Before we even get into the episode itself, if we were to judge Tales From The Crypt episodes by the strength of their titles alone, “People Who Live In Brass Hearses” surely would win hands down. I’m mean it’s perfect, isn’t it? It’s a play on words, it’s evocative and it’s also faintly ludicrous – which coincidentally describes the show through and through. However, what even more impressive is that the fifth episode of the fifth season actually manages to live up to such a rousing moniker, and actually stands back to back with the best and brightest the Crypt Keeper has had to offer.
With so many returning contributors leaving the Crypt over the last season or two, it’s a real treat to welcome back Russell Mulcahy, who not only gave us the super-stylish cult hits Razorback and Highlander, but also cashed his chips to be in the Tales From The Crypt hall of fame with the exemplary “Split Second” back in Season 3. Can he possibly top an episode where he had Brion James graphically chainsawed into sections before our very eyes – you best believe it, and he has a blowout cast to back him up, too.
Billy DeLuca is a grade-A shitheel who has recently only just got out of San Quentin after serving two years for embezzlement. However, due to breathtaking rage issues, he is determined to get revenge on the major ice cream company that shit-canned him and the vendor, Earl Bryd, who turned him in to the cops in the first place. With his his mentally challenged brother, Virgil, recruited as an inside man, Billy hopes to clear out the safe under the nose of the obnoxious manager, Ms. Grafungar – but after approaching Byrd in an attempt to intimidate his old colleague, he notices that the beloved ice cream seller is sitting on a pile of cash.
Barely able to contain his greed, Billy alters the plan to become a twofer: first he and Virgil rob the safe, then they’ll hijack Earl in his ice cream truck and swipe the $500 cash the man has in his money box. However, after Billy hypes him up a little too much, Virgil oversteps his bounds and violently attacks Grafungar with an ice pick, leaving his older brother no choice but to finish her off with a hook before her bloodied gasps are heard. However, in his enthusiasm, Virgil neglected to ensure that the safe was open before fatally attacking his boss, so the only way the DeLuca brothers are going to emerge from this mess with anything to show for it, is to head to Earl Byrd’s house to see what they can steal.
However, once there, Virgil gets carried away again, blowing off the top of Byrd’s head with a shotgun before Billy can get the location of his stash of money. However, while the DeLuca siblings seemed to have well and truly fucked things up, it turns out that they’re not the only brothers present and Earl had a mindblowing secret that’ll prove to be the well deserved ruin of Billy and Virgil.
If the fact that the title of “People Who Live In Brass Hearses” wasn’t magnificent enough, the pedigree behind the episode proves to be equally as impressive. Obviously Mulcahy, in his second trip to the Crypt, is a proven force when realising the shocks and yucks of an EC Comic on the screen, but he’s come prepared with maybe one of the most perfect casts you could imagine for such a show. Heading things up is the mighty Bill Paxton, whose peerless talents of portraying snivelling thugs is unsurpassed; but in something of a coup, the episode also boasts Brad Dourif plying his quirky trade as his slow-witted brother, infant-like, Virgil. To top off the trifecta, we get Barton Fink’s Michael Lerner playing the ice cream vendor with a suitably macabre secret and while I’ve said things to this effect before. It’s tough to imagine an episode of the gore-flingin’, twist-bringin’, HBO show that’s featured a more perfect cast.
Paxton in particular is perfect. Swaggering around with a mean, shitkicker attitude and a chip on his shoulder the size of a coffee table, he alternates between invoking the outlaw aspects of Near Dark’s Severen with the sizable freak-out capacity of Aliens’ Corporal Hudson once his weak-ass plan inevitably falls apart. Meeting Paxton’s tattooed, volatile scumbag with every twitch and tic in his vast repertoire, Dourif plays Billy’s bullied and put-upon brother with a childlike innocence, even when his old sibling’s influence causes him to resort to opportunistic murder to impress him. It’s a double act that invokes a twisted variation of the George and Lennie dynamic from Of Mice And Men – although I don’t remember either of those guys putting a hook through the head of a wounded, former boss in order to avoid detection.
While the central pairing proves to be nothing short of a gift, Mulcahy ensures that the episode that surrounds it is packed with incident to take us on the doomed path the DeLuca brothers have put themselves on. Right from the word go, the story ensures that their plan virtually disintegrates before our very eyes as the director fuses extreme gore with almost a farcical nature as the Hitchcockian scrapes these two losers get into have us on the edge of our seat. As a badly wounded Ms Grafungar desperately tries to crawl for help after being repeatedly stabbed by Virgil, she’s only moments away from salvation if Byrd only would turn his head and spot her mangled form in his rear view mirror. Watching Billy desperately trying to snag her with that hook, Mulcahy has us on tenterhooks (natch) despite the fact that the DeLuca’s are screaming for some ironic punishment.
It eventually comes in the form of that classic Tales From The Crypt denouement – the secret conjoined twin; and it’s amazing how much mileage the show has gotten from revealing that a character – surprise, surprise – has been hiding an entire secret sibling attached to their person. In this case, Michael Lerner’s Earl has his brother – in the shape of another, full-sized Michael Lerner – seemingly joined somewhere around the butt, and they’ve kept up their subterfuge by pretending to be one person thanks to the way their ice cream van has been tricked out. However, the reveal proves to be an extra shock because thanks once again to Virigil’s excited nature, he blows the top of Earl’s head off around five seconds into their robbery. But after splitting up to look for the cash, Virgil is throttled off-screen by Earl’s brother, who doesn’t take kindly to how having a headless, dead body fused to his spine. All that’s left is for the murderous twin to promptly remove Billy’s leg with a shotgun blast, and the ex-con finally gets the comeuppance he so richly deserves. But it also helps that the manic, frenzied energy of the twist is also incredibly ludicrous, much in the same way the ending of season 2’s exemplary “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy” was, as it pushes that comic book insanity to the absolute limit.
As we mull over the sight of a plainly crazy Bryd heading out to do his ice cream route with his brother’s rotting corpse still connected to his posterior, we’re left with yet another Crypt that – judging within the parameters of the show – is virtually perfect. The kickass cast sell the crap out of it with a minimum of camp (not easy when you have a dead body grafted to your butt) and any time we get to watch Paxton freak out, Dourif be weird, or Lerner blow his stack, is time wisely spent.
Great title. Amazing cast. Flawless episode. Now, who’s for ice cream?
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