanted woman and can't live with her old face. She takes her mold and leaves, cradling it like a baby. 

She chose...poorly

She leaves knowing she's stuck looking like she drank from the wrong grail for the rest of her life or else she'll be imprisoned. She crosses a busy intersection and bumps into Raven, who doesn't recognize her. The mold shatters, and Raven leaves, calling her an ugly old bitch and telling her to be more careful next time. She's left devastated in the middle of the street, hopelessly trying to put the broken pieces back together. 

Crypt Keeper is putting on ACME acne cream. All the puns suck. So did this episode. The end. 

The first real dud of the series. The main character was really hateable, but the comeuppance at the end wasn't enough to make suffering through her shit worth it. I'm not giving it 1 star because I know what seasons 6 and 7 have in store for me, so that leaves me with 

2/5


[ Previous Episode | Episode List | Next Episode ]