Ahh, Creepshow! One of the best horror anthologies to come out of the 1980’s. It’s not perfect, but is immensely enjoyable if you’re into this sort of movie. It brings us the combined talents of Stephen King and George Romero as they homage to the E.C. comics of the 1950’s with 5 different stories of terror. In some ways, this can be seen as more of a comedy than a horror movie. Granted, it does have its scary moments (a hand coming out of a grave is always good for a jolt), but it is presented in such an over the top fashion that you have to thank both King and Romero for not taking the stories in the film too seriously.
As I write this review, filmmaker Eli Roth is having a two week festival of his favorite movies at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles. This film was playing on a double bill with the 1980 film, “Mother’s Day.” I missed that one unfortunetly, but it was probably because I was a lot more excited about seeing this one. I vividly remember seeing the trailer for this movie in the theater when I went to see (and again cry at) “E.T.” I remember that skull you see at the top of the movie, and my brother saying,
“Whoa!”
The trailer was amusing and funny, at least until those cockroaches came in. I had to cover my eyes at that point. Granted, it would years and years before I would have the stomach (let alone the time) to check this one out. Anthology movies and series like “Masters Of Horrors” are always intriguing to me because they seemed to be filled with so many possibilities. Going from one story to the next, you are eager to see where the next story or chapter takes you. The only downside with anthologies is that there is usually the weak story among the whole bunch that can weigh down the whole enterprise, or have you comparing it to the other stories which makes the weak one seem even worse in comparison. “Creepshow” may have some of those problems, but it doesn’t make it any less enjoyable to sit through.
The movie opens with a prologue with a father (Tom Atkins) berating his young son (Joe King, Stephen King’s son) for reading these “crappy” horror comics. The kick of the scene comes from the son calling out his dad for the hypocrite he is when he points out that it’s a lot better “than the magazines you read.” You can’t help but think this kid’s upstanding dad has a wide variety of porno mags hidden where his wife can’t find them. It’s funny how we see fathers not wanting their kids to read “crap,” and then they sit in a recliner with a can of beer boasting of how God made fathers. Poor schmuck.
The movie then goes into the its first story entitled “Father’s Day,” a story of revenge. The patriarch of a family was murdered for being an annoying prick for demanding his cake to be brought out to him, and now he’s come back from the dead to get that tasty cake that has long been denied to him. Of all the stories in the movie, I consider this one the weakest because it is very short and almost threatens to be pointless. It does however succeed in defining the look and feel for the rest of the movie. The acting for the most part is over the top, and there is a fantastic use of colors that dominates the entire movie and gives it that pulp feel. If Dario Argento had ever created a comic book, I’m pretty sure it would look something like this, but darker.
The great thing I got out of watching “Father’s Day” is that it allows us to see Ed Harris in a role where he is loosened up. Ed is a great actor who plays mostly deadly serious men in the movies he does, and one day he will certainly get an Oscar for playing one. But here, we get to see him get his boogie on with his wife while dancing to some crappy disco music that somehow sneaked its way into a 1980’s movie. You listen to that music, and you’d figure that it should have died a fiery death before the 70’s ended. No such luck.
The next story is both funny and sad, and it’s called “The Lonesome Death Of Jordy Verrill.” It features Stephen King in one of the few acting performances you will ever see him in, as the title character who is a dimwit farmer who discovers a meteor that has crashed into his back yard. Jordy gets excited at the prospect of selling this meteor to the local college for a handsome profit, and he tries to salvage it, but breaks it into two in the process. A liquid from the meteor ends up seeing into the barren ground of the farm, and everything it touches starts growing plant life that is so green. It also grows off anything that touches it, including Mr. Verrill himself. Seeing King turn into a bush basically is frightening and morbidly amusing. Stephen King will probably admit that he is a better writer than an actor, but you can also say that he is a better actor than he is a director (“Maximum Overdrive” anyone?). In the end, he is perfectly cast as the seemingly brainless farmer, and his over the top performance fits both the story he is in as well as the film itself.
