Cellar Dweller

If, dear reader, you’re unfamiliar with Cellar Dweller, think of it as an overlong episode of the Tales From the Crypt television series.

The story sees Debrah Farentino play an illustrator who arrives at a remote artists’ retreat where she unwittingly unleashes a demon who brings her drawings to gruesome life.

The limited sets, small budget, and guest star (Yvonne De Carlo) all evoke the television series. The film wears its influences proudly, as Farentino’s character hopes to relaunch the Cellar Dweller comic book series, whose art, font, and even company logo are all meant to evoke EC Comics. The opening prologue with Jeffrey Combs even revolves around some terrific artwork courtesy of Frank Brunner who broke into comics on Warren Publishing’s EC-inspired Creepy and Eerie.

That said, even at a scant seventy-seven minutes, the film feels long. While the script by Child’s Play creator Don Mancini—credited as Kit Dubois—continues the Tales From the Crypt feel by paying homage to the EC Comics stories, right down to the twist ending, it also lifts some of the comics lesser-remembered features, like the paper-thin characters defined solely by their eccentricities. We have a bitchy videographer, a novelist who talks and dresses like a 1940s gumshoe, an airhead dancer, and a boy-next-door. The plot advances through a head-scratching scheme to frame Farentino as a plagiarist in which the videographer secretly films Farentino, then splices in shots of her own hand drawing a different picture.

Fortunately, the special effects compensate. Director John Carl Buechler, a special effects artist, also heads the creature team, and they craft a suitably menacing monster and some gruesome murder set-pieces, highlighted by a simultaneously cartoonish and effective beheading. While one can still sense the limited budget, if you frame it in Tales From the Crypt terms, it shines. Perhaps the biggest misstep is having the creature suit differ from Brunner’s artwork which showed the creature as more humanoid with less hair and more of a menacing sexuality.

Buechler’s attention to the effects may have cost the performances. While veteran De Carlo and stalwart Combs acquit themselves well, the rest struggle, delivering performances too broad and better suited to stage than screen.

One could argue Buechler was simply uninterested in the non-effects scenes. An early shot sees Combs back into a wall-mounted axe, dislodging it, but in the next cut he’s lifting the axe off the wall where it’s securely mounted. Such glaring goofs give the film a rushed, amateurish feel. Even Combs suffers, as his death scene sees him engulfed in flame, looking around calmly before screaming, “No!” as though prompted off-screen.

Still, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I enjoyed Cellar Dweller. But I’m a Tales From the Crypt apologist. Even a bad episode is still half-good.