It seems that this season of Tales From The Crypt has something of a fascination about examining the perils of showbiz while in a period setting. We’ve already had “Food For Thought” about four episodes ago, that saw a crazed circus performer try to harness the power of the mind. Well, this week we’ve got “Well Cooked Hams”, a turn of the century story about an unscrupulous magician who will stop at nothing to jazz up his dreary act. But while that earlier episode was a bit of a mess, this one has the benefit of some well cooked hams of its own.
Tales From The Crpyt has always been a safe space for recognisable actors to get their freak on. Be it scratching that itch to play an absolute bastard/bitch, fooling around with explicit gore, or even just getting a chance to fuck about and have fun by delivering the biggest performance they can, some surprisingly high-end talents have used the Crypt to let their hair down for our entertainment. Well, with none other than Martin Sheen and Billy Zane vying for screen time, expect some exaggerated acting that goes far beyond a magician’s theatricality…
Around the turn of the century, we find that the floundering magician known as Miles Federman is nearing the end of his tether. Truth be told, despite being a protege of the Zorbin the Magnificent, Miles is an impressively lousy performer, who seems to fumble the most rudimentary tricks, and despite some spiteful deflecting, audiences are starting to stay away in droves. However, after firing his assistant, Greta, Miles discovers a modicum of hope when he’s visited by a fellow illusionist, Franz Kraygen, who invites him to view his showstopping new act, the Box Of Death. Essentially an escapologist trick that sees Kragen padlocked in a sack, locked in a box and struggling to escape before getting pierced by swords and splashed with acid, the gag is that the trick is supposed to fail, shocking the audience – but in actuality, it’s all a bluff and the second Miles hears the applause, he knows he needs this trick for himself.
Murdering Kragen and stealing his act, Miles aims to finally be the wonder of all now that he’s got the Box Of Death to show off his stolen skills, but on opening night, his ego is stoked even more by the presence of Thomas Miller, a cameraman who wishes to film the act to market it to the world. However, once on stage, Miles proceeds to bumble through the act as usual, but when it comes time for the big finish, the greedy illusionist discovers that he’s only the punchline of a greater performance. You see, it seems that Miles can’t even get murder right, as the surviving Zorbin the Magnificent has returned in various guises (Kragen, Miller) to get his revenge and the con man realises too late that a tampered with Box Of Death will become exactly that…
Even armed with an early script by Se7en’s Andrew Kevin Walker, Elliot Silverstein’s Crypt output has been somewhat up and down so far, with the director of Cat Ballou often taking a more theatrical approach to his numerous offerings. While “The Reluctant Vampire” from season 3 was an oddly sweet, yet willfully silly comedy about a squeamish bloodsucker, “Curiosity Killed” was a screechy farce that saw a hateful, elderly couple bicker over enternal youth. However, while both episodes had their pros and cons, they also showed that Silverstein favoured a more campy, histrionic approach to his episodes (four over all) that tended to be a little hit and miss. With that being said, while “Well Cooked Hams” is the director’s latest opportunity to cram an installment with as many huge performances as he can, it turns out that this particular collective of overblown emoting proves to be quite fun in spite of itself.
For a start, it’s kind of fun to watch a story about ruthless, dueling magicians, because at times it almost feels like we’re getting Lloyd Kaufman’s The Prestige, as acts are stolen, underhanded tactics are utilised and pompous showmen are bamboozled as a clueless audience looks on. The script is hardly inspired and Sliverstein knows that there’s no way to pull the twist off without everyone guessing the ending about five minutes in, but amusingly, the director chooses to lean into it and allow us to be comfortably three steps ahead of the story at all times. While this seems to be a disastrous idea for an anthology show that survives on its twists, Silverstein doesn’t seem to be worried at all thanks to a couple of loud, blustering, secret weapons that manage to haul this episode out of a dangerously bland fire: the overacting onslaught of Martin Sheen and Billy Zane.
Zane’s overacting was already legendary at this point, mostly thanks to the marvelously twitchy performance he gave in Phillip Noyce’s Dead Calm; but here he bumbles, stumbles and throws petulant fits almost non-stop as he emits impressive caddish energy from underneath a gargantuan mustache. It also helps that Zane went onto become Tales From The Crypt royalty that to the fact that a mere couple of years later, he went on to overact even more as the villain of Ernest Dickerson’s magnificent Tales From The Crypt Presents: Demon Knight; but watching him here make a meal of every line, proves to be great fun, even if you do suspect that he’s just blatantly taking the piss. However, if Zane is getting paid to fuck about, Martin Sheen has showed up to work, and his triple-threat performance of Zorbin and his various disguises sees the veteran of such films as Apocalypse Now and Badlands somehow out-ham even Zane.
Adopting a thick, tremendously unsubtle German accent and wearing prosthetics that weirdly give him a passing resemblance to Robert Englund in The Mangler, Sheen starts chewing more of the scenery than a termite infestation, but once the gnarled Kraygen is supposedly given an early curtain by Miles’ greed, Zorbin switches to the more sedate, bearded form of cameraman Thomas Miller in order to lure his enemy in further and have a ring side seat to film his revenge once it’s in motion. However, I’ll freely admit that without the frenzied performances of Zane and Sheen, “Well Cooked Hams” would most likely feel decidedly underdone as the episode, as a whole, is admittedly a bit of a mess. There’s no real reason for The Living Daylights’ Maryam a’Abo to be here as she has nothing really to do, and a lot of the episode feels weirdly cheap. However, what will I say is, if it wasn’t Sheen’s ludicrous German accent that hooked me, it was Zane’s histrionic death scene as he succumbs to numerous stab wounds and an acid seared scalp that made these hams so fun to feast upon.
While objectively something of a weak episode, Silverstein is once again saved by the fact that he seemingly has put no restraints on his actor’s performances whatsoever. If deranged overacting isn’t yor thing, “Well Cooked Hams” will result in these twenty six minutes feeling like an eternity; but for all it’s faults, watching actors like Sheen and Zane play the idiot proves to be magically infectious.
Florish.
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