You’d think that after such a string of high profile directors, I wouldn’t be so impressed when yet another one turns up to play in the realms of the Crypt – and yet you have to admit that there’s still something pretty wild about William freakin’ Friedkin showing up to helm an episode. I mean, not to get too starry eyed here, but not only was Friedkin responsible for one of the greatest horror movies ever made (The Exorcist, obviously), but he also crafted such epics as The French Connection, Sorcerer and To Live And Die In LA, so the idea that the notoriously serious director would be willing to let his hair down and weave up thirty minutes of fucked-up television is pretty wild.
Thankfully, “On A Dead Man’s Chest” proves to be just as wild as you’d hope, as Friedkin seems to literally be in the mood to rock and roll. Murderous rock stars, living tattoos and a whole heap of gore? Friedkin’s having fun and by golly, it’s infectious.
Danny Darwin is the volatile, hard-partying front man of the heavy metal band Exorcist (sic), but while he’s something of an entitled prick at the best of times, he’s grown worse as of late due to booze-fuelled bouts of jealousy. While he’s the singer, it’s actually guitarist and best friend Nick Bosch who is the true creative mind behind the band, but he’s finally starting to catch on to Danny’s bullshit thanks to the urging of his new wife, Scarlett. Trying to convince Nick to go solo means that Danny fucking despises his buddy’s influential spouse and soon his hatred blossoms into outright obsession.
Meanwhile, conniving groupie, Vendetta, shows off an exotic new tattoo to Danny and suggests that he may calm down if he gets one too. Visiting the mysterious, eye-patched, tattoo artist known as Farouche, he’s informed that he won’t be getting a rose he wants inked on his chest as it’s the body that ultimately choose the design. But Danny is enraged even further when the tattoo takes the form of Scarlett’s face circled by a snarling dragon and it’s the final trigger that sends the singer spiralling into madness. After painful attempts to remove the tattoo fail, Scarlett pushes Nick even harder to break up the band and Darwin finally snaps and bloodily murders the object of his hatred by beating her head against a bathroom wall.
However, rather than making his mania go away, things get even worse when the tattooed face of Scarlett on his chest changes to as look as dead as the real one. After roughing up Vendetta in a rage, it seems like the jig is up but while Nick and his peers learn the terrible truth, that tattoo has yet more surprises for it’s host. As the dragon design erupts from his chest and starts snapping at him with huge teeth, Danny resorts to extreme measures (and a piece of broken mirror) to literally get a load off his chest…
I’ll be the first to admit that Friedkin’s big swing at Tales From The Crypt doesn’t actually make a whole lot of sense when you look at it. Is the tattoo actually alive? Is it actually some sort of gateway to madness much like the imagined beating of Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart? Is the strangely influential Vendetta more involved than the plot is letting on? Friedkin seems not to give much a shit about the details as he’s far too busy blurring those lines and creating a heavy metal atmosphere that’s nice, sleazy and quite unlike anything we’ve seen on the show before. What the episode misses in charactization (for such a central character, Paul Hipp’s Nick doesn’t get to do much) and subtlety, the entire thirty minutes feels as angry and restless as the rasping metal songs our cast scream to their baying fans. Through the smoke, haze, casual nudity and copious gore, Friedkin seems to be trying to transfer the very nature of metal scene on the screen regardless of whether it sticks to any conventional Crypt logic.
While other episodes are keen to put you in the shoes of their various scumbags before karma runs over them and then reverse over their bodies like a mack truck, Yul Vazquez’s Danny Darwin is such an angry, volatile presence, he’s virtually unknowable from the start due to the lack of any moment that allows us to see him as happy or even remotely calm. Similarly, Tia Carrere may have some familiarity with the rock scene thanks to Wayne’s World, but a lot of her performance is drowned out by the episode’s seething tone. However, while it seems that all I’m doing is just ragging on the episode I’m claiming to love, the constant, raw, edginess the installment has means that it has loads of uncomfortable energy to spare as it goes to a bunch of trippy places.
For a start, the nature of the tattoo itself is fairly fascinating and it’s no coincidence that the only time the episode stops ranting for a second is to focus on the exquisite, yet painful process Farouche (rapper Heavy D) employs to mark his subjects. Using old school methods that avoids using typical needles and requires topless women to hold you down, we never truly find out if the tattoo has mystical properties, or if everything is all within Danny’s paranoid brain; but the fact that Farouche draws a portrait of our lead’s hated enemy sight unseen on his epidermis suggests the former. Of course, while Friedkin continues to immerse us in the world of music by offering up cameos to the likes of Gregg Allman (The Allman Brothers), Steve Jones (Sex Pistols) and Rudy Sarzo (Whitesnake), he truly cuts loose in the graphic, bizarre finale.
While the more violent side of horror is obviously no stranger to the director of The Exorcist (not to mention forgotten, deranged, killer tree movie, The Guardian), it’s impressive how far Friedkin is willing to push the show, firstly with the sight of Vazquez messily bashing Carrere’s brains in over an extended sequence that’s pretty nasty, even for this show’s standards. However, it’s with the final denouement that proves to be most memorable of all when Danny’s dragon tattoo suddenly comes alive and erupts from his chest like a xenomorph and starts whipping around the place while still affixed to his torso. The creature is gorgeous, a bright, sparkling green compared to the smokey dinge that the majority of the episode has employed and whether or not the beast is real, or is a vivid figment of Danny’s collapsing imagination, his way of vanquishing it proves to be just as memorable. As concerned parties burst in the room, we find that Danny has resorted to skinning the tattooed area clean off of his body with a chunk of glass and as he proudly displays his flayed chest to the horrified onlookers, we reach the end of a slightly muddled, but utterly unforgettable episode.
While Friedkin deliberately keeps some of the storytelling vague, you can’t deny that he’s created something of a unique tone even if the show has played in the sandbox of the music business before. However, a thoroughly batshit ending ensures that roping in a director as legendary as Friedkin proves to give the three-part season premiere the big finish we were all hoping for. It’s so fucking metal, dude.
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