After that, we get “Something To Tide You Over,” and this one was my favorite of all the stories in the movie. It features Leslie Neilsen before his image was permanently altered by “The Naked Gun” movies as a millionaire husband who takes his revenge on Harry (Ted Danson), the man who is having an affair with his wife. The way he lures Danson’s character out to the beach and gets him to bury himself in the sand up to his neck is priceless, and you can say that there is a bit of “The Vanishing” in this story as we have a man willing to do anything to find out the fate of his loved one. Danson’s fate, being stuck in the sand as the tide rushes over him is a frightening and unnerving one. You feel stuck in the sand with him, and it shows how fiendishly clever both Stephen King and George Romero are at exploiting what we fear the most and yet we keep watching.
Watching this segment today may seem a bit weird for some as Leslie Nielsen will now be forever known as Lt. Frank Drebin of Police Squad, and Ted Danson is still best known for his work in the brilliant sitcom “Cheers.” Seeing them in a serious story (albeit a highly exaggerated one) may be hard for some, but these actors do have their serious chops as well as their comic ones, and both serve them well here. Leslie is a particular hoot to watch here as a man so confident of his deviant plan of revenge, yet quickly haunted by the possibility of his crimes coming back to do him in. Nothing can stay buried forever.
Next we have “The Crate” which features Hal Holbrook (recently nominated for “Into The Wild”) as a Professor at a New England college who is saddled with an eternally inebriated bitch of a wife (Adrienne Barbeau) who constantly embarrasses him and herself in front of anybody who happens to be watching. Hal plays Henry Northup, and he is a coward who doesn’t have the cojones to stand up to his abusive wife. But then a colleague of his at the college and a janitor discover a crate beneath the stairs that has not been opened for decades. It turns out to contain a monster that eats human beings whole. After Henry hears of this from his colleague, he sneaks sleeping pills into his drink to knock him out for awhile, and he concocts a plan to lure his abusive wife over to the crate.
Hal Holbrook is great at making you feel sorry for his character even while we berate him for being a wimp for not standing up to that woman who somehow got married to him. Adrienne Barbeau gives a one-note performance as a humongous bitch who has no real redeeming features whatsoever. In the end, this is not too big a criticism because Adrienne (along with everyone else in the movie) is given a one-dimensional character to play. The characters are not meant to be complex in the way they handle themselves, and they are here to represent different types of people who meet their own destined fate.
Then comes the last story of the movie, the appropriately titled “They’re Creeping Up On You.” This is the one I had the hardest time sitting through, and I doubt it will be easy for you either if you have an intense phobia of bugs. E.G. Marshall plays Upson Pratt, a thoughtlessly hateful bigot who has no sympathy for anyone other than himself. He gleefully takes delight in the suffering of others, and lives in a completely sterile apartment that makes him look like he’s a doctor. But his problem now is with the bugs in his apartment, specifically cockroaches. They keep popping up out of nowhere, and their numbers keep growing and growing…I found myself looking at my shoes a lot during this segment, and that reminds me that I do need to gets some new shoes pronto!
I remember watching one of those “scariest moments in movies” episodes that was on the Bravo channel. They featured the cockroach segment of “Creepshow” in it, and it turned out that the segment was really a more socially conscious piece than people realized. This is after all a George Romero picture, and whose “Dead” movies are loaded with social commentary. The whole point of the “Creeping” segment they said was to look at bigotry, and how what we fear the most we end up empowering. We invite our fears to mess with us, and sometimes they eat us whole. Suffice to say, this is very much an anti-racism piece, and themetatically speaking, it’s the strongest of the movie. E.G. Marshall gives a brilliantly zany performance as a man who cannot control the world around him any longer, and who could never really control it in the first place. You reap what you sow Upson!
Eli Roth had programs for his festival at the New Beverly Cinema entitled “The Greats Of Roth,” and in it he summed up this “criminally underrated” movie perfectly:
“It’s amazing to see how many comic book and graphic novel adaptations today are praised for getting the ‘look’ of the comic perfect, and nobody ever seems to mention this film. This was the first time that Romero was really surrounded with a star studded cast, and you see Romero, Stephen King, and Tom Savini all coming together to create one of the most visually spectacular and fun horror films of all time. They set out to recreate the look and feel of the old E.C. Comics and nailed it perfectly.”
