With the leftover remnants of Two-Fisted Tales finally behind us, it’s time for season 4 to get back to its regularly scheduled programming, and to do so the Crypt Keeper has brought aboard some major talent. I’m not sure if this season of Tales From The Crypt deliberately set out to nab both directors of the French Connection movies when it started, but after featuring William Friedkin with “On A Dead Man’s Chest”, we now have John Frankenheimer delivering “Maniac At Large”.
I have to say, it’s something of a coup to nail two such outwardly serious filmmakers to provide quirky short stories for a quipping corpse puppet, but it’s certainly worth it – especially if it helps the show get back to what it does the best: deliver randomly eclectic casts to embody a story that’s quirky as hell. We have murderers, twists and red herrings galore as we tempt the fates and work overtime while a serial killer prowls the streets…
Margaret is about as meek and mousey as they come – but the fact that she jumps at every noise and recoils at every shadow is further exacerbated by the details of her new job. Working as a librarian in an inner-city library means that she’s at the mercy of virtually everything. Practically everyone and everything in the city terrifies her – especially the homeless and the destructive punks who sneak in to deface the desks, but even worse yet, the newspapers continuously scream about a maniac that’s been terrorising the area and stabbing random people as they go.
Margaret’s blood pressure goes up a couple of more notches when her strict boss, Mrs. Pritchard, puts her down for overtime to work late into the night without consulting her. This means that while a frenzied killer stalks the streets, she, Pritchard and boozy, cynical security guard, Grady, are all burning the midnight oils while they potentially risk their lives. It also doesn’t help that a random, serial killer-loving member of the public named Pipkin, has gotten locked in with the staff as he researches his favorite subject. As the evening wears on, Margaret becomes more and more on edge as her mind apparently starts playing tricks on her. Did she really see the silhouette of someone stabbing a book with a knife? Is she imagining every leer and lingering look she’s seeing on the faces of her colleagues? Who is the odd looking man banging on the window, desperate to get in?
Despite the police getting called out, it all seems to be getting to be too much for Margaret’s timid nature – but in a typical twist of fate for Tales From The Crypt, nothing is quite what it seems. What if the killer doesn’t actually know they’re the killer and their murderous impulses are only triggered when a fight or flight response is required? Why, just about anyone could be the maniac, even a lowly librarian who is continuously scared of everything.
There’s something refreshingly basic about the setup of “Maniac At Large”, as it occurs in a single location, contains a limited amount of characters and is hinged around the notion of an unseen killer lurking at the outskirts of the story who could literally be anybody. It’s exactly this kind of scenario that allows a respected director to let his hair down and have a little fun with the medium and while Frankenheimer’s not here to break any molds or challenge genre conventions, you can tell he got stuck into this tale of slashers and scaredy cats. It’s not like the director is any stranger to horror either as he made the mutant-bear, eco-thriller, Prophecy, and years after his Crypt offering, he joined one of the most notoriously chaotic film productions in history when he was hired to try and bail out Richard Stanley’s The Island Of Dr. Moreau But in the absence of rutting animal people, Marlon Brandon’s lumpy Mini-Me, or Val Kilmer in general, Maniac At Large chugs along just fine.
But while Frankenheimer screws around with shadows, weird angles and multiple false alarms, he also has one of those wonderfully weird Tales From The Crypt casts that literally make no sense on paper. Taking the main role of the terrified Margaret is Meet The Parents’ Blythe Danner who spends the entire episode seemingly on the verge of a fear-induced nervous breakdown, and lording it over her with a stern look is Salome Jens’ head librarian, who thinks all of Margaret’s jitters are just ridiculous. However, it’s here where the cast gets really weird as we first have Clarence Williams III at hand as a security guard who seems initially friendly, but who seems to be a bit of a letch, and then we none other than Adam Ant as an overzealous geek who adores serial killers. To be honest, this is exactly the type of deranged mixture of actors I hope for every time I settle down to watch one of these things.
Of course, in true Crypt style, all of these random characters all prove to be distractions from the big twist, but I do have to say that I thought that someone like Frankenheimer could have delivered it a little cleaner. After an episode-full of Hitchcockian twists and tweaks that points a potential finger at everyone, we discover that the maniac of the title ends up being Margaret herself after she takes her frustrations out Mrs. Pritchard with a switchblade – but it turns out that she has no idea about her own, murderous proclivities. Or, at least, I think she doesn’t. It’s not actually made particularly clear what her deal is, but what I managed to piece together from Danner’s ranting is that it’s her fear of everything that causes her to eventually switch into her other, murderous persona. Once she gets to a particular level of terror, she defends herself with a ferocious rage; but the most interesting aspect of her malady is that it’s her own rampages that’s unknowingly fueling her own nervousness. However, I’d have appreciated two or three extra minutes on the runtime to spell it out just a little better.
However, that doesn’t discount the fun that Frankenheimer is obviously having, especially when it comes to utilising the interior of the dark, oppressive nature of an out of hours library. As he moves his cast about like pawns and keeps muddying the waters about whether or not Margaret is actually witnessing the tell-tale signs of an omnipresent murderer, he keeps us guessing thanks to a well timed sneer from Williams, or the sheer nature of Adam Ant’s accent – let’s just say he’s not exactly prince charming, but ridicule is nothing to be scared of…
He certainly ain’t trying to reinvent the wheel, but that doesn’t mean that John Frankenheimer’s time in the Crypt is wasted. But while his stripped down, meat and potatoes psycho-thriller stumbles a little during its final reveal, it’s good to be back to the established way of doing things after two weeks of recycled episodes from another show.
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