When it comes to weird romantic flings with scarecrows and deaths by pitchfork, you’d think that Ti West’s Pearl had exclusively cornered the market. However, old school horror-heads know that long before Mia Goth held one of the most heartbreaking/terrifying final smiles for an interminably long time, there was another slice of steamy, Southern Gothic that touched on similar issues and delivered a similar body count.
While a lot of episodes of Tales From The Crypt tend to embrace the twisted aspects of their source material, Tom Holland’s Four-Sided Triangle goes that extra mile to ensure things get pretty fucked up. Trading in rickety farms and unchecked lust for the usual urban stories of karma gone nutzoid, Holland turns in an episode quite unlike any other found within the season – but can the man who gave us last season’s similarly sexy “Lover Come Hack To Me” deliver something that truly sticks?
George and Luisa Yates toil on their rickety farm as they grumble their way through their hard life, but fate has given them a break in the form of some free labour. Mary Jo is a young fugitive who, after robbing a convenience store, has found herself in something of a miserable situation as the Yates’ agreed to shelter her in exchange for her unpaid help, but now she’s found herself trapped because if she tries to leave, Luisa will call the cops on her. Worse yet, while she’s essentially their slave and has to endure the odd whack with Luisa’s cane, dumb old George can’t seem to keep his eyes off of the shapely blonde and soon enough he finds that he can’t control his lustful urges.
Even though the fear of his tyrannical wife keeps him mostly in line (threats of a gelding aren’t to be taken lightly), George’s loins soon win over his trepidation, but Mary Jo manages to fight him off – but when he tries for a second time, he’s forced to silence her in a panic by smashing a bottle across the back of her head. But while George seems to have gotten away with his attempts at assault, the impact to Mary Jo’s noggin seems to have sent her completely into delusion-land.
It seems that the young criminal has become convinced that the resident scarecrow is her lover and that she lives in hope that some day soon he will sleep with her, but while Luisa writes this off as the irritating ramblings of a crazy person, the ever horny George starts to get the rumblings of a sordid plan. One night, after Mary Jo has claimed that she’s extra-confident her straw-filled man will bed her, George sneaks into the cornfield before her and dresses in the scarecrow’s clothes in order to get what he’s been yearning for. However, Luisa is sick of Mary Jo’s fantasies and aims to prove that the scarecrow is just clothes stuffed with straw – bad luck for George that she uses a pitch fork to test it…
If I’m being honest, Tom Holland’s last attempt at a Tale, wound up being somewhat underwhelming despite featuring the genuinely striking sight of a scantily-clad Amanda Plummer violently swinging a gargantuan axe. While the best the Crypt has to offer tends to balance twisted thrills with a noticably morbid sense of humour, Holland’s offerings tend to be oddly serious and always seemed to circle around weird-ass sexual relationships that often ended in bloodshed. But while Four-Sided Triangle fills a lot of that brief, the director’s second stab at the show ends up being far more memorable than his installment from the first season. For a start, Four-Sized Triangle is impressively fucked up and keenly pushes some boundaries that other episodes might not dare to attempt and while sex is ever-present in the Crypt-verse, this is a rare episode where lust is the total focal point of the story.
The majority of it comes from the upsetting tension that comes from Chelcie Ross’ sweaty, lecherous farmer and the trapped, frequently bra-less criminal played by a Patricia Arquette and the story takes full opportunity to mine this uncomfortable dynamic for all that it’s worth. Holland, an old hand at creepy, psychosexual, thrillers thanks to his script for Psycho II dutifully employs every trick in the book to gain maximum tension. Ross’ bloodshot eyeball ogles Arquette’s form through a hole in the wall as she roots around a hen house looking for eggs and later on he forces her to milk a cow while he watches – and when the object of his lusty advances fights back by throwing a bucket of milk on him, well, no prizes guessing what it’s supposed to signify. And yet, once George breaks that bottle over her head and essentially seals his fate, Four-Sided Triangle goes and gets really weird.
It’s here that we really need to tip the hat to the cast who all fill their roles uncomfortably well. Arquette really is perfect casting for the store robbing runaway who has found herself living life as a slave and her usual, seemingly-naive-girl-with-an-edge act that went on to serve her so well in True Romance gets a good pre-outing here. Elsewhere, Ross’ cowardly George is another highlight as he perspires, fumbles and switches moods depending on who he’s talking to. While it’s the crippled Luisa who obviously wears the trousers in the household, the cuckolded creep obviously is seeking some much desired power when he targets Mary Jo and his performance is commendably odious. However, a surprise high point turns out to be Susan Blommaert’s legitimately formidable Luisa who, with her lurching limp, chainsaw drawl and her utter dominion over her simple minded husband, manages to nail her role almost too well.
However, it’s how far Holland is willing to push things that’s the real star here and Four-Sided Triangle proves to be that rare Crypt episode that actually benefits from being played straighter just so the whole bizarre nature of the story isn’t diluted with camp jokes. Although I will admit that I would have preferred Mary Jo’s delusions be real rather than a complex plot just to really slam home the kooky, kinky nature of the piece, it is immensely satisfying when the Yates’ are violently out-maneuvered. In fact, Four-Sided Triangle is a rare episode where the actual criminal is not only the lead, but they also escape scott free when it is the so-called “normal” folk who are the cruel villains edging towards their just desserts. As a result, Holland finally earns his Crypt stripes on his second try as his more serious style yields some memorably twisted results.
Tales From The Crypt always prided itself on leaned heavily into the more fucked-up areas of pulp comic book adaptations, but watching Patricia Arquette desperately yearning to fuck a scarecrow manages to top the lot. Regrettably, Holland would only make one more Tales From The Crypt after this (the Brad Pitt starrer King Of The Road), but it’s good to know that the filmmaker managed to make a noticable impact during his time rocking the Crypt – especially when Four-Sided Triangle manages to cover all the angles.
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