We’re nearly at the end of Tales From The Crypt’s second season and once again, the powers that be are testing the waters with another episode that favours comedy over everything else. I made it no secret that my more favoured installments have been the ones that manage to blend mirth and the macabre in a way that benefits the two rather than the ones that opt to go full goofball. However, I have to say that despite my leanings, “My Brother’s Keeper” managed to mostly win we over purely by doubling down on a plot point you simply couldn’t get away with today.
The notion of conjoined twins at war isn’t new, Hell, this season of Tales From The Crypt alone has already given us the magnificently macabre punchline to Richard Donner’s “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy”, but while My Brother’s Keeper doesn’t go quite to those extremes, I couldn’t help but be reminded of 2003 Farrelly Brothers comedy, Stuck On You, that saw Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear in a simular situation…
To say that brothers Frank and Eddie Duran are joined at the hip may suggest that they just like spending time with one another – but when you discover that the conjoined twins are literally joined together at that exact place, you soon realise that the connected siblings couldn’t be more different and it’s starting to become a problem. Frank is the more mild mannered and cultured of the two who is constantly longing to go to operas and various other highbrow interests, but Eddie is completely opposite as he openly leches on women, boozes regularly and can’t stand all that artsy fartsy stuff. While the two have managed to make it work up until now, both are rapidly reaching their wits ends with each other and Eddie tries to offer them a way out after contacting a doctor who specialises in separating conjoined twins.
However, after discovering that the operation has a 50% success rate, Frank balks at the idea, scared at the low chance of survival. His apprehension is also heightened by the fact that he’s met Marie Hilton, a woman who shares his interests and is willing to try and look past the fact that he’s fused to a complete douchebag. However, desperate to be free of his brother, Eddie starts to turn up the heat, putting more and more strain on Frank and Marie’s relationship with his uncouth behavior and wild sexual proclivities.
However, its all soon revealed that everything is one huge double cross and that Maria has been hired by Eddie to pretend to fall in love with him in order to persuade him to go ahead with the operation. However, when Maria actually falls in love with Frank, Eddie goes down a more deranged route and murders his brother’s lady love with a cleaver knowing that he’ll never get the gas chamber if attached to an innocent man. However, Eddie may finally have pushed his brother too far and discovers that if it means seeing his asshole sibling brother meet justice, he’ll happily sign up for the fateful operation.
While I’d understand if some more modern viewers may have a problem with an episode that takes such a bawdy look at a disability such as being a conjoined twin, Tales From The Crypt has always been a show that happily plays on the wrong side of the street – especially when 99% of episodes suggest that justice is best served at the hand of some ironic, fatal happenstance. Besides, it’s not like My Brother’s Keeper has anything especially offensive to say about the condition in its quest to amuse and confound. As a result, the penultimate installment of season 2 ends up being quite fun, even if once again, it’s another example of the more comedy based episodes being way more forgettable than the ones that push the freakier stuff to its limits.
It does help that it’s the sole directing credit of Peter S. Seaman, the man who wrote the screenplays for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Wild Wild West and the fellow season 2 Crypt episode “For Cryin’ Out Loud” which I consider a fun high point and the goofy energy he brought to those other scripts is still evident here even if the emphasis is confidently more on comedy. Also aiding matters is that there’s an appropriately solid cast at hand to pull things off and as the long suffering Frank, we have Son of the Beach’s Timothy Stack, who is able to play up the more straight man qualities needed to play the nicer twin. On the flip side we have Jonathan Stark of Fright Night and House 2: The Second Story fame, who fully embraces his inner sleazebag to play Eddie, a man who has no compunction about hiring a dominatrix for himself the same night his brother is planning a romantic meal at home for his girlfriend. As the blatantly more fun role of the two, you can tell that Stark is having fun being the biggest butthole he can be, but if I’m being picky, his sudden lapse from shallow moron to cleaver wielding killer feels like a major step in his transition is missing.
Now while Tales From The Crypt isn’t exactly a show that cares much about dotting the i’s and crossng the t’s when it comes to logic, suddenly plunging a kitchen implement into the back of your brother’s lover means that some of the twists in this episode are fairly tough to take seriously, even if the victim in question is played by horror royalty, Jessica Harper (she was not only in Dario Argento’s Suspiria, but was also in Brian DePalma’s Phantom Of The Paradise).
From here, My Brother’s Keeper starts to feel like it could use some keeping of its own and starts to fall apart a little as it uses its goofy tone to cover for some further, random twists that don’t quite land as well as they could. After drugging both himself and his brother with an overdose of pills and booze (which surely would have meant the operation simply couldn’t have gone ahead), both Frank and Eddie wake in the hospital where the latter still continues to mock his quieter sibling over the murder of Marie. However, both the doctor and the waiting police have chosen to kindly set up a situation that allows the realisation that the Durans have been separated to be held from Eddie until maximum irony has been accomplished. Yes, it’s a comedy and incurring such plot holes are necessary in order to preserve the surprise but it’s something of a clunky punchline when surely something snappier could have been rustled up. Weirdest of all, however, is the inferring that Frank has seemingly taken on some of Eddie’s more unwelcome personality traits – are we to believe that upon separating, Frank is now a lecherous dick like his brother? Why? Is it a side effect? Is it a happy ending? Sad? Funny? I genuinely don’t know the answer, but I know that a good twist isn’t supposed to leave you this confused.
A fun episode that has a real chance of being a rare comedic episode that flies unfortunately is brought down in its closing moments that plainly worked better in the comics than it did on the screen. Still, Stack and Stark make a good double act and the subject matter is out-there enough to fascinate, but with only one episode left to go, can the Crypt Keeper’s second season manage to snag a big finish?
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