Compiling anthology premieres are something of an artform, especially when they’re delivered in the style of Tales From The Crypt. In case you’d forgotten, whenever the Crypt Keeper kicks off a brand new season, it usually takes the form of a trilogy of stories that delivers a range of the tongue in cheek horrors the show has to offer. Past seasons have either gotten the mix insanely right with a triptych of bangers (season 1) or fumbled the ball by delivering only a single, standout entry (season 3), but while season 4 got off to a healthy start thanks to Tom Hanks’ spirited “None But The Lonely Heart”, could the second installment keep that momentum going?
With a more grounded tone and without a ghoul, zombie, or creature in sight, can the noir-tinged tale of “This’ll Kill Ya” manage to keep up the quality?
Cops are understandably flabbergasted when a dishevelled man enters a police station while dragging the body of a murdered victim by his leg, but when they all pull their guns on the perpetrator, he seems relatively unfazed. Telling them that they might as well shoot because he’s dead already, we turn back the clock a spell to see how the players ended up in this bloody predicament.
Unscrupulous scientific researcher, George Gatlin, and his long suffering lab partners Sophie Wagner and Pack Brightman, are tinkering with an experimental virus that goes by the catchy moniker of H-Cell-24. The plan is for the experimental hybrid cell to cure any disease by “breeding it out of the body”, but so far all it can do is cause masses of tumors to grow within it’s host – but that hasn’t stopped Gatlin making premature promises to investors that they’re ready for human testing in order to guarantee that the cash keeps flowing.
Obviously, this enrages Pack and an exasperated Sophie tries to get the greedy George to understand that science doesn’t move forward just because he wants to line his pockets, but matters are made more complex due to the fact that both George and Sophie have had a prior relationship that he’s eager to start up again. However, thanks to the fact that the diabetic Gatlin is such an overconfident douche, he keeps his insulin on the same shelf that they store the H-Cell-24 and when the inevitable happens, he gets injected with a syringe full of his tumor making poison.
However, while George struggles with suddenly being forced to face his own mortality, he starts to get suspicious as the last couple of hours of his life tick down. Becoming convinced that his injection of H-Cell-24 was no mere accident, he plots to take revenge on the colleagues that have conspired to kill him. But after murdering Pack and dragging his body into that police station, Sophie fills him in with a truth far more devestating than his impeding “death”.
While Tales From The Crypt has always made some interesting choices about who they get to helm their episodes (Hello? Tom Hanks?) the choice of getting artist Robert Longo to helm one seems to be an especially eccentric choice. While he’d had some experience behind the camera thanks to shooting music videos for New Order, Megadeth and R.E.M. and eventually directed the feature film Johnny Mnemonic, his stint on Tales seems to be more than a proving ground than a memorable offering. Taking more of a same sort of ticking clock thriller approach as D.O.A., Longo plays things fairly straight as we follow Dylan McDermott’s huckster scientist as his ego starts writing checks his partners can’t cash. And yet, for an show as excitable as Tales From The Crypt, the script actually pays more attention to the events leading up to the fateful injection than after it.
In fact, the episode’s dedication of making everything that transpires make some sort of logical sense is something to be admired. Rather than just having McDermott’s sleazebag be a bit of a greedy dick, the show takes the time to double down on just how much of a prick he is, from repeatedly not giving a shit about how lethal H-Cell-24 would be for human trials, to his unsubtle attempts to woo Sônia Braga’s Sophie back into his bed despite her annoyed protests. I mean, what better way to decisively explain how much of an egotistical, reckless turd your main character is than having him overconfidently store his insulin right next to the indentical vials of killer serum?
However, while Longo should be credited to take his time with the set up, you can’t help but think that things might have been more fun if we’d got to spend more time with George post injection to really see how such a bastard would act if they knew their life’s end was imminent due to a stupid mistake.
Still, watching him get shitfaced at a bar and hallucinate people around him suddenly suffering from masses of tumours is still pretty cool and it sets us up for his drunken swing at revenge. Obviously someone as ego-driven as George can’t fully accept that such a simple mistake could be an accident, so he gets his brutal revenge of Cleavon (Blazing Saddles) Little’s Pack by battering him into oblivion with a bat and then finishing the job by jabbing a syringe full of insulin directly into his heart (it’s a nice touch that we hear his organ actually explode). While it’s fairly disconcerting to see the sheriff of Rock Ridge die in such a savage way, the scene is given an extra layer of sadness when you realise that Little died four months after the episode aired.
Of course, this takes us back to the opening where George hopes to go out in a blaze of glory by dragging Pack’s body into a crowded police station, but this is when the twist fully kicks in. Regrettably, it’s actually pretty easy to predict, as, in an attempt to teach their boss a lesson, both Sophie and Pack have played a prank on him by only letting him think that he’d been injected with the deadly virus. Worse yet, it turns out H-Cell-24 has actually been perfected, so if George hadn’t spiraled into a paranoid rage and murdered one of his partners, he’d be finally riding that pharmaceutical gravy train to cashville. However, while it all ends fairly neatly (if incredibly unprofessionally from a medical point of view), This’ll Kill Ya never really manages to rise above being marginally interesting despite some strong performances and a dark noir-thriller tone. But compared to a previous episode, that saw dripping zombies, plentiful murder and Treat Williams putting Tom Hanks’ head through a TV set, it’s actually fairly forgettable and ends up joining the other straight-played crime episodes that just end up being season filler.
A nifty central premise can’t quite stop This’ll Kill Ya from shifting the season 4 premiere into more middling territory during its second installment and it certainly doesn’t help that the title is weirdly reminiscent of “Easel Kill Ya” from season 3. But while it does work well within the parameters set by its own story, it’s regrettably an episode that’s far too restrained to be Tales at its very best.
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