With its first three clutch of tales debuting on the same night, the bumper crop of all-star directors who kicked off HBO’s Tales From The Crypt has already included the likes of Walter Hill and Robert Zemeckis. However, having the men who created both The Warriors and Back To The Future was seemingly not enough as the final installment of that original trilogy was helmed by none other than The Omen and Superman director, Richard Donner. But while Hill gave us a typically hard boiled, noirish tale involving a sacked executioner turning vigilante and Zememkis unsurprisingly went full roller coaster ride with his killer Santa entry, Donner instead arguably delivered the most batshit of the three, throwing us into an unhinged carnival world in the massively fun Dig That Cat… He’s Real Gone. Death, murder, resurrection, more death – you name it, it’s here. Over to you, Crypt Keeper…
Gather round, gather round and prepare to feast your eyes on the living miracle that is the magnificent Ulrich the Undying! Watch as before your very eyes, the man is about to climb into a coffin of his own free will and get buried alive with no hope of escape and won’t be dug up again until noon tomorrow! Surely, to any normal man, this would be suicide, but to the death defying Ulrich, being dead is only a minor inconvenience!
Right, now that I’ve got all that hullabaloo out of my system, it’s time to settle down and spend some time with Urich himself as he waits out the clock while nestled six feet under and the first thing he relates is his origin. Discovered on the streets by the eccentric Dr. Emil Manfred, Ulrich was a drunk, worthless bum living on the streets until the creepy scientist offers to pay him a lot of money in order to experiment on him to prove a revolutionary breakthrough. Simply put, Manfred has not only discovered that cats actually do have nine lives, but he’s able to transplant the necessary gland over to a human brain to give the owner the same abilities. After testing his hypothesis by shooting Ulrich in the head after the operation, the two do the obvious thing that anyone would do – take their act to a carnival in an attempt to make as much money as they can.
After dying for dollars a few times, word starts to spread and soon the big bucks start rolling in. However, the ugly face of greed soon rears it’s head when Ulrich realises that he could make more cash if he cut out Manfred as a partner by causing a car crash that he naturally would “survive”. However, as the hangings, electrocutions and hangings mount up, and after his squeeze, Coralee, costs him a life when she stabs him and makes off with his earnings, Ulrich needs to ensure that his last act pay him plenty. However, as the air starts to run out in that coffin, he soon realises that he may have miscounted those lives…
While both Hill’s and Zememkis’ Tales From The Crypt entries very much were results of the type of filmmakers they were at the time, Donner’s installment proves to be quite unlike anything the director has put in his movies. Right from the word go, the episode is marked with a frantic, manic editing style that lashes you with jump cuts, replays the occasional line reading like a deranged echo and employs an incredibly erratic handheld camera that isn’t afraid to indulge in more than a few impromptu extreme close ups at a moment’s notice. Simply put, Donner seems to be using the episode not just to have fun, but to experiment like a mad person and while all the other episodes have that same, wry, dark sense of humour, Dig That Cat… is the first one that really goes for the laughs.
Once again, it’s another opportunity for a character actor to take centre stage and in the role of the devious, greedy, Ulrich, is a tremendously excited Joe Pantoliano who positively relishes the role for every second he’s on screen. But what’s so satisfying about his performance is that over a period of approximately half an hour, we watch Ulrich turn from a slurring down and out into a natural performer as he goes from an unkillable schmoe to a scheming piece of shit. You could argue that running a gauntlet of varied deaths will probably do that to anyone, but I guess it wouldn’t be much of a Tales From The Crypt episode if karma wasn’t running over someone like a Mac truck. However, it’s also fun to watch the schemer get out-schemed too thanks to Kathleen York’s helium-voiced, glamorous assistant, who may be an unmitigated air-head, but is smart enough to pick her moment and make a run with the cash thanks to some literal back stabbing. Rounding out the typically minimal main cast is Batman’s Robert Wuhl, who goes full-on carny as he delivers his grandstanding introductions, often direct to camera, and always from underneath an ever-more extravagant collections of fake mustaches.
The episode also gets around the issues of having to find a high body count by simply choosing to murder its main character over and over again and thanks to Donner’s crazed style, you soon get caught up in the excitement of watching Ulrich bite the bullet in a myriad of different ways. In fact, the increasing desensitised nature of the audience to these evermore inventive deaths become a major source of the laughs. At one point someone urges that he speeds things up as he drowns, during another an old granny looks elated that she’s the one chosen to throw the switch on an electrical current and after shooting Ulrich with a crossbow, the winner gets the bolt as an impromptu prize.
Of course, you can’t have a story like this without the punchline, and unless you guess it earlier on, it’s a fucking doozy. You just know that Ulrich is eventually going to run out of lives at the absolute worst moment, but when he realises that both he and Manfred have forgotten to count the death of the kitty cat after the original operation into their assumptions, Ulrich is way too fucked to do anything about it. Of course, some might deride the entire episode for being dumb if you can suspend disbelief long enough to buy a cat having a gland that actually gives them nine lives. Also, the exact nature of Ulrich’s powers are about as hazy as a drunk’s vision – I mean, he doesn’t seem to have a Wolverine healing factor, so how exactly does one recover from a bullet to the brain, or a crossbow to the heart? However, if you’re actually sitting there questioning this rather than just enjoying a winningly loopy episode, then I think the problem’s more with you than it is the writing. It’s a carnival dude, just have fun with it.
As we’re left with the Crypt Keeper’s signature cackle as we glide out of his decrepit mansion under the closing credits, we come to an end of the three-episode opening gambit that relentlessly spoiled us with three, important, directorial talents who were just screwing around and having fun. Suggestions that Tales was a version of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, just with more tits, gore and swearing may be understandable, but with an opening salvo like this, these crypt dwelling tall tales still feel as fresh as a daisy.
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