Tales from the Crypt Fat Tuesday/Dead Easy.

Ok so in my last post I mentioned the fact that originally at least there was only  two “Tales from the Crypt Presents” movies, “DemonKnight” and “Bordello of Blood.”. I then went on to talk about Ritual and how it was originally going to be the third film but then it was made to be a stand alone horror film before eventually being released on to disc as a Tales film a long time latter. There was however another Tales Movie apparently  filmed and completed between Demon Knight and Boredllo of Blood but never released. That film was the film I am going to talk about today, it was  “Fat Tuesday.” 

 

The trilogy might have started with Demon Knight the script for which apparently predated the Tales From The Crypt TV series but when they originally decided to make a trilogy of films it was  intended to be the second film in the trilogy. Dead Easy was at one stage intended to be the opening film of the trilogy. Dead Easy and Fat Tuesday are the same script/idea but it seems like they kept floating between the two possible titles. According to Gilbert Adler the reason for Demon Knight becoming the first film was issues they were having with the script for Dead Easy "We were rewriting it, and it was getting scarier and more intense, but a lot of the humor had been lost, and we always felt that was an important part of Tales from the Crypt -- scare people, then let them laugh.''. You might be thinking at this stage that Dead Easy had been dumped but no if you went and saw Demon Knight in the cinema then you would have seen it had a post-credits scene where the Crypt Keeper told everyone that if they hadnt had enough that they could return to the cinema soon to see the next Tales from the Crypt movie “Dead Easy”so for at least a time Dead Easy was going to be the second film in the trilogy.

The amount known about Fat Tuesday/Dead Esay well its not a lot really, most of what is known comes from magazine articles around the time Demon Knight was released. ''The next one is more psychological; than blood guts and gore'' according to A.l Katz ''As a Matter of fqact today we wrote a scene where a shadow figure squeezes through the skull of an old lady and into her brain and thats just where the movie begins.'' Adler was apparently directing Fat Tuesday and it was going into production in febuarary with a $12 million budget. The film was going to be based on a script by J.P kELLY. It was going to be set in the Deep South (possibly New Orleans) It was supposed to be about a man trying to determine what happened in his past and how his memories of this would bring back a malevolent entity if they are ever recalled. The closer the guy gets to the truth the closer he gets to releasing something inside of him. They claimed that they would be creating a unique bad guy one who would be unique and funny and like nothing we had seen before and that would also scare the shit out of people. I have found a scan of this article and I wrote the above by squinting like mad, I will share it below incase you can read it better than I.

I personally think that the plot for the film and what they had planned for us actually sounded great, yet we never got it so why not? Well apparently the reason we never got to see it according to rumors was due to with issues due to the films casting and possible racial implications. Since the script was very voodoo related youd imagine that they would have required a large African-American cast. Well during pre-production there was apparently a bunch of debates focused on whether the film would be commercially viable with a largly African American cast. The story goes that apparently the film was actually completed but the cast was entirely white. This apparently led to “Tales from the Crypt” producer Joel Silver steping in, claiming that he would be branded a racist if the film was released and because of this it was locked in a vault and has not seen the light of day since. It is intresting to think that there is a Tales from The Crypt film out there that we have never seen and I wish I could see it but I figure it will never be shown, I do wish that with the change in times they would either release the original script, noveilse it or remake it with an appropriate cast.

The two pictures I provided above and tried to read are from an article on “Fat Tuesday” that apparently came from a “DemonKnight” magazine that was published when that movie was released. There is also some art which has made its way online and I will post it here because its both intresting and I think its rather good too. Does this art really tell us anything? Well it supports the claims that the script includes a man looking after his child and it also shows that this villian as well as being described as a shadow and as having come out of the man it seems to take the form of an Evil Jester, its hard to draw anything concreate from this but maybe it was a bit like the creature in Stephen King's IT maybe it was an Evil Shadow which took the form of a Jester it sounds pretty intresting to me, I would still love to see it but I guess it will just have to live on as a movie legend.