Does anyone else get the feeling that Tales From The Crypt front-loads all of its best episodes at the start of the season? While there’s been a few exceptions to the rule, the fact that season 5 has delivered its first, true stinker so late in the game kinda lends credence to my theory. Despite sporting an absolute cracker of a title in the form of “Oil’s Well That Ends Well”, the resulting episode proves to be a crass, flat, season low point that offers little in the way of laughs, shocks, or even basic surprises.
Essentially mostly just one twisty con job that involves a femme fatale and various sweaty businessmen, the episode has a lot of flaws, but ultimately falls foul of the first rule of Tales From The Crypt: if your Crypt Keeper sequences are better than the episode they bookend, then something has gone terribly, terribly wrong…
We are introduced to professional con artists Carl (working under the alias Jerry) and the man-hating, chain smoking Gina in the midst of their latest scheme, as they dig up Gina’s still living husband, Larry, after he faked his death to score a $20,000 payout. Quite why you’d allow yourself to be buried alive and rely on scam artists to dig you up is anyone’s guess, but after the weasly Larry berates his sneering wife one too many times, “Jerry” shoots him after making a counter deal with Gina. Yep, it’s going to be one of those episodes where literally everyone is going to be a fully minted piece of shit, and soon, after consummating their union, Gina and Carl move onto their next score.
This one involves trying to hoodwink a clutch of sweaty, sexist, southern investors into believing that oil has been struck in a local, abandoned cemetery and in order to pull a larger swindle, each are required to cough up 5 grand in order to keep Carl (posing as someone who reports to the oil company) from turning in his findings so they all can swipe the land out from whomever owns it and claim the oil. However, sensing an even bigger score within, Gina unwisely takes it further, throwing in her life savings of $82,000 in the hope that she can bleed even more loot out of her victims. As the grift gets ever more complicated with the stakes growing higher, the group starts to turn on each other, with Gina injecting Carl in the heart with acid to remove him from the game – as you do.
However, maybe if she’d listened to her man-hating urges a little more, Gina would have realised that she’s walked into yet a counter-scam that reveals that Carl, the southern investors, and a still-living Larry, have set literally everything up to swipe Gina’s sizable nest egg. Worse yet, Gina finds herself completely out maneuvered, standing in an open grave facing her betrayers. But when it turns out that there actually is oil to be found in the graveyard, all it takes is a furious Gina and a lit cigarette to show that Hell truly hath no fury for a woman scorned.
With no goofy supernatural twist to fall back on, “Oil’s Well That Ends Well” is one of those twisty, turny stories proves to be both needlessly complicated and extremely dumb at the same time. The typically random cast all overact to a ridiculous degree and the fact that every single character involved in the story has all the appeal of a skid mark discovered in clean white underwear means that it’s something of a slog to get through. It’s odd, because if any show has full licence to be more effective because all of its characters are stunningly unlikable, it’s Tales From The Crypt, but making everyone greedy dickweeds still needs a certain amount of charm and humour to carry it off. And that’s the problem. The episode just isn’t likable or funny in away way, shape, or form and as a result, the majority of this lifeless installment proves to be legitimately boring.
However, one thing that isn’t boring are the Crypt Keeper’s intros, that not only see the horrible host get more meta than usual, but actually gives us a genuinely enjoyable peak behind the curtain of the show. When we first see the Crypt Keeper, he’s playing on an actual, official, Tales From The Crypt pinball machine, which I don’t mind saying is a pretty sweet spot of merchandising. But even better yet, at the end of the episode, we find the cordial corpse obsessing over a particular actor that appeared in the episode, claiming that he’s a phenomenal actor. Of course, more eagle-eyed viewers will recognise that Larry is played by non-other than John Kassir, the man who voices the Crypt Keeper himself, so no wonder the skeletal storyteller is so drawn to him. In fact, this episode marks the only time the actor appeared in the show in the flesh, so it’s a bit of a shame he couldn’t have picked a better episode to do it in…
Anyway, back to the story and we find director Paul Abascal helming the thing like it’s a play where everyone was only told their blocking and motivation four minutes before opening curtain. Everyone delivers an overblown, exaggerated performance that clashes with everyone else’s and frankly a lot of the story is a mess. I’m not sure if any of this is actually supposed to be gripping or tense, but the constant back stabbing and twists only end up being curiously dull. What’s all the more confounding is that the cast is relatively well known, so you’d think that the ensemble would be able to work together on the same page. Priscilla Presley attacks her role of a man-hating seductress like she’s still in a Naked Gun movie, but with minimum jokes to sustain her performance, her constantly seething character stubbornly refuses to make sense – if she despises men so much, why the Hell has she put herself in a line of business that requires her to trust them so much? Also, Lou Diamond Phillips’ Carl isn’t exactly a bright spark for a con artist either, after all, isn’t the point of pulling a scam is that you make money? So why would his big plan involve him taking on five fucking partners when surely that would score him a smaller cut of the profits? I understand that everyone here has been rendered idiotic by their immence greed, but that doesn’t excuse such bad writing, or such flat direction. However, it’s admittedly cool seeing who they managed to get to play the sleazy, southern investors, with Lethal Weapon alumni Noble Willingham, drawling The Last Boy Scout villain Steve Kahan, Monty Burns’ favorite actor Rory Calhoun and Ferris Bueller’s Alan Ruck all hamming it up a storm, but unlike the black gold that bubbles up from the ground in the finale, none of it manages to stick. It’s ironic that I’d use “crude” to describe an episode so directly linked to oil, but truth be told, the episode is all over the place and once all the players are finally all obliterated in a climactic explosion, it’s frankly a relief to get back to the Crypt Keeper for some closing jibes.
After a relatively strong selection of stories, season 5 finally has an episode that crashes out spectacularly. Dull, annoying and vastly overplayed, there’s not even the promise of cool gore to carry us through to the end. Terrible with a capital Texas Tea.
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