A practical note: if, instead of importing crash.py, I do a json.loads, with a few extra transformations:

with open("crash.py") as f: holo_table={tuple(int(z) for z in k.split(', ')):v for k,v in json.loads(f.readlines()[0][13:].replace('(','"').replace(')','"')).iteritems()}

--the whole data structure loads in a jiffy.

Makes me wonder why this roundabout approach is so much more efficient than the native parsing.