Tales From The Crypt :”The Sacrifice”

I saw the name Kim Delaney, and I was all “Hey, another actress I know!” But then the episode started, and she didn’t look or sound right to me, so I looked her up.  Yeah, I got mixed up and thought it was going to be Dana Delany.  They aren’t related.  They don’t even spell their last names the same,

Oh well.  Kim does a good job here anyway.

One of my favorite Billy Wilder movies–and I really like Billy Wilder movies–is Double Indemnity.  An otherwise honest insurance salesman is asked to sell a new policy to an obnoxious husband, plots with the beautiful wife to murder the man, making it look like an accident, and then collect the insurance money.  But the salesman’s boss is looking into things, and that causes problems for the criminal couple.  Brilliant movie.

This episode runs a lot like that one, only the rich guy’s death is less of an accident than before as the salesman, Jim, just knocks the rich guy off a balcony.  Oh, and the boss here isn’t interested in turning Jim and Gloria (Delaney) over to the authorities.  He’s into…blackmail!

Dum dum DUM!

I shouldn’t be too surprised.  Jerry, the boss, is played by Michael Ironside, and he always seems up to something only a tough guy who thinks rules are for suckers would be up to.  Also, here’s where I can be extra disappointed it isn’t Dana Delany because she played Lois Lane on Superman: The Animated Series where Ironside was Darkseid.

As it is, Jerry doesn’t want money.  He wants to do whatever he wants to Gloria at night, letting Jim have her during the day.  That sounds…awful.  The things she describes later sounds awful.  It is awful.

So, Jim takes a bunch of sleeping pills and leaves a confession behind that claims Gloria had nothing to do with her husband’s death.  Not that the parrots will back that up.  Yes, there were parrots.  Yes, they repeated the husband’s last words calling to Gloria.  That’s the end of the story, so it doesn’t much matter.

What does matter is that Gloria and Jerry were working together the whole time to get the dead husband’s money, using patsy Jim to do the deed and then kill himself.

Yeah, Double Indemnity doesn’t end with Edward G Robinson driving off with Barbara Stanwyck in a car with a vanity plate that is just Robinson’s character name.  That would have been a very different movie if it had.

What about the Cryptkeeper?  He opens the episode preparing a recipe, but the live goat he has is lucky because it gets to live: the recipe asked for a virgin goat.  In the end, he hangs himself to see what suicide is like.  He’s already dead, so, you know…

Notable Names:  Delaney, Ironside, director Richard Alan Greenberg did special effects for Predator, writer Ross Thomas has a nice crime fiction resume