With the end of the season in sight, there’s a real sense that the Crypt Keeper’s third go-round of freakish fables has really gotten its act together. But after two week of Tales that’s seen the show offer a macabre riff on the Goonies and a ghoulish conspiracy that brought the scares, its time once again for that giant tome to scare up a story that offers up the classic tropes.
Duplicitous females and fairly sordid happenings that occur when people give in to their baser instincts has always been the Crypt’s bread and butter, but you might be forgiven for getting a little tired of the show whipping up yet another noir-ish example of lust and karma. However, in the hands of Highlander’s Russell Mulcahy, “Split Second” becomes a steamy example of how an extreme location change can revitalise an oft-used plot. Prepare to yell “timber” folks, because in this one, someone’s definitely going down…
Liz Kelly is something of a looker, but she’s also that most dangerous of combinations – beautiful and bored. Stuck in a little do-nothing town somewhere in the Pacific Northwest that only has the local logging trade to keep it breathing, Liz has been desperately working a job as a waitress in a dive bar in order to rustle up funds to get her a bus ticket the fuck out of this rustic limbo. However, she certainly hasn’t been shy during her time there, racking up multiple flings and one-night stands with a sizable, but slightly different body count to the one Crypt fans are more used to.
But one evening, when one of her old conquests decides to get fresh, she’s drawn to the hulking figure of Steve Dixon, the owner of a lumber camp who defends her dubious honor by pulling a gun on the would-be suitor. Never having had someone protect her like that, Liz’s boredom evaporates and she hastily accepts the besotted Steve’s marriage proposal for the protection, the sex and the fact that the burly mountain man is fairly wealthy.
However, an unforseen wrinkle emerges when it turns out that Dixon is the insanely jealous type and is more than ready to fly into a deranged rage if he even thinks that any one of his red-blooded workers is even looking at his new bride wrong. The problem is that Liz is getting bored again and isn’t beneath toying with a few dangerous emotions to inject a little fun back into her morals-free lifestyle.
Enter young, muscled lumberjack Ted Morgan who has a talent for chopping wood old school (he prefers and axe over a chainsaw) and is in need of a job. But while the boys at the lumber camp take him in as one of their own, Liz hungrily targets the muscled, innocent himbo to be her next conquest. As Dixon’s paranoia finally causes him to do something terrible, the rest of the camp decides that enough is enough and plans some cutting payback for their brutal boss and his scheming bride.
Essentially a pitch perfect offering of lust, betrayal and vengeance by chainsaw, Split Second could have ended up quite a middle of the road offering if delivered by a director without any vision. I mean, out of context, this is simply a story that both Tales From The Crypt and many other anthology series have told many, many times that sees a woman with a high sexual appetite and low regard for the mess she leaves in her wake gets herself in a sticky situation because she can’t stop stirring things up. However, while this sort of tale often plays out in nightclubs and bars in some sort of degenerate big city with rain-slicked streets and speakeasys where the atmosphere is 78% cigarette smoke, Split Second pulls an impressive 180 degrees by setting its version in possibly the most counterintuitive place imaginable.
Gone are the dark smokey rooms, blood red lipstick and discarded evening dresses you’d usually get in a tale led by a callous femme fatale, and instead we get wide open spaces, sunshine and a lot of trees as we plonk a lot of the famous tropes in a completely different environment to make smell as fresh as Georgia pine. In many ways, setting the sordid adventure in a remote logging camp located on the side of a mountain is actually a stroke of genius, as its the perfect place for a character like Liz Kelly to cause trouble. Her morals may be loose and her jean shorts may be tight, but with her habit of discarding men on a whim, even someone as low rent as her can cause a lot of damage when placed in a remote environment such as this. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with a woman enjoying the more physical pleasures of life, the fact that this woman has had more tricks than a second-hand dartboard is made way more sinister when she starts toying with men for her own amusement.
OK, so there’s some iffy sexual politics going on here – but if everyone kept their erogenous zones to themselves, we wouldn’t have a show let alone an episode, but matter are greatly elevated by some deft casting. Firstly, I don’t mean this as an insult that Michelle Johnson was born to play a role like this thanks to her roles as a young siren in Blame It On Rio and poetaying an unmitigated bitch while weathering extreme gore in the raucous horror/comedy, Waxwork, and when you add a bit of gratuitous nudity, she’s suitably kissable and hissable as the selfish maneater. Better yet, we get the bug-eyed joys of Brion James as Steve Dixon, seems to be relishing going from a stand-up boss to a full-blown paranoid berserker once Liz starts playing away under his nose. Finally Billy Wirth ditches the glam from his Lost Boys days for a white vest as Tom, the new meat Liz sinks her horny claws into – but while Russell Mulcahy makes great use of his rustic surroundings to give the more familiar aspects of the story, it’s the gloriously over the top comeuppance that really cements Split Second as a Tale to watch.
After being blinded by Saxon after getting clubbed repeatedly by the blunt side of an axe, it seems that poor, dumb Tom has no future chopping down trees, but I guess mountain justice takes no prisoners as his workmates set him up to take unwitting revenge. Tooling him up with a revving chainsaw, they teach him to saw through some prepared logs only for us to find that they’ve been pre-hollowed out and contain the bound and gagged Liz and Steve. As sawdust and blood fill the air, the thoughtless temptress looks on as her hot tempered hubby is sawed into slices and there’s a particularly deft moment where, mid-cut, Tom actually figures out what’s occuring and decides he’s totally cool with it. While we fade to black before Tom can get to work cutting his wayward seducer down to size, we get the last, bitter resolution of her jaded voice over claiming that at least her boredom has cleared up. Well, it’s good to focus on a sliver lining, I suppose.
As solid a Tale as you’re likely to get, the cast and the totally left-field setting ensure that Russell Mulcahy’s trip to the Crypt is a must-watch. Plus, as an added bonus we get Johnson being slinky as hell, James going full crazed husband and Wirth provides some eye candy for the ladies too. I mean, what other show gives you all this and the most outlandishly over the top revenge you ever saw? Despite that final image, Split Second is no buzz-kill.
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