Tales From the Crypt, Season Three, Episode Six "Dead Wait"
In “Dead Wait”, hot-headed career criminal and inveterate degenerate “Red” (James Remar) responds to a criminal cohort knocking over a chess board by arguing, “Chess isn’t just a game; it’s a way to improve your mind!”
That may be true but in the world of entertainment Chess is an all-purpose metaphor first and a game of strategy for smart people a very distant second. In “Dead Wait”, the life-or-death metaphorical Chess game Red finds himself in involves an almost unfathomably valuable jewel known as the Black Pearl, Kathrine (Vanity) the gorgeous wife of desperately ill rich powerbroker Duval (John Rhys-Davies), Peligre (Whoopi Goldberg) a voodoo priestess with mysterious motivations and a tropical island in the grips of a Civil War.
Chess may be a game for smart people but Red is not a smart man. He’s not strategic. Mostly, he’s just white so people treat him with deference and respect even when he has done nothing to deserve it.
Red isn’t just white in a place where that is exceedingly rare; he’s also a red-head, a fluke of biology that is nevertheless treated as special, sacred, a form of magic even, particularly by Peligre, who has an unusually intense connection to the spirit world and a whole lot of dark juju at her command.
Our sweaty, desperate anti-hero/villain’s quest for the Black Pearl kicks into high gear when he murders the man who knocks over his chess board after he makes the mistake of both insulting Red’s intelligence and revealing that Duvall is the Black Pearl’s owner.
“If you’re so fucking smart, how come you’re the one who’s dead?” Red indignantly asks the dead man. The corpse, alas, does not have a good answer, or any answer, really, to this particular question.
Red then meets Duvall, who gives him a job running his plantation despite the steamy looks he gives the older man’s impossibly gorgeous, much younger wife. For it seems Duvall has something Red wants nearly as much as the Black Pearl: Kathrine.
Red seduces Kathrine with an eye towards recruiting her in his quest for the Black Pearl despite the warnings of Peligre, who tells Red that she wants to protect him even if it’s the other characters that need to be protected from him.
Rhys-Davies lends his character a sense of exhaustion and resignation that proves surprisingly moving. The ubiquitous character actor and staple of the Lord of the Rings and Indiana Jones franchises plays Duvall as someone who has accepted that his time on earth has nearly come to an end, and is mostly concerned with wrapping things up before the Grim Reaper comes calling.
Rhys-Davies was only in his mid-40s when “Dead Wait” was filmed but he seems much older. When Duvall tells Red with the perfect note of fatalism, “A word of advice, Red: Don’t get old. There’s no fun in it” the words have a wisdom, authority and conviction that can only come with age and hard-won experience.
Throughout “Dead Wait”, Duvall keeps saying that he can’t quite get his hands on the Black Pearl immediately. Red eventually figures out that he’s speaking literally as well as symbolically. Duvall swallows the Black Pearl in a balloon in order to transport it discretely.
The obsessed Red isn’t going to let anything get in the way of his big payday so he cuts into Duvall’s flesh with a knife, revealing an impressively disgusting, utterly stomach-churning, vomit-inducing tableaus of diseased worms writhing around inside Duvall’s bloated corpse.
From a practical effects standpoint, this sequence is quietly masterful but it has an unmistakable metaphorical resonance as well: THIS is what Red’s inveterate criminality and greed invariably leads to.
Red’s brain and soul are maggot-infested nightmares but he still labors under the delusion that this he can win this metaphorical Chess match, that he will be the last man standing, with the pearl if not the girl.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist director Tobe Hooper, working from a script by producers AL Katz and Gilbert Adler, lends the proceedings a wonderfully sweaty, visceral sense of atmosphere. “Dead Wait” takes place in a war zone vibrating with violence and death and bloodshed, where life is cheap and death is everywhere.
Red is foolish enough to think that he’s special, smart, three steps ahead when he’s really more behind than he can possibly imagine. He thinks he can get out of this pit of death with his head intact. He is sadly, tragically mistaken.
The most striking thing about “Dead Wait” is its overwhelming air of sadness. It’s about a rich old man waiting patiently to die and an imperious young buck who does not realize that he is inherently doomed. So even though there is violence and sex and nudity and all of the other things that make Tales From the Crypt special what we’re ultimately left with is an exploration of fate and destiny, and how the odds are always against us even when we’re foolish enough to think we’ve figured it all out.
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