Tales From The Crypt “Collection Completed”

Apparently, season one of Tales from the Crypt was all of six episodes.  That was fast.

Jonas (M. Emmet Walsh, the perfect character actor to hire to play an angry grump) has been forced into retirement from his job, something he hates, but maybe it won’t be so bad since he still has his wife Anita (Audra “Mrs. Roper” Lindley).  Small problem:  Anita seems to have adopted every critter in the neighborhood.  Her “surprise party” for Jonas when he got home was a bunch of dogs and cats, and maybe a parrot or two, in the kitchen wearing party hats.

So, the episode basically plays off the idea that Anita loves animals, Jonas more or less hates them, and somehow after decades of marriage, this never came up before.  To be far, Anita is not the most considerate of wives.  She makes a nice steak for a dog’s breakfast but gives Jonas a small box of oat bran.  He asks for an aspirin, and she puts it inside a brownie because dogs and cats take them that way.  When he needs a shower, the bottom is full of fish because she’s cleaning the fish tank.  Jonas is a second class citizen in his own home.

However, it wouldn’t be so bad if he wasn’t so irritable about the whole thing.  She names a bulldog after him, and that’s bad because…?  Beats me.  Maybe if he tried putting together the model ships his neighbor friend kept bringing over, he’d be OK.  I just want to know why Jonas never noticed Anita’s love for animals before.  The neighbor guy did.  This isn’t new behavior.  You mean he never noticed, on weekends especially, that there were all these pets around the house?  Anita apparently even gets along with the local squirrels.

But then Jonas has an idea for a new hobby:  taxidermy.  He starts with Jonas the bulldog, giving him light-up eyes.

Boo!

So, now that he’s killed and stuffed many of the animals around the house–mostly rabbits and squirrels from the looks of things, but at least one other dog–Jonas threatens what I guess is Anita’s favorite cat, Mew-Mew.  Naturally, that leads to the most predictable ending so far:  Anita snaps, kills Jonas, and taxidermies him to sit in his armchair and watch Lassie reruns with her.

I might think that’s horrible, but this guy decided to start killing animals just because his wife loved them.  There’s not much room for sympathy there.

What about the Cryptkeeper?  He introduces his own pet, a small, poorly-taxidermied dog.

Notable Names:  Walsh; Lindely; director Mary Lambert made some horror movies back in the day, most notable Pet Semtary; one of the episode’s three credited writers, A. Whitney Brown, was one of the original correspondents on The Daily Show.