Tales From the Crypt: Season Three, Episode 3 "The Trap"
They have fun!
For big movie stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Hanks and Michael J. Fox, directing an episode of Tales From the Crypt during its star-studded heyday was an opportunity too rich and juicy to pass up. It’s easy to see why. The stakes were relatively low, the lurid pulp material seems like it’d undoubtedly be enormous fun to adapt for the small screen and of course it never hurt to do a favor for a show whose high-powered roster of Executive Producers included such big machers as Walter Hill, Joel Silver, Richard Donner, David Giler and Robert Zemeckis.
That’s particularly true if you owe your movie stardom to Robert Zemeckis, as “The Trap” director and bit player Michael J. Fox does thanks to the formerly great director’s masterful work on Back to the Future, one of only a handful of movies that are legitimately perfect, and could not be improved in any way.
“The Trap” is littered with references to Back to the Future, from its lout of a villain getting fired from Zemeckis’ Pizza to Back to the Future assistant principal James Tolkan playing another nasty, clueless authority figure, in this case an inept but aggressive cop who seriously mishandles the case of Lou Paloma (Bruce McGill), an unbearable waste of genetic material who fakes his own death with the help of his long-suffering wife Irene (Teri Garr) and his brother Billy (Bruno Kirby) for a big insurance payday and ends up getting more than he bargained for.
McGill lustily overplays the role of a belligerent small-time loser with an ego as big as his bank account is small. It’s the kind of hot-tempered blowhard role that was once offered first to Joe Pesci as a professional courtesy and McGill doubles down on the flagrant jackassery. Even by Tales From the Crypt standards, this is one odious dude, a sort of psychotic Archie Bunker who deserves to die, and not in a kind or dignified fashion either.
As the episode opens, Lou has just been fired from what appears to be an endless succession of menial jobs he lost quickly for very good reasons. The couple is drowning in credit card debt and hounded by debt collectors who distractingly talk EXACTLY like Edgar G. Robinson, right down to their use of a belligerent, combative “See” as a constantly-employed intensifier.
Yet this blustery blow-hard refuses to let his wife work, clinging to his identity as the man of the house and a good provider despite having zero interest in providing for his family, at least in not any legal or reputable fashion.
Lou needs money fast and he’s not able to lower himself to working for it. So he hatches a scheme with his mortified mortician brother Lou to make it look like he was murdered in a burglary so he can fly to Rio, get extensive cosmetic surgery to become unrecognizable and eventually be reunited with his wife in sunny, idyllic South America once the heat has died down.
Unfortunately for Lou, his brother and his wife, united in their all-consuming hatred for him, have fallen into a passionate affair that gives them even less of an incentive to follow through on the plan and share the money with a man who has only ever been a malignant, destructive presence in their lives.
Garr lends her physically and emotionally abused domestic avenger the squirmy vulnerability and pathos she brought to her unforgettable performance in After Hours. She and Kirby are easy to buy as bullied and tormented everyday people who see an opportunity to end the abuse and enrich themselves in the process and go for it.
Kirby is one of a series of heavyweight character actors that includes Baby Doll’s Carroll Baker as Lou and Billy’s smothering, senile mother but you can just tell that Kirby’s mind is on finding Curly’s Gold and I gotta admit, it’s a little distracting. I get it. He, Billy Crystal and Daniel Stern needed to first “find their smiles” and then Curly’s Gold but Kirby is playing a different character here so his motivation should also be different. Also, City Slickers 2: The Search for Curly’s Gold wouldn’t even be released for another couple of years but I guess the seed for it had already been planted in Kirby’s mind.
Lastly, Kirby wasn’t even in City Slickers 2: The Legend of Curly’s Gold but the titular legend is so vast and all-consuming that it apparently obsessed the beloved late character actor all the same.
The twist, such as it is, in “The Trap” is that when an apoplectic Lou comes back to the States post-surgery to confront his wife and brother he discovers that they’re now married and pretend not to know who he is.
Lou ends up getting framed for his own non-existent murder when the cops and the legal system both refuse to believe that Lou is who he says he is, in part because it makes all of their lives easier and less complicated if Lou dies a violent, richly merited death.
Like most “funny” episodes of Tales From the Crypt, “The Trap” is not subtle or sophisticated. It’s an exceedingly loud and vulgar exploration of the destruction of a singularly loud and vulgar man’s life where even the bit players over-act egregiously, whether in the form of the debt collector who talks like a 1930s gangster or a jury forewomen who doesn’t just announce Lou’s guilty verdict but screams it loud enough for Jesus and the devil to both hear it.
The episode works best as an actor’s showcase, not surprisingly, particularly for McGill, whose monstrous abuser stays defiant and rebellious right up to the bitter end.
“The Trap” is largely devoid of surprises but the actors, including Fox in a fun cameo as the attorney prosecuting Lou are all clearly having a ball and their pleasure is infectious.
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