Tales From The Crypt “Lower Berth”

Well, this episode was unexpected.

So, it’s like 1920 something-or-other, and a traveling carnival sideshow’s best attraction is Enoch, a man born with a second face.  He can barely talk, doesn’t seem very intelligent, and sure, the second face was probably a twin brother that never fully split off from the original embryo, and his teeth are terrible in both mouths, but this is Tales from the Crypt, a show that is never really subtle, so the villain is his caretaker Mr. Sickles.

Sickles, he abuses Enoch, whipping him, forcing him into a cage, and while the carnival owner doesn’t seem to object too hard to Enoch’s treatment, he’s harsher to Sickles because Sickles is trying to hide the fact that Enoch is dying.  Sickles would lose his own cash cow if that happened, so he does the only thing that seems natural and buys a mummy, a young girl when she died, from a shifty doctor.

But hey, the mummy is a hit!  Enoch, he seems to like her.  And a little girl gives him her doll for some reason.

But wait, why would some shifty doctor give a mummy to Sickles?  Why, it’s obvious!  The doctor wants the jeweled necklace around the mummy’s neck!  Wouldn’t everybody?  Anyhoo, Shifty Doctor says it’s cursed: if you try to remove it, you get castrated.  Sickles, in a scuffle, stabs Shifty Doctor with his sheers then goes to swipe the necklace.  That comes after abusing Enoch, and apparently, forcing Enoch to remove the necklace never occurred to him.  Instead, Enoch uses the sheets to alive Sickles kinda low, the mummy opens her eyes(!), and…well, Enoch and the mummy are both missing the next day, Sickles’s body left in the sarcophagus.

What kind of carnival has a real mummy anyway?

Well, a year later, the cops find a dead Enoch cuddling up next to the mummy in a cave they were clearly living in.  Kinda creepy.  Not much of an episode, actually.  Wait, there’s a baby.  Gray skin.  Milky blue eyes.  No nose.  And he has the same doll the Cryptkeeper was using in the introdu…oh.

What about the Cryptkeeper?  Yeah, apparently, this was a stealth Cryptkeeper origin story.

Notable Names:  Mark Rolston, one of those “that guy” actors, was the Shifty Doctor.  Lewis Arquette, the father of all those other Arquettes, is the carnival owner.  Fred Dekker got another script in.  Direction was handled by one Kevin Yagher, a special effects guy who did Freddy Kreuger’s make-up, the Chuckie doll, and…the Cryptkeeper.  Man, this really was a stealth origin story.