Tales From the Crypt Season 3, Episode 12: "Deadline"

Writer, director and producer (of the Alien films as well as Tales From the Crypt) Walter Hill is one of our true auteurs, a very American master of tough guy action whose filmography includes such macho marvels as Hard Times, The Warriors, The Driver, 48 Hours, Southern Comfort, Extreme Prejudice, Trespass and Undisputed. 

Hill is every bit as much the auteur in his work for Tales From the Crypt. Though he served as part of the murderer’s row of big-name Executive Producers throughout the show’s run and on its film, game show and animation spin-offs, Hill only wrote and directed three episodes of the beloved HBO horror anthology but those episodes rank among the series’ very best. 

Hill’s auspicious career as a Tales From the Crypt writer-director kicked off with the series’ very first episode, the rightly revered death row romp “The Man Who Was Death” before hitting another high with “Cutting Cards”, a hard-boiled exploration of gambling addiction and competition taken to a pathological, bloody extreme and concluding honorably with “Deadline”, a terrific character study about a boozy, self-destructive newshound played by Richard Jordan who is more than willing to kill for a big story that will get him back in the game. 

Hill had a very specific vision for Tales From the Crypt. The episodes he wrote and directed eschew supernatural shenanigans. The monsters of his episodes are less werwolves, mummies, Draculas and Frankenstein’s Monsters than jealousy, rage, addiction, misogyny and all of the other unfortunate staples of human behavior that make the world such an ugly and dangerous place. 

The life of Charles McKenzie, the drunk, sad aging journalist Richard Jordan plays with just the right note of bone-deep exhaustion and soul-deep desperation, is filled with demons, albeit purely of the psychological variety. His glory days as a newshound are long behind him. His old editor looks at him with no small amount of pity as a has-been, a no-hoper, a stone-cold loser deep into an inexorable personal and professional fall. 

In a predicament that cuts very close to home for me, he’s a middle aged writer who has reached the terrifying point in his life and his career where he’s no longer sure how much longer he can go, when it feels like the world has no use for him and his increasingly irrelevant skill set. 

We open with our anti-hero narrating to camera about his life as a dogged newshound who would do anything to get the story. Anything. This is Tales From the Crypt so anything means anything, up to and including all manner of rank criminality. 

He’s a good journalist with a very big problem: he’s an alcoholic, and his drinking has dragged a once promising career down into the gutter. Even a bartender who has benefited personally, professionally and financially from his addiction diplomatically encourages him to ease up on the sauce. 

Charles is angry and proud and defiant in ways that only feed his sickness but he retains enough rakish charm to seduce Vicki, a hard-luck beauty played by Marg Helgenberger when she shows up at the end of the bar in the skid row gin joint where he apparently spends much of his time.

“I thought with her maybe I could get it all back” Charles observes sadly via narration of his more than sexual attraction to the barroom vixen. Vicki helps inspire Charles to try to get his professional life back together. He tries to kick booze and when an editor tells him he’ll give him another shot if he can bring in a murder story.

As a newspaperman in frantic search of a comeback and a juicy scoop, Charles has some of the poignant, all-consuming desperation Jack Lemmon brought to Glengarry Glen Ross. Life for Charles doesn’t get any easier for our flopsweat-drenched protagonist once he stops drinking. On the contrary, withdrawal and the pressure to resist the temptation of drinking just makes everything harder. 

Then one tough night on the wagon our scoop-starved reporter stumbles upon the murder story of his dreams when he goes to a greasy spoon to read the paper and drink coffee and overhears what sounds unmistakably like proprietor Nikos Stano (Jon Polito) killing his wife in a jealous rage. 

As a human being, Charles is horrified. As a reporter, he is ecstatic but when he investigates the crime scene he makes two surprising discoveries. Charles doesn’t just know the woman the low-rent restauranteur strikes down in a fit of sexual jealousy, because she was cheating on him extensively and enthusiastically: he knows her in a biblical fashion.

That’s because Charles is just one of the many men the woman on the floor cheated on her husband with. That’s right, she’s Vicki, Charles’ sometimes girlfriend and according to her teary, overwhelmed husband, she’s been picking up bums and winos at bars for the purpose of humiliating her mortified hubby. 

When Charles sees that the woman Nikos is talking about is Vicki and she wakes up and calls his name he strangles her to death in a fit of sexual jealousy combined with cynical professional calculation. 

He’s got his murder story, all right. But he’s the one doing the murdering. A delighted Charles reads the story over the phone to a newspaper that most assuredly will not be employing Charles on a full-time basis, as it turns out he’s been narrating the events of the episode from inside a straight jacket inside a hospital for the criminally insane. 

Like so much of Tales From the Crypt, “Deadline” is prescient and quietly incisive in its portrayal of male fragility and masculinity at its most toxic. 

Two separate men commit a heinous crime against a sexually liberated, aggressive women in rapid succession because they cannot control her and her sexuality. And because they cannot control her they are intent on snuffing her out her life force so that she can never embarrass them again. 

“Deadline” works as well, if not better, as a character study than as a terror tale or fright fable. Jordan is terrific in the meaty lead role of a man deep into middle age trying and failing to keep up in a young man’s game. Helgenberger is equally good as a tough, cynical woman who has learned from brutal firsthand experience not to have faith in human nature.

There’s nothing supernatural about “Deadline”, or any of Hill’s fright fables. That’s part of what makes nasty nuggets like this special. Like “The Man Who Was Death” and “Cutting Cards” before it it’s a haunting cautionary warning about the dangers of letting pride and insecurity lead you down the road to hell. 

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