While Tales From The Crypt’s fourth season has arguably been it’s most consistent to date, the near-constant string of four-star episodes has been yet to yield a genuine, top-notch banger. It’s certainly come close a few times, but I suppose having a set level of quality is arguably better than having a genuine classic one week and then a mediocre one the next. Well, someone obviously didn’t tell action producer extraordinaire Joel Silver, who made his sole directing credit with “Split Personality” – a wonderfully nasty entry that throws in con men, twins, chainsaws and the most awful looking ponytail you’ve even seen on a short, middle-aged man.
However, in many ways it’s not that surprising that Silver just swooped in a nailed the best episode of the season so far, check out some of the people he has on his crew. There’s Michael Kamen doing the score, Fred Decker on scripting duties and he even has Jan de Bont as his cinematographer – two of those guys worked on Die Hard for him for crying out loud!
Vic Stetson may be a small-time hustler, but that doesn’t mean he’s an asshole. No, wait – actually that means he’s a tremendous asshole and when we first meet him we see him pull a scam on a luckless gambler who has no idea he’s been duped for a hell of a lot of money. But it’s all small change to Vic, who obviously likes the finer things in life but who chooses to earn them in far less honorable ways. However, his dream of a big score finally looks to be within his grubby reach when he suffers a tyre blow-out outside a noticably strange looking, but decidedly modern, mansion.
Heading inside to look for a phone, he soon discovers that the mansion is populated by April and June Blair, twin sisters who are the daughters of famous architect Etchyson Dobbs Blair, who even designed their eccentric home before dying of mysterious circumstances. Obviously, this sets our Crypt-Sense buzzing, but as people in Tales From The Crypt don’t have Crypt-Sense, Vic is far more invested in the fact that the Blair sisters combined have a net worth of 2 billion.
Turning on the charm, he soon weasels his way into their affections, but realises that even if he manages to marry one of them, he only has access to a “measly” billion.
If he wants to get his hands on the full amount, Vic realises where charm fails, bullshit prevails and feeds the the lie that he has a twin brother himself, Jack, and thus a far more complicated con is born.
Claiming that each “brother” works alternate months in South Africa, Vic woos both sisters and even marries them both as he switches identities every thirty days to string the Blair twins along. But when a careless spot of sunburn give the game away, Vic finds that not only do the twins don’t like being conned, they don’t particularly like sharing much either…
There’s something about an episode that’s helmed by the pool of the Tales From The Crypt pool of executive producers that continues to carry some extra weight. Obviously I’ve spent a lot of reviews praising any episode that’s been directed by the “big three” of Robert Zemeckis, Richard Donner and Walter Hill, but while David Giler never stepped up to try his luck, the fact that Joel Silver thought he’d take a crack at it is pretty fascinating. After all, this guy produced some of the most important action films of the 80s and 90s and had worked with a wealth of famous filmmakers long before this – so you’d hope that some of it would have rubbed off on him. Thankfully it had, but while he delivers an offering that delivers a practically perfect mix of sleeze, weirdness and extreme gore, the real selling point ends up being the central performance of one Joe Pesci, who obviously woke up every morning hoping to deliver the perfect shitheel.
Wise enough to step back and let Pesci do his thing, Silver is rewarded with a diminutive, motormouthed dynamo who seems to be a highly amusing mesh of Vinny Gambini from My Cousin Vinny if he had the morals (but not the hair trigger) of Tommy DeVito from Goodfellas. Frankly it’s a fucking delight to watch Pesci do his stuff, be it conning a confused-looking Burt Young in a casino with the aid of a cameoing Joe Pantoliano, to watching him gyrate to his own, tone-deaf rendition of “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred and, judging by the amusing verbal diarrhea Vic constantly spews, you’d swear that the actor is making the majority of this shit up on the fly.
Matching Pesci in his hyperverbal douchebaggery is the overwhelming weirdness exuded from the twins he tries to woo. While there’s certainly an argument to be made that both Jacqueline Alexandra Citron and Kristen Amber Citron aren’t exactly the most talented thespians in the world, their off-beat line readings and their habit of overlapping their lines certainly proves to have a very unnerving effect. Similarly their strange giggles, infantile mannerisms and creepy grins make the pair a genuinely arresting couple. Of course, the fact that Vic is so locked into getting his mitts on that molah, he quite happily ignores a multitude of blood-red flags which delivers a lot of the humour as the anticipation of the imminent karma builds and builds.
And what karma it is. While there’s a lot of reasons why a person of loose moral standing should get theirs at the end of a Crypt episode – upsetting gyrating aside – Vic has apparently earned himself one of the more graphic demises that the show has ever delivered. Painfully smug in the knowledge that he now has access to $2 billion after marrying the twins as two different people, Vic inevitably gets sloppy while keeping up his subterfuge and after the sisters discover the both he and “Jack” both have a distinct sunburn in exactly the same place, the penny violently drops. After discovering that the sisters did indeed kill their father, Vic is knocked unconsciousness only to wake tied to the bed. But after hurling some very Joe Pesci-style insults at them, we discover that April and June did indeed kill their daddy, but only because they both loved him so much, and just couldn’t share. However, unluckily for Vic, they’ve since come up with a solution to both have him equally – and that’s to chainsaw him down the middle (crotch first, naturally) so they both can lavish each half with affection. Silver pulls no punches as a writhing Pesci gets a roaring saw graphically in the nether regions, and the final shot is a doozy as we track through both the twin’s bedrooms and pull back to see them each canoodling with their half of the cleaved body. It’s eerie as hell, and shares a creepy kinship with the posthumous reveals of both Jon Lovitz and Mimi Rogers in both “Top Billing” and “Beauty Rest” respectively. However, it’s Pesci furiously earning this excessive demise that truly earns that big score.
Season 4 finally gets its big, standout episode thanks to both some top notch mugging by Joe Pesci and Joel Silver’s nicely balanced direction. Hand it to one of the show’s executive producers to once again deliver the perfect mix of conniving con-artist and merry mutilation.
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