Review – Tales from the Crypt: Ritual

I’ll bet Val Lewton made I Walked with a Zombie for less than it cost to shoot the model-intensive Crypt Keeper intro sequence for this stinker. I guess it isn’t as terrible as the previous two Tales-TV-series-based movies I’ve seen (not that being better than Bordello of Blood is much of a distinction). Although it manages for the most part to avoid actively offending, it still spends a considerable percentage of its running time meandering aimlessly. Jennifer Grey (who in the years since Dirty Dancing appears to have acquired a new nose and a taste for see-through tops) stars as a doctor who loses her license and ends up working in Jamaica as a nursemaid for a plantation co-owner suffering from voodoo. Perhaps if they’d just stuck with the zombie stuff and avoided the mystery angle, they might have been able to focus the story a bit more and come up with a better movie. As it is, this seems to lack even the cheap sex and gore that one expects from a TftC movie. Sure, there’s some violence and an egregious skin shot or two. But for the most part the sex is confined to some never-developed lesbian overtones between Grey and one of the supporting characters. It’s just not the trash exploitation one expects from entries in the series. Really, that isn’t a “hooray” or a “boo.” It’s more of just an “eh.” See if desperate