“Creepshow” does indeed one of the most deliriously entertaining horror movies ever made, and it is in it’s own way, a stunning visual achievement on what must have been a low budget. There were many other movies to come out of this that tried for the same look (Ang Lee’s “Hulk” was one of them), but none of them succeeded at it quite like this. This is just a fun fun fun movie for people who dig this sort of thing. To see it on the big screen was a real treat.
I also want to point out the giddily creepy movie score from John Harrison, who also did the score for Romero’s “Day Of The Dead.” It is largely an electronic score, and it suits the material perfectly, creating a creepy feeling without taking everything too seriously. For anyone looking for this soundtrack, you can find it at La La Land Records at www.lalalandrecords.com.
I think “Creepshow” made more of an influence on the genre of horror than more people realize. After this film, you had “Tales From The Darkside,” “Tales From The Crypt” on HBO, “John Carpenter’s Body Bags” on Showtime, and not to mention several new incarnations of “The Twilight Zone.” Now, we have (or do we still have it?) “Masters Of Horror” on Showtime which brings all these great horror directors together for an hour of terror each week. At the time “Creepshow” was originally released, horror anthologies were not that big a thing. It’s influence on these types of films can be felt so subtly that you almost don’t notice it.
Then of course came the obligatory sequels. “Creepshow 2” I have not seen all of, but it pales in comparison to the original in regards to stories, star power, and it reeks of a low low budget that is typical of filmmaking in Toronto, Canada. It is worth seeing for “The Raft” which is based on one of Stephen King’s scariest short stories from “Skeletion Crew.” That is, if you can get past the horrible acting. I haven’t seen “Creepshow 3,” but it was a direct to DVD release so I imagine that it’s unimaginably bad. Sounds like a sequel in name only actually.
Now there’s going to be a “Creepshow 4” and a “Creepshow” remake of sorts from Warner Brothers. Actually, it’s not so much a remake as it is a new set of stories, or so I have heard. My hope is that George Romero and Stephen King end up working on that one so that we can at least expect something that’s worth watching. It would be fun to see another “Creepshow” movie, but let’s hope that it doesn’t get pillaged like all the other horror franchises of our past. It’s bad enough that they’ve decided to remake “A Nightmare On Elm Street.” Blasphemy!
Someone get me one of those voodoo dolls!
**** out of ****
As I write this review, filmmaker Eli Roth is having a two week festival of his favorite movies at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles. This film was playing on a double bill with the 1980 film, “Mother’s Day.” I missed that one unfortunetly, but it was probably because I was a lot more excited about seeing this one. I vividly remember seeing the trailer for this movie in the theater when I went to see (and again cry at) “E.T.” I remember that skull you see at the top of the movie, and my brother saying,
“Whoa!”
The trailer was amusing and funny, at least until those cockroaches came in. I had to cover my eyes at that point. Granted, it would years and years before I would have the stomach (let alone the time) to check this one out. Anthology movies and series like “Masters Of Horrors” are always intriguing to me because they seemed to be filled with so many possibilities. Going from one story to the next, you are eager to see where the next story or chapter takes you. The only downside with anthologies is that there is usually the weak story among the whole bunch that can weigh down the whole enterprise, or have you comparing it to the other stories which makes the weak one seem even worse in comparison. “Creepshow” may have some of those problems, but it doesn’t make it any less enjoyable to sit through.
The movie opens with a prologue with a father (Tom Atkins) berating his young son (Joe King, Stephen King’s son) for reading these “crappy” horror comics. The kick of the scene comes from the son calling out his dad for the hypocrite he is when he points out that it’s a lot better “than the magazines you read.” You can’t help but think this kid’s upstanding dad has a wide variety of porno mags hidden where his wife can’t find them. It’s funny how we see fathers not wanting their kids to read “crap,” and then they sit in a recliner with a can of beer boasting of how God made fathers. Poor schmuck.
The movie then goes into the its first story entitled “Father’s Day,” a story of revenge. The patriarch of a family was murdered for being an annoying prick for demanding his cake to be brought out to him, and now he’s come back from the dead to get that tasty cake that has long been denied to him. Of all the stories in the movie, I consider this one the weakest because it is very short and almost threatens to be pointless. It does however succeed in defining the look and feel for the rest of the movie. The acting for the most part is over the top, and there is a fantastic use of colors that dominates the entire movie and gives it that pulp feel. If Dario Argento had ever created a comic book, I’m pretty sure it would look something like this, but darker.
