While I’ll admit that I’ve been fairly vocal about my preferences concerning how deranged I like my Tale From The Crypt episodes to be (hint: very), even I wouldn’t begrudge the Crypt Keeper and his seemingly endless tomes of shriek inducing stories to shoot for a more overt Hitchcockian angle. With that in mind, we get Mute Witness To Murder, a gimmicky psychological thriller with a premise that wouldn’t have looked out of place on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock presents as it keeps its spectral goings on to an absolute minimum.
Helmed by Jim Simpson (assistant director on such films as Spice World and Event Horizon and spouse to non-other than Sigourney Weaver), can this tale of victimised vocal chords and sinister sanatoriums manage to break the streak of the “straighter” episodes being the more blander offerings from the second season?
Suzy Hastings is blissfully married to her husband Paul and as her anniversary costume party winds down, she wonders what could possibly ruin such a perfect night. However, we all know that Tales From The Crypt sees a healthy relationship as an open challenge to shit upon it from a great height and while Suzy gazes out of her apartment window in a content haze, she witnesses some rather disturbing goings on in the apartment across from her own.
What starts as a heated, domestic argument between husband and wife suddenly steps up a savage notch when the spouse, visibly troubled by his wife’s yelling, first strikes her with a lamp and then chokes the life right out of her as Suzy watches. While it’s a shocking tableaux for anyone to see, the jolt to Suzy’s system is so extreme that it instantly renders her mute with terror and to endure something of a violent panic attack. Trying to help, Phil contacts Dr. Trask, a renowned psychiatric doctor in the area, but when he shows up, we’re treated to a traumatic game of “guess who”.
That’s right, it turns out that Dr. Trask is the very murderous husband that caused Suzy to have her non-verbal freak out in the first place and the callous killer wastes no time having her committed to the state hospital he’s in charge of under the pretext that’s she’s spontaneously gone completely insane. Before you know it, poor Suzy is wrapped up in a straightjacket and cooling her mute heels in a padded room awaiting whatever fate Dr. Trask has in store for her, but while it seems that her goose is cooked, Trask has one vital achillie’s heel that she could take advantage of. It seems that he has a rare heart condition that’s exasperated by the sort of stress caused by loud noises – but the only way she can take advantage of it is if she can once again find her voice.
While we find another episode falling foul of trying to be too serious while the best of season goes for broke, Mute Witness To Murder nevertheless has quite a few good things going for it. For a start, while the premise of being declared crazy by a doctor who wants to kill you has provided some great bouts of paranoia over the years (Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane immediately springs to mind), it still has enough gas in the tank to still be quite an engrossing scenario. It also helps that playing the tormented Suzy is Patricia Clarkson, who manages to envoke the right amount of tension despite spending the majority of the story trying to comunicate in a panicky croak while bundled up in restraints. However, most interestingly, we also get the sight of Richard Thomas (best known as famously upstanding John-Boy Walton from The Waltons) delivering something of rarity in the form of an actual villain role and the novelty of watching him scheme, plot and torment armed with a slicked-back bad-guy hairdo is admittedly pretty neat.
Alas, once again, it does seem to be a case of yet another thriller-coded Crypt episode turning out to be just passable mostly because of the installments it’s had to follow. Over the past weeks the Crypt Keeper’s gleefully doled out sights such as Don Rickles with a conjoined twin growing out of his wrist; a pair of sawn-off feet booting Moses Gunn down a flight of stairs and the fucked-up union of a circus freak and an Egyptian mummy that gave us a bouncing, baby Crypt Keeper – how the Hell is Jon-Boy Walton with Hannibal Lector hair supposed to complete with that. However, even taken in isolation, Mute Witness To Murder mostly coasts on its concept and it’s casting choices without ever really digging under the skin of the real flesh crawling chills of having a woman-hating madman declare you insane.
Maybe if the episode was 15 – 20 minutes longer it would have the time to come up with more cinematic ways to really drive home Suzy’s plight other than have Thomas deliver sinister monologues and hint that he has equally unnerving members of staff. Maybe the episode could have really sunk its teeth in if an extra plot twist revealed that Trask’s staff were also as psycho as he is in order to keep his secrets – but I get that we only have 30 minutes to play with here.
On the plus side, it’s nice that the episode uses rather a heavy hand with its cast and doesn’t shoot for a safe ending. For example, even though our plucky heroine does manage to take advantage of her abuser’s convenient heart problems, her well-meaning husband (Reed Birney) still buys the farm due to the unfortunate placement of an air-filled syringe and even though she regains her voice, the episode doesn’t even give Suzy the comfort of a cozy epilogue that sees her safe outside the hospital. However, even with that nice, hard edge backing it up, and the treat of Clackson getting a rare starring role, Mute Witness To Murder just can’t stop itself sliding into mediocrity mostly because it’s thrill are far more subtle than revealing a rubbery monster, or delivering a slice of fiendish gore and given more room to breathe it actually could have been a genuinely tense hour of television. Also, as much fun as it is to watch John-Boy break bad, Thompson admittedly isn’t that great a fit as the nefarious doctor, mostly because all you can see is John-Boy Walton play the prick. But just because we have another episode that can’t quite measure up to the grand excess of some of the more unhinged episodes, Mute Witness To Murder is still a fairly decent shout.
You can tell when Tales From The Crypt falls foul of some rather large tone swappage mostly because the pun laden Crypt Keeper segments feel wildly out of place. But even though director Simpson gives it his all, and tries to do some cool Hitchcockian nods such as the Rear Window type opening and some nifty, stylised lighting, Mute Witness To Murder proves to be yet another sober-themed episode that can’t quite find its voice.
🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 