Tales from the Crypt #3 (1990)

A man uses a girl then dumps her and makes the mistake of seeking the help of a boat pilot to leave the country who used to love her before she killed herself. The boat pilot drops him off at an island that serves as a leper colony.

Still awake at a late hour, Duncan decides to go out for a bite to eat. But, the smell of his burger being cooked makes him ill, and he runs from the restaurant. He soon finds himself in a cemetery, digging up a grave to feast on the corpse. The next thing he knows, he awakes on his couch, convinced it was all a nightmare. Then, he looks in his refrigerator...

Ralph and Cora have a dirty secret: they murdered Cora's uncle. Now, Ralph is trying to convince Cora that her uncle's corpse has come to life and is stalking them. As planned, Cora keels over from a heart attack. But, Ralph was far closer to the truth than he thought.

Fred's mother always held him back and favored his younger bother Harold and it finally caused Fred to end up in prison. When he gets out, he confronts his mother, pouring out his heart and begging forgiveness. But, she doesn't even acknowledge him and he shoots himself right in front of her. Little did Fred know that his mother had been paralyzed by a stroke years before.

Jim and Gail want to get married, but they're already married to other people. So, they hatch a plan. They each kill their spouses, then they pose as each other's spouse in photos so the respective families won't get suspicious. This works for a while, but what happens when the romance between them fades?

This story is narrated by a California gold miner who is shot by a claim jumper. He passes out from the pain and when he 'wakes up', he sees the jumper looming over him with a bloody knife and he realizes that he is dead. No matter what the burly man does to Whitey, he can't seem to successfully bury the dead prospector, a fact that later costs the claim jumper his life.

A movie producer, who flies out to an Eskimo settlement, is surprised to find a beautiful American girl living among them and quickly falls for her. He secretly sneaks her back to the States without her step-father's knowledge to marry her and put her in films. When her step-father cathes up to them, he reveals to the producer a rather horrifying aspect of the girl.

Young Toby hears a voice inside his head, telling him to do things that his aunt punishes him for. One day he hears a voice from the coal chute in the cellar claiming to be his aunt who has found herself locked in, but Toby doesn't believe it because yesterday the voice sounded like his mother. He ignores the voice, which actually is the aunt, and she is buried by the delivery of four tons of coal.

A man goes to visit his uncle who turns out to be a ghoul.

Two men aboard a cargo ship are bored until they get the idea to build a rat trap and ask the Captain to have a barrel built with a platform in the middle of it and a run off down the center. They fill it with water and attach a teeter to the rim with some food attached to the end of it so that when a rat attempts to get it, it falls into the water and swims to the platform. When another rat approaches and falls into the drink, they bet on which rat will survive the bloody struggle for the platform. Later, when their ship sinks, two find out that humans are not much different from rats!

A man's wife dies in childbirth giving him a deformed retarded son with stunted legs, and he becomes a hermit in his cabin in the Glades. When four people are ripped apart, the sheriff confronts him, but backs off when the father brandishes a gun. Later, severely wounded, the man admits to the sheriff he was wrong and that his son is a killer.

Harry has stolen money from the desk drawer of his boss, and he knows that his boss knows it. But Harry has a surprise waiting for his boss in the hay loft......but the real surprise strikes Harry!

Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein tell this auto-biographical tale of hiring Jack Kamen to draw horror stories, first telling Kamen that his work is too sweet. They advise him to get into the swing of things like Ingels, Craig and Davis, who are all drawn by their respective artists shown torturing effigies of Bill Gaines. Jack resolves to become more horrible and doses off at the drawing board and dreams of committing murder under the full moon and returning menacingly to his wife and two small children. His wife wakes him up with a scream when she spies a mouse.

In 1667 Germany a fat Duke lords it over his starving peasants, but when he imposes a tax on the peasants for "dirtying his carriage" with the blood of a young child he rode down in the street, Johann conceives the plot of stealing some of the Duke's jewels in order to pay the tax. When a friend, Emile, offers to go in his stead, because he has no family, the friend is caught, and the Duke orders the man's hands severed. Johann plans a sweet revenge on the Duke.

