Television: Gleefully Ghoulish

Gleefully Ghoulish

TV has often looked for inspiration to the world of comic books, usually superhero juvenilia like The Flash or The Incredible Hulk. But TALES FROM THE CRYPT is a different kettle of rotting fish. Based on the seedy old E.C. horror comics, each half-hour episode is a ghoulish black comedy that aims less for thrills or scares than for gleefully evoked squirms. The show, garnering high ratings in its third season on HBO, demonstrates another quality rare in TV: it is improving with age. Introduced by a cackling, skeletal "crypt keeper," the stories barrel along with logic-bending abandon; even when the...

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