Tales From the Crypt, Season 3, Episode 11: "Split Second"

Gratuitous titillation in Tales From the Crypt? It happened!

Michelle Johnson had the terrible personal and professional misfortune to make her oft-naked debut in 1984’s Blame It on Rio, which was less a movie than a low-level criminal enterprise rooted in the sexual exploitation of an underaged girl. The notorious remake of a French (of course) farce was less filmmaking than low-level sex trafficking. I felt very dirty after watching the movie for my First and Last column for TCM Backlot. Hell, I’m feeling dirty just remembering that god-forsaken abomination. 

Stanley Donen’s first movie as a director or co-director, On the Town, made his name as a filmmaker of distinction. Blame It on Rio, Donen’s final film, disgraced that name but poor Johnson, a seventeen year old cast in the impossible role of a nubile teen nymphet who aggressively pursues a sexual relationship with family friend and old-ass man Michael Caine bore the worst of it. 

The upside to making a stain on the conscience of the entire film industry like Blame It on Rio, where you’re forced to vomit forth dialogue about how horny you must have felt as a baby when your current erotic fixation Michael Caine spanked you on your bottom during your christening is that it leaves ample room for improvement. 

There’s nowhere to go but up when your first film is an enduring humiliation for everyone involved. Michelle Johnson lead role as Liz Kelly-Dixon, the narrator and anti-heroine of the terrific and exceedingly brutal “Split Second” accordingly represents a big step up from Johnson’s notorious debut, even as it is every bit as rooted in her sexuality and willingness to do nudity. 

Johnson stars here as a hard-luck waitress who ends up working at a bar frequented by lumberjacks after a hardscrabble life full of bad decisions, poor choices and depressing one night stands with horrible men with unspeakable odors. Then one day Steve Dixon (Brion James), the profane but well-liked boss of the lumber camp brutishly defends her honor from the crude advances of one of any number of regrettable short-term trysts and almost instantly falls in love and lust with the gorgeous barmaid in tight jeans and midriff-bearing tops. 

As played by Brion James, the famously hideous tough guy character actor, Steve is ugly as sin. James, who specialized in playing henchmen and low-level heavies, looks like a rat-human hybrid with a huge rat nose, no chin and appalling bald mullet but his lumber boss is genuinely sweet to our protagonist at the beginning and rich enough to give her a life of relative comfort away from the sweaty, boozy advances of horny lumberjacks in a macho milieu where men outnumber the women by an insane amount, so she marries him. 

For the cynical and exhausted Liz, sex is purely transactional. She’s willing to trade her youth and sexiness for money and a nice house even if she cannot bring herself to pretend that she loves the gargoyle that she has married. 

The domestic life does not suit Liz, however. She gets bored easily and once married, Steve makes a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde like transformation from good boss and affable dude well-liked by his employees and crew to a wild-eyed, jealousy-crazed maniac willing to beat anyone who looks too long or too leeringly at Liz or gossips about her sordid and extensive sexual history with most of the men in her husband’s orbit half to death, if not further.

When James gets a murderous gleam in his eyes he is nothing short of terrifying. He’s a tremendously physical actor, a brute of a man, but it’s that crazed glint of pure rage, jealousy and hatred that really makes the character. It’s as if a light switches on and the beast comes out. 

not a handsome man.

Steve is so jealous that it ruins his marriage and destroys any chance at happiness. Liz loses interest in him quickly. To liven up her dreary life as the beauty to her husband’s beast she becomes erotically fixated on Ted (Billy Wirth), a prodigiously talented young lumberjack as gifted at chopping wood as he is dense, and he is very good at the art of lumber-jacking. 

The pouty, sinewy, muscular young stud with the delicate cheekbones is so good at swinging his axe that he doesn’t need to use an electric chainsaw; he can do just as well swinging his trusty axe, and boy does he know how to work his axe. Also, his penis. 

Liz and Ted enjoy some genuinely hot as well as narratively essential, nudity-filled, “It’s not TV, it’s HBO” sex until Steve finds out and attacks him in a violent rage, rendering him blind. 

Ted’s fellow lumberjacks are nevertheless eager for their now blind colleague to represent them in a woodcutting contest so they trick him into practicing his wood-cutting magic with an electric chainsaw this time through a tree with the apoplectic and soon to be vivisected Steve inside it. 

As the oblivious dope cuts his former employer into pieces blood spurts on his delighted angel face and everyone laughs and laughs and laughs at their asshole boss’ death by electric chainsaw, with our weary narrator on deck as the next human being to be divided into pieces by Ted’s trusty chainsaw. 

“Split Second” is one of those minor miracles that does just about everything right. The milieu of a lumberjack camp filled with evil, lustful and murderous men is vividly realized, the sex is hot and purposeful and Johnson and James are terrific as an odd couple that comes apart in the most literal as well as figurative sense. 

Highlander director and MTV veteran Russell Mulcahy does a great job with atmosphere and the climactic bloodbath is stomach-churningly graphic and unforgettable. There’s a psychological complexity to “Split Second” that registers just as strongly as the graphic and willfully excessive bloodshed. “Split Second” is Tales From the Crypt at its best, albeit in a more modest sense than episodes that broadcast their ambition where this is happy just to be a wonderfully warped macabre morsel about flannel-clad men doing very bad things with chainsaws. 

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