Original Scaredate: June 21, 1989
Director: Tom Holland
Writer: Michael McDowell
Starring: Amanda Plummer, Stephen Shellen, Lisa Figus, John Kassir
Quick Kill: A gold-digging lothario's wedding night gives him more than he bargained for.
Review: We open outside the home of young heiress Peggy (Plummer) as she gets ready to leave on her honeymoon with Charles (Shellen). Charles is taken aside by Aunt Edith (Figus), who tells Charles that she knows that he only married Peggy because he wants to sponge off of the young woman's inheritance money. Charles responds venomously that this is what Edith has been doing for years.
The half-happy couple soon runs into a heavy rainstorm, and a tree across the road. Charles is reluctant to get out and move the tree, since he doesn't want to get wet (a real tough guy), but Peggy convinces him. When Peggy opens the glove box to look for a flashlight, a gun tumbles out, though both parties claim ignorance of where it could have come from. During his tree-moving adventure, Charles spies an old mansion nearby. When he gets back into the car, the keys are missing. Peggy says he must have taken them with him and lost them.
Unable to travel farther, they hoof it through the rain to the abandoned house, where Peggy conveniently finds a key under a potted plant. Once inside, Charles lights a fire (where there's a nasty looking axe on the mantle) and strips down to get his clothes dry. He cajoles Peggy to join him, but since they haven't been intimate yet, she's shy, and changes into her nightgown in another room.
When she returns, Charles puts on his best seductive moves, and soon Peggy is ready to make with the sexy-times, as long as they can find a bed in the house. She wants their (and her) first time to be "perfect". Upstairs, she disappears into a side room and changes into some skimpy lingerie, which seems to give Charles pause, and some genuine desire. Cue the loooong, grandfather clock shattering love scene, followed by Peggy's joy that they've made a child.
Charles wakes up alone, but hears noises outside. Looking out, he sees Peggy jumping into the arms of another man. Hiding on the staircase, he sees them have sex on the couch in front of the fireplace. As the new man sleeps, Peggy gives him the same speech about having made a child that she gave Charles, and proceeds to hack him up with the axe. Charles rushes downstairs to try and stop her, but runs right through them. They're ghosts! Charles realizes that this must be a vision of Peggy's parents on their wedding night.
Charles jolts awake again, and this time Peggy comes into the room with the axe. She says that their love was perfect, and just like her mother did to her father, she's going to kill him before it has time to turn sour. In a lovely bit of writing, Charles says she shouldn't kill him because he never loved her in the first place, and only wanted the money. He then pulls the gun from earlier on her. She says she knows he loves her because he could never kill her. He tries, but the gun just clicks. He looks over to see the bullets lined up in a neat row on the night stand as the axe begins to fall.
There's a short scene where Peggy and Aunt Edith discuss the baby girl who is on the way, and how she'll eventually need a man too, and we fade back to the crypt.
"Lover Come Hack to Me" has some points in its favor. At first, the acting seems a little over the top, but given the romance novel/soap opera vibe of the episode, I think this must have been intentional. Shellen is the standout performer of the episode, having to be by turns slimy, charming, angry, and afraid. The sly venom of his telling off of Aunt Edith in the opening scene is really an outstanding piece of character work. Plummer plays innocent and crazy equally well, and has some excellent moments throughout the episode.
Tom Holland (Fright Night, Child's Play) isn't given a lot to play with as a director, but there are some touches that stand out. During the climax (ha, ha) of the love scene, Peggy's cries crack the face of the grandfather clock. During the ghostly dream sequence, Charles passes the clock, and the face is fine. It's noticeable, and what at first glance seems to be a continuity error, is actually a hint that things aren't what they seem. There's also a shot where Peggy's mother rises from the couch, mouth dripping blood from kissing the man she's just mutilated, that is a beautifully shot piece of grotesquerie.
McDowell's (Beetlejuice) script is strong, if a little exposition heavy toward the end. The twists the story takes kept me interested. And as stated above, when Charles tries to escape death by admitting his true motives, it's a surprising and clever bit of storytelling.
My biggest fault with the episode is the Peggy dressing up sexy/love scene sequence. It seems to go on forever, and feels like it is mostly there to fill time. While noisy, it's pretty chaste, and it seems like the point of it (Peggy isn't the mousy girl she seemed to be) was made plain quickly. It just feels like a misstep in what is otherwise a fairly tight story.
Overall, this was a good, but not great entry of Tales, but a definite step up from the previous episode.
Best Death: Charles' death by axe is mostly off-screen (we see the axe fall, but not much of it hitting the body), but the blood-splatter shots resulting from it are among the gorier sights of the show so far.
Creeper Corner: Fellas: Some Shellen butt shots. Ladies: Plummer in lingerie.
Cryptkeeper's Line of the Week: "You know by now who's here to feed your fear."
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