Another episode brings us yet another left-over revenant from the failed Two-Fisted Tales pilot that found its way into various season of Tales From The Crypt. While it’s strangely heartening to discover that the Crypt Keeper is big on recycling (apologies if I’ve used that joke before), can this third and final entry manage to keep up the standard set by Robert Zemeckis’ “Yellow” and Richard Donner’s “Showdown”?
As we shift from World War I and the Wild West, we find ourselves caught up in the drama of an aging speed racer who is dragged back into his old life by a young pretender to the throne. But while the previous Two-Fisted Tales were directed by Two of Crypt’s “big three”, we find the final offering directed by Child’s Play and Fright Night director Tom Holland. While it’s strange that Walter Hill didn’t round out the trio (Two-Fisted Tales seemed made for him) can Holland give the ghost of a failed pilot the final send off it deserves – or is it destined to crash and burn?
Joe Garrett is the sheriff of a sleepy town, but it’s about to be rudely woken by the arrival of Billy, a cackling throwback who has dedicated his wild life to street racing and doesn’t care who gets hurt along the way. Thinking that Billy is just some speed-obsessed punk who’ll soon skip town once he gets bored, Joe is strangely tolerant of the cocky hoodlum, but unfortunately for the lawman, it turns out he’s the reason the racer has hit town.
Desperate for a challenge and eager to prove himself king of the road, it turns out that Billy knows all about Joe’s secret past as a street racer himself. Undefeated for nearly a decade, Joe raced under the name “Iceman”, but soon fled that life to avoid a manslaughter charge after a race went bad. However, so determined is Billy to face Iceman on the tarmac, he’s willing to go to any lengths to convince the sheriff to revert back to his old ways. When simple goading doesn’t yield results, Billy pivots into a hate campaign that includes threats to expose him and sticking tarantulas in his mail box.
However, when all that fails, Billy resorts to his dirtiest trick yet: dating Joe’s daughter, Carey, who apparently has a thing for bad boys. However, there’s bad boys and then there’s straight-up maniacs, and Billy’s final plan involves kidnapping her to force her old man back behind the wheel of a growling roadster.
Luckily, Joe has his old car from his Iceman days stashed away and once the two decide on a time and place, it’s time to race. Will the crazy young upstart have the upper hand or will grizzled experience win the day? Actually, it seems like neither, as the deciding factor seems to be a discarded digger and some iffy editing – but regardless how it goes down, only one can be crowned king of the road.
If we’re being blunt, King Of The Road ends up being least of the trio of refugees from that cancelled sister show, but even though it has some issues that dull how cool and exciting it could have been, there’s one aspect about the episode that proves to be incredibly fun to watch – the snickering, gum chewing, cigarette flicking villain of the piece who is played by Brad Pitt. Showing up in random horror (or horror adjacent) stuff wasn’t exactly a new thing for an embryonic Pitt as his pre-Thelma & Louise roles saw him crop up in stuff like Cutting Class and even an episode of Freddy’s Nightmares. But you can tell he’s really enjoying himself playing the lunatic as he deploys a lot of the similar tics he displayed in similarly unhinged roles in the likes of Twelve Monkeys and Kalifornia. As he struts about the place in a black leather jacket with flames on the arms, he proves to be the best thing in the episode by a mile and he breathes quirky, bad boy life into an episode that should be really exciting.
I say should, because it seems that Tom Holland has fallen asleep at the wheel somewhat. He tells the Cape Fear-like tale competently enough as Billy’s psychological warfare quickly grows in scope, but considering that the whole point of the episode is to end on a drag race to see which of the two racers is superior, King Of The Road is not only lacking that big, spectacular finish, but it’s missing some coherence too. You’d hope that that final race would be a nail biting finale with rushing speeds as both racers, young and old, struggle to pull ahead. However, while Holland obviously had a knack for directing killer dolls and suave vampires, the climactic race just isn’t very gripping and even botches it’s finale by having Billy suddenly crash into a digger that he somehow doesn’t see despite it literally being in the middle of the road.
It’s a shame, because the throwback tone to films like Rebel Without A Cause and the like is yet another refreshing change of pace for Tales Of The Crypt much in the same way that the other Two-Fisted Tales were too. Additionally, Justified’s Raymond J. Barry is solid as Joe, Michelle Bronson gives good daughter-gone-astray as Carey, and while the psycho-thriller aspect of the story isn’t quite as tense as it should be, Pitt’s villain manages to make up for a multitude of sins.
However, even he can’t make up for the King Of The Road’s most annoying aspect – the soundtrack. You’d think that the featured songs would help enhance the mood, especially as they’d brought in Warren Zevon of “Werewolves Of London” fame to write and perform them, but instead not only are the songs a weird fit, they’re actually quite distracting and unhelpfully strip whatever remaining tension may have existed from the story. Even more irritating is the fact that the episode isn’t even based on a comic story published by EC Comics and is an entirely new tale which proves to be a little confounding when you consider how many stories the show potentially had to work from…
But while the episode does has its good points, it regrettably lets the team down by breaking season 4’s streak of being impressively consistent. While none of the installments thus far could be nominated as all-time series greats, there hasn’t been a duff episode yet, so the relative okay-ness of Holland’s thriller stands out like a sore thumb. Still, as Billy kills himself in a fairly impressive fireball, we finally get to say good bye to the memory of Two-Fisted Tales once and for all. Had that pilot been successful, who knows what other spin-offs we might have gotten (also we did get a sci-fi spin off in the form of Perversions Of Science that popped up for a single season in 1997), but as it stands, I guess the Crypt is the only place people really wanted to be.
With the final Two-Fisted Tale, we find season 4 of Tales Of The Crypt finally losing it’s grip on the wheel somewhat. However, the sight of a leering Brad Pitt tearing down the asphalt with a light-up plastic skull on his dashboard proves enough to get a strangely sluggish thriller out of second gear.
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