For a hot minute there, I was thinking that the rot had truly started setting in on the carcass of Tales From The Crypt. After a second season that delivered far more hits than misses, season three immediately ran into a wall when it’s first installment proved to be incredibly lack luster – luckily, as your average Crypt season premiere usually involves a triple-header of episodes, there was still time to make up some lost ground. However, season 3 managed to violently course correct in the most thrilling way imaginable.
From the moment the Crypt Keeper rolls in on a police bike, kitted out like he’s going to guest spot on an episode of CHiPs, to the spectacularly gruesome denouement, Carrion Death plays out like a near-perfect Crypt episode. Are you ready for for the season to really start? To watch an episode that gets the twisted humour right and doesn’t pull it’s punches? Well get ready to cop some of this!
Earl Raymond Diggs is a wanted fellon on the run. As he emerges from an Arizona bank with a pistol in one hand and bags of cash in the other, shooting down people as he goes, thanks to a radio broadcast we discover that this vicious robbery us the least of his heinous crimes. We discover that before this mad rush for the Mexican border, Diggs was on death row for the rape, murder and mutilation of numerous women and he’s only recently escaped after feigning illness and using the prison doctor as a human shield.
However, Diggs ain’t home free yet, and as he tears down the dusty highway, he notices in his rearview that a member of the highway patrol is rapidly gaining on him. During the blacktop battle, the motorcycle cop is thrown from his bike, but the bike also crashes into Diggs’ car, leaving him stranded in the dessert, miles from his destination.
Grabbing his cash and trying to complete his journey on foot, we discover that the cop is still alive and incredibly determined to bring in his quarry, but in the aftermath of Diggs’ exploding vehicle, a third player enters the game in a form of a highly curious vulture who seems to take an extra liking to the mad-dog convict.
With both an unstoppable cop and a hungry bird on his trail, Diggs tries to stay one step ahead of his human pursues at least, but every time he thinks he loses the cop, the vulture gives his position away. Soon, the players inevitably collide and while Diggs wins the battle with a well placed bullet, the cop may have retroactively made it a draw after he cuffs himself to his enemy and swallows the key before dying.
Now handcuffed to a dead body and with six miles of desert still to cross, Diggs funds himself in something of a deadly situation. But as he carries and drags the dead weight of a human carcass under a blazing sun, he’s about to discover that there’s no pursuer more dedicated and tireless than a hungry vulture.
After the goofy, disappointing buffoonery of the previous episode, Steven E. de Souza’s Carrion Death rides in on a roaring hog to salvage the premiere with style to spare. Unless de Souza’s name has passed you by, you should know him as the screenwriter who penned such action classics as 48 Hours, Commando and a little, lesser-known little flick called Die Hard. Yes, he went on to write and direct the legendarily awful Street Fighter movie in 1994, but as Carrion Death was televised three years before that cocaine-dusted, cinematic car wreck, we’ll let him off. It’s also not hard to see how he got the gig as a lot of directors for these episodes are first timers who have worked with the core producers before – for example, not only has de Souza penned numerous scripts for producer Joel Silver, but he’s also worked with Walter Hill too.
In fact, it’s the Walter Hill episodes that Carrion Death most resembles, as it accurately manages to evoke the hard bitten attitude, high-concept thrills and comes complete with viciously cruel sense of jet black humour that proves to be immensely satisfying. Following in the footsteps of Hill’s entries such as “The Man Who Was Death” and the superlative “Cutting Cards” de Souza plays with stripped back thriller conventions and delivers a turbo-charged, Hitchcockian half-hour that makes the absolute most of its muscular concept. Leading the charge is Blue Velvet’s Kyle MacLachlan, who at the time was a household name thanks to playing the coffee-sipping, pie-congratulating Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks, but his Crypt stint ironically sees him playing someone with all the self-control of Frank Booth.
Visibly thrilled to be playing an extremely bad hombre, MacLachlan fully embraces the ludicrousity of his comic book dialogue, spitting out such hissable gems as “Women. Can’t live with em’ can’t fit more than one of them in a trunk at a time.” when he isn’t yelling out tongue-in-cheek exposition like announcing that he’s paralysed out loud. It’s telling that the actor is relishing playing a complete and utter bastard, as villain roles like the ones he’s playing in shows like Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Fallout seem to be more of his bread and butter now, but it’s great watching him mouth off to that unshakable vulture and mutter to himself as the glaring sun strips what little sanity he has left. Playing opposite him as the only cast member who isn’t a voice on the radio is George DelHoyo, who fills out the uniform as the nameless cop who won’t stop interfering in Diggs’ business even after he’s dead. But he’s merely another obstacle to get in Diggs’ way and substituting the actors face for a pair of inscrucible mirrored sunglasses manages to make all of the villian’s obstacles seem weirdly more than human.
But what de Souza excels most in, is treating his odious lead as badly as humanly possible quite simply because he fucking deserves it. Being chased by a tag team of a traffic cop and a vulture is one thing, but the director keeps turning the screws and tormenting the murderer for our entertainment. Of course, as we all know by now, the build up us vital, but it’s the payoff that usually tests a Tales’ mettle and it’s here that Carrion Death takes it over the top. After fashioning a makeshift hatchet out of a piece of wood and the dead cop’s badge, Diggs attempts to free himself by chopping the hand off from his handcuffed foe, but due to exhaustion and thirst making his vision blur, the moronic murder only succeeds in partially severing his own wrist, which in turn leads him to fall, have his wounded hand torn off and finally break his neck on the rocks below. But wait – we’re not done yet as Diggs’ final punishment hungrily flaps towards him with malice in its eyes and proceeds to grotesquely pick his eye sockets clean while he screams in agony. OK, so the puppet vulture might not be as convincing as it could be, but the tearing out of a paralysed Diggs’ eyeballs certainly more than makes up for it, much in the same way this episode makes up for the weakness of the last one.
Tales From The Crypt rights it’s wrongs in impressive fashion thanks to the man who penned some of the eighties greatest hits, in fact, Carrion Death is everything a great Crypt episode should strive to be – darkly funny, unrelentingly mean and sublimely satisfying. I mean, if you can derive questionable pleasure from a murdering rapist being relieved of his eyes, where can you get it from? But seriously, if the Crypt Keeper wants to keep this level of quality, he should certainly “carrion” down this path…
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