A butcher during the war gets around rationing points by selling steak to the wealthy customers who will pay cash for it and horsemeat, then stale meat and finally tainted meat to everyone else. When Junior, his son, dies from the tainted meat, his wife seizes a carving knife and advances upon her husband, cutting him neatly into serving portions, and putting him on display in his butcher shop's display case.

Three business partners in construction make a patsy out of a fourth to take the blame for shoddy construction of a hospital that collapses and kills twenty-one patients. They take a flight in a small plane out in South America and, when trying to fly through a gap between two mountains at night, become snagged by cables. When the dawn arrives, they realize that their plane has become stuck in a giant spider's web.

Ramsey, while searching an island for a half-million treasure, intended as a sacrifice to primitive gods, and sealed up in a mountain, kills his native guide, ignores a curse carved into the stone on the mountain, and plants dynamite charges in it to uncover the treasure. Unfortunately for Ramsey, the mountain was volcanic........and the explosion activated it!

Two professional gamblers hate each other so much that they challenge each other to a game of chop poker. Chop poker is like strip poker, although, instead of removing an article of clothing, they use a meat cleaver to remove a digit or limb. They have their personal doctors act as seconds during their bizarre duel to the finish, but the gamblers find themselves unable to proceed when they've both hacked each others arms and legs off.

An elephant trainer whose performance entails having the animal raise its foot an inch above his beautiful wife-assistant's face is having an affair with a woman who convinces him to have the elephant crush the wife and have the elephant shot blaming the death on the elephant. He does so, and marries the lover and trains a new elephant. A year later they return to the same town where the murder was conducted and the dead woman and beast rise from the grave to seek their revenge.

The Crypt Keeper relates his origin story of the meeting between his parents, a 4000-year-old female Egyptian mummy and a two-headed corpse.

A magician and his wife are visiting India looking for new acts to perform when he spies a girl with a trick rope that rises into the air when she plays a pipe and can be climbed upon. He offers to buy the rope from her but she refuses. His wife invites her back to the hotel room where the two plot to kill her and steal the rope. He strangles the girl and the rope still rises into the air when the pipe is played. His wife climbs the rope but disappears at the top of it, and moments later, the dismembered parts of her corpse fall from the air. The unattached rope wraps itself around the man's neck and holds him swaying off the ground.

In this grim fairy tale, a young prince grows fond of his nanny until one day she appears dead. The king attempts to console his heart-broken son by offering him candy, cake and a pony at the funeral for his nanny. The boy peeks in on her as she is lying in state and sees her move. It turns out she suffers from cataleptic fits and reassures the prince that she will never leave him. The boy thinks of all the nice things that he won't be getting due to the cancellation of the funeral and so brings a candlestick down upon her head.

A man who marries homely wealthy women and murders them for their money receives a lonely-hearts letter from a woman who tells him that she lives in a large stone house and enclosures a photograph of a lovely woman whom she admits the picture displays two years ago, not having a more recent snapshot. Since she is so beautiful, he decides that it's time to wind up his racket and settle down. She accepts his proposal and he dashes out to meet her.....with stunning results.

A first person narrative where a man fashions a monster together out of artificial parts ala Frankenstein and transfers your brain into it. You stumble into a carnival's hall of mirrors and are killed by the sight of your own multiple ghastly images.

Two swindlers run a racket where they visit a small town and convince them there is oil present and get them to issue stock in order to come up with the check to begin drilling. One of them fakes his death and is buried in order to hide the money and default. Unfortunately for him, the other is a smoker and when he digs up his casket, it turns out there really is oil in the cemetery dirt. This oil has collected in the casket, and when the startled smoker lifts the casket lid he drops the cigarette into it which causes an explosion.

This grim fairy tale tells the story of king Moneymad's tax scheme. He taxes the people for everything he can think of, until they have no money left to pay their 'thumb' tax, and he begins having their thumbs cut off. The peasants revolt and cut out his stomach.

The employees of a mortuary are haunted by the spirit of an old woman who refuses to leave until they return her body to her.