The great thing I got out of watching “Father’s Day” is that it allows us to see Ed Harris in a role where he is loosened up. Ed is a great actor who plays mostly deadly serious men in the movies he does, and one day he will certainly get an Oscar for playing one. But here, we get to see him get his boogie on with his wife while dancing to some crappy disco music that somehow sneaked its way into a 1980’s movie. You listen to that music, and you’d figure that it should have died a fiery death before the 70’s ended. No such luck.
The next story is both funny and sad, and it’s called “The Lonesome Death Of Jordy Verrill.” It features Stephen King in one of the few acting performances you will ever see him in, as the title character who is a dimwit farmer who discovers a meteor that has crashed into his back yard. Jordy gets excited at the prospect of selling this meteor to the local college for a handsome profit, and he tries to salvage it, but breaks it into two in the process. A liquid from the meteor ends up seeing into the barren ground of the farm, and everything it touches starts growing plant life that is so green. It also grows off anything that touches it, including Mr. Verrill himself. Seeing King turn into a bush basically is frightening and morbidly amusing. Stephen King will probably admit that he is a better writer than an actor, but you can also say that he is a better actor than he is a director (“Maximum Overdrive” anyone?). In the end, he is perfectly cast as the seemingly brainless farmer, and his over the top performance fits both the story he is in as well as the film itself.
After that, we get “Something To Tide You Over,” and this one was my favorite of all the stories in the movie. It features Leslie Neilsen before his image was permanently altered by “The Naked Gun” movies as a millionaire husband who takes his revenge on Harry (Ted Danson), the man who is having an affair with his wife. The way he lures Danson’s character out to the beach and gets him to bury himself in the sand up to his neck is priceless, and you can say that there is a bit of “The Vanishing” in this story as we have a man willing to do anything to find out the fate of his loved one. Danson’s fate, being stuck in the sand as the tide rushes over him is a frightening and unnerving one. You feel stuck in the sand with him, and it shows how fiendishly clever both Stephen King and George Romero are at exploiting what we fear the most and yet we keep watching.
Watching this segment today may seem a bit weird for some as Leslie Nielsen will now be forever known as Lt. Frank Drebin of Police Squad, and Ted Danson is still best known for his work in the brilliant sitcom “Cheers.” Seeing them in a serious story (albeit a highly exaggerated one) may be hard for some, but these actors do have their serious chops as well as their comic ones, and both serve them well here. Leslie is a particular hoot to watch here as a man so confident of his deviant plan of revenge, yet quickly haunted by the possibility of his crimes coming back to do him in. Nothing can stay buried forever.
Next we have “The Crate” which features Hal Holbrook (recently nominated for “Into The Wild”) as a Professor at a New England college who is saddled with an eternally inebriated bitch of a wife (Adrienne Barbeau) who constantly embarrasses him and herself in front of anybody who happens to be watching. Hal plays Henry Northup, and he is a coward who doesn’t have the cojones to stand up to his abusive wife. But then a colleague of his at the college and a janitor discover a crate beneath the stairs that has not been opened for decades. It turns out to contain a monster that eats human beings whole. After Henry hears of this from his colleague, he sneaks sleeping pills into his drink to knock him out for awhile, and he concocts a plan to lure his abusive wife over to the crate.
Hal Holbrook is great at making you feel sorry for his character even while we berate him for being a wimp for not standing up to that woman who somehow got married to him. Adrienne Barbeau gives a one-note performance as a humongous bitch who has no real redeeming features whatsoever. In the end, this is not too big a criticism because Adrienne (along with everyone else in the movie) is given a one-dimensional character to play. The characters are not meant to be complex in the way they handle themselves, and they are here to represent different types of people who meet their own destined fate.
