Tales from the Crypt: Ritual

OK so I wanted to do a Post about Tales From The Crypt as well its something that is very dear to my heart. I don't just mean the HBO TV series I mean the comic books the 1970's films, the latter films such as Demon Knight and Bordello of Blood, the spiritual successors such as CreepShow and CreepShow 2 all of it put together just becomes this thing which was a massive influence on me. I wanted to become a horror Writer because of them, and even if it will never ever come true I have always had the secret dream that a story I have written would end up becoming the basis for something Tales From The Crypt related, as I think some of my work kind of has an EC Comics Tales kind of vibe to it.

I have decided that I want to talk about Tales from the Crypt films, no not Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror nor the newer HBO connected films such as Demon Knight and Bordello of Blood, what I want to talk about is the films that either never made it to screen or didn't make it to screen as officially branded Tales from the Crypt Movies. I am going to start this today by talking about Ritual.

OK so the first think to say is that Ritual actually got made. Ritual was originally intended to be produced by Universal so that it could be used as the third instalment of a trilogy of Tales from the Crypt  movies. It was actually sort of going to be a replacement for other shelved films but I will talk about them in latter posts. Plans were scrapped for this to be a Tales from the Crypt film after Bordello of Blood the second released Tales from the Crypt movie (not counting the old Amicus ones here) bombed in theatres. Miramax purchased the rights from Universal and removed all references to the Tales from the Crypt franchise, so that it could be released as a stand alone movie.Eventually it was released as a Tales from the Crypt film years after with what seems to be newly shot CryptKeeper scenes with an unfortunately not great puppet. The funny thing being originally they thought the connection to Tales from Crypt might harm it then latter they felt that reconnecting it to Tales from the Crypt might improve sales of it on disc. In all honesty its a half decent film with the highlight of it for me being the fact it features Tim Curry. I personally wish they'd kept it a Tales from Crypt film in the first place . Its basically a retelling of the old film I Walked With a Zombie.If you enjoy films about Voodoo then you will probably like it, at times it does feel very much like a Tales from the Crypt film but then at others it feels a little slow paced and like it lost its mojo maybe some of this is due to alterations made to try and take it away from its Crypt past and treat it like a stand alone movie. I recommend that people watch it, I would also check out the latter filmed Crypt Keeper bits but I don't think its something that your going to keep returning to and you certainly need to watch it with your expectations dialled down.

I do tend to see this as a Tales from the Crypt film as I think at heart despite its original unbranding it always was a Tales film at heart, I don't think it was anywhere near as good as Demon Knight the first of the Tales Trilogy but then the thing is I would actually call Demon Knight one of my top ten favourite films of all time. If we were to consider the official trilogy Demon Knight, Bordello of Blood and then Ritual I would order them from best to worst in that very same order. Once I have talked about more of the potential sequels and kind of sequels I will have to come back and reassess this films place in the rankings but until then.... Good Night Boys and Ghouls.