TV Reviews : ‘The Tell Tale Heart’ a Shivering Bravo Show

Want to curl up with a genuine Halloween nightcap after the amateur ghouls and pranksters have gone to bed? Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Tell Tale Heart,� unmasks the witches and goblins of the human mind in a shivering tale of madness and murder. It’s on the Bravo cable channel at 8 tonight.

The first of three literary theatrical specials scheduled for this fall on the network’s “Texaco Performing Arts Showcase,� “The Tell Tale Heart� chillingly renders Poe’s mastery of the first-person narrative and enjoys a tour de force performance by Steven Berkoff as the demented narrator/murderer.

Like Poe’s 1843 story, in which an insane man vainly tries to persuade authorities that he’s abundantly sane, the production draws you into a world of torment that culminates in the narrator killing and dismembering an old man living in his house.

The narrator didn’t hate the old man, but he had to kill him because he was tormented by the sight of the old man’s “vulture eye, a pale blue eye with a film over it.�

Berkoff’s performance stretches the confessional format to its theatrical limits. It takes some initial adjusting, but it’s exhilarating in its mannerisms, charged with a crazed, maniacal gleam.

Berkoff (whom moviegoers may remember as the bad guy in “Beverly Hills Cop� and “Rambo�) rolls his eyes, veers his voice from one deranged register to another and mimes his ghastly deed with terrifying vocal effects--once assuming the growly, gurgly sound of a hand saw screeching its bloody way through his victim’s leg.

When the soundtrack and the madman’s ears fill with the “low, dull, quick sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton,� it becomes the beating of the dead man’s heart. We wonder too: Is it actually the victim’s watch ticking under those floorboards or is it the heart of our terrified narrator? Poe, after all, with vivid assistance from Berkoff and director John Carlow, has also spun a case study in self-destruction and suicide.

So Happy Halloween, shrouded momentarily in the mystery and terror of madness.