Then comes the last story of the movie, the appropriately titled “They’re Creeping Up On You.” This is the one I had the hardest time sitting through, and I doubt it will be easy for you either if you have an intense phobia of bugs. E.G. Marshall plays Upson Pratt, a thoughtlessly hateful bigot who has no sympathy for anyone other than himself. He gleefully takes delight in the suffering of others, and lives in a completely sterile apartment that makes him look like he’s a doctor. But his problem now is with the bugs in his apartment, specifically cockroaches. They keep popping up out of nowhere, and their numbers keep growing and growing…I found myself looking at my shoes a lot during this segment, and that reminds me that I do need to gets some new shoes pronto!
I remember watching one of those “scariest moments in movies” episodes that was on the Bravo channel. They featured the cockroach segment of “Creepshow” in it, and it turned out that the segment was really a more socially conscious piece than people realized. This is after all a George Romero picture, and whose “Dead” movies are loaded with social commentary. The whole point of the “Creeping” segment they said was to look at bigotry, and how what we fear the most we end up empowering. We invite our fears to mess with us, and sometimes they eat us whole. Suffice to say, this is very much an anti-racism piece, and themetatically speaking, it’s the strongest of the movie. E.G. Marshall gives a brilliantly zany performance as a man who cannot control the world around him any longer, and who could never really control it in the first place. You reap what you sow Upson!
Eli Roth had programs for his festival at the New Beverly Cinema entitled “The Greats Of Roth,” and in it he summed up this “criminally underrated” movie perfectly:
“It’s amazing to see how many comic book and graphic novel adaptations today are praised for getting the ‘look’ of the comic perfect, and nobody ever seems to mention this film. This was the first time that Romero was really surrounded with a star studded cast, and you see Romero, Stephen King, and Tom Savini all coming together to create one of the most visually spectacular and fun horror films of all time. They set out to recreate the look and feel of the old E.C. Comics and nailed it perfectly.”
“Creepshow” does indeed one of the most deliriously entertaining horror movies ever made, and it is in it’s own way, a stunning visual achievement on what must have been a low budget. There were many other movies to come out of this that tried for the same look (Ang Lee’s “Hulk” was one of them), but none of them succeeded at it quite like this. This is just a fun fun fun movie for people who dig this sort of thing. To see it on the big screen was a real treat.
I also want to point out the giddily creepy movie score from John Harrison, who also did the score for Romero’s “Day Of The Dead.” It is largely an electronic score, and it suits the material perfectly, creating a creepy feeling without taking everything too seriously. For anyone looking for this soundtrack, you can find it at La La Land Records at www.lalalandrecords.com.
I think “Creepshow” made more of an influence on the genre of horror than more people realize. After this film, you had “Tales From The Darkside,” “Tales From The Crypt” on HBO, “John Carpenter’s Body Bags” on Showtime, and not to mention several new incarnations of “The Twilight Zone.” Now, we have (or do we still have it?) “Masters Of Horror” on Showtime which brings all these great horror directors together for an hour of terror each week. At the time “Creepshow” was originally released, horror anthologies were not that big a thing. It’s influence on these types of films can be felt so subtly that you almost don’t notice it.
Then of course came the obligatory sequels. “Creepshow 2” I have not seen all of, but it pales in comparison to the original in regards to stories, star power, and it reeks of a low low budget that is typical of filmmaking in Toronto, Canada. It is worth seeing for “The Raft” which is based on one of Stephen King’s scariest short stories from “Skeletion Crew.” That is, if you can get past the horrible acting. I haven’t seen “Creepshow 3,” but it was a direct to DVD release so I imagine that it’s unimaginably bad. Sounds like a sequel in name only actually.
Now there’s going to be a “Creepshow 4” and a “Creepshow” remake of sorts from Warner Brothers. Actually, it’s not so much a remake as it is a new set of stories, or so I have heard. My hope is that George Romero and Stephen King end up working on that one so that we can at least expect something that’s worth watching. It would be fun to see another “Creepshow” movie, but let’s hope that it doesn’t get pillaged like all the other horror franchises of our past. It’s bad enough that they’ve decided to remake “A Nightmare On Elm Street.” Blasphemy!
Someone get me one of those voodoo dolls!
**** out of ****
What a great review.
This is one of the classics.
Also a very funny trailer from what I remember and a very cool comic book that came with it.