OK, I know I said I had a lot of new stuff on streaming I should probably get to, so naturally, that might make someone assume I would be reviewing the new Ron Howard movie over on Prime Video next. Instead, I watched something off one of my many Watchlists, something that I had been on the lookout for for a while now, and AMC+ finally dropped the original Creepshow anthology for me to see without paying a rental fee. Besides, I need to knock stuff off my different watchlists once in a while.
Granted, I knew Stephen King, here responsible for the screenplay, was also in the movie, but I didn’t know his son Joe Hill played the young boy in the opening and closing scenes until after I watched the movie.
Framed around a device where an angry father (80s horror mainstay Tom Atkins) berates his son (Hill) over the “crap” horror comic books the boy has, the movie sets the tone early. The father throws the comics into the garbage and from there, an animated version of the “Creep” from the old Creepshow comic book series comes along to act as a silent host to a series of tales written by King and directed by another horror icon, namely George Romero. King himself appears in the second story, the largely comedic “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” where he plays a cartoon character stupid-level sort of person. But there are actually famous faces in all of the stories. There’s a young Ed Harris in “Father’s Day;” Leslie Nielsen reminds everyone he played a lot of bad guys before he went into comedy as he threatens Ted Danson in “Something to Tide You Over;” Hal Holbrook can’t take much more of his awful drunken wife in the form of 80s scream queen Adrienne Barbeau in “The Crate;” and E.G. Marshall is an awful billionaire and germaphobe with a cockroach problem in “They’re Creeping Up on You.” Heck, make-up master Tom Savini appears as a garbage man in the, for lack of a better term, host segments.
However, as a horror anthology, it’s about as good as its best story and as bad as its worst. Fortunately, all of the stories here are fun and entertaining. These are five stories spread over two hours, so it’s not like there’s a lot of deep character work going on here, and each story has something of its own tone. “Father’s Day” just shows a zombie getting revenge on his awful family, though the dead man was no innocent victim himself when he died, and arguably Ed Harris’s character, newly married into the family, along with the cook don’t deserve what happens to them. “Jordy Verrill” is played for broad laughs, and even though King in the past hasn’t necessarily proven to be the best actor, he has some gift for this sort of slapstick comedy. Plus, it was a story here based on one of his own that wasn’t written strictly for the movie. The rest seem to be somewhere along the lines of something like the old Tales from the Crypt TV series where someone who is rather awful gets what he or she deserves by the time the story is over, often thanks to a paranormal or other sort of incident. Murderers are punished, and people who treat others poorly get what they deserve.
As for the general look, Romero and his crew opted to make the movie look as much like a comic book as they could with transition shots, colorful lights and backgrounds, and the various creatures since, well, some of them look more silly than scary. That could be due to the fact the effects haven’t aged well, but I doubt it. The undead father demanding cake in “Father’s Day” doesn’t look like Savini’s best work, so I am inclined to think that’s on purpose. And while I think the monster from “The Crate” that the cast and crew called “Fluffy” would have scared the crap out of me when this movie was new, today…he looks more cuddly even with those teeth. Again, given the look of the movie, I suspect that was done on purpose.
And as it is, this one was a lot of fun. Yeah, maybe don’t watch the last one if cockroaches make you uncomfortable, but this one largely worked as what felt to me like light-hearted horror. It’s a movie where a dumb farmer thinks $200 is a lot of money. It’s a movie where a henpecked university professor daydreams of murdering his emotionally abusive wife to the general applause of everyone. It’s a movie where an angry boy will get his hands on a working voodoo doll. Basically, it’s a movie that acts as a tribute to a beloved comic book series that was probably aimed at younger readers. To that end, it’s not exactly a masterpiece of modern horror cinema, but it sure is fun.
Grade: B+
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