DVD Review: CREEPSHOW (1982)

Because The Prezzies don't have ENOUGH topics to cover on this site (Reviews, Mini-Reviews, Actor Spotlights, Awards Speculation, Retro Awards, Anticipated Releases), there will now be the occasional DVD Review here. I have almost 250 DVD movies, and about 30 television seasons, and lately have been trolling Half Price Books for older clearance discs at $2-3 each. The reviews will mostly cover the film itself, since they are older, many younger people may have not seen them, but we'll discuss the Special Features if they apply or are noteworthy. Today, we will take a look at the 1982 camp horror classic, Creepshow.



Creepshow

Released: November 12, 1982

Box Office: $21 million
(Ranked 37th of 1982)

Starring: Hal Holbrook, Leslie Nielsen, Adrienne Barbeau, E.G. Marshall, Ted Danson, Fritz Weaver, Ed Harris, Stephen King

Director: George A. Romero

DVD Issue: 1999

Grade: B



Stephen King and George A. Romero's Creepshow is perhaps the most well-known portmanteau in horror cinema. Grossing a modest $21 million in a 1982 era dominated by E.T., it's success greenlighted the likes of future "tales of terror" popular in the 1980s, such as The Twilight Zone Movie, King's Cat Eye, and Tales From The Darkside. It, along with the cheap double features of the sixties and seventies, inspired Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez to make Grindhouse (Eli Roth's short segment 'Thanksgiving' in the film even uses part of the Creepshow score).

But while Creepshow may have helped revived the genre of anthology horror, movies that pieced together several unrelated tales of the macabre into one feature film, the United Kingdom had quite a run with these type of tales at least a full two decades before that.

One of the first was Dead of Night in 1948, which influenced many radio programs and future television adaptations at the time. The genre picked up in the late sixties and seventies with such fare as Dr. Terror's House Of Horrors and The Vault Of Horror. The most famous of these was 1972's Tales From The Crypt, which later lent its name to the HBO series and its run of knockoffs. The 1972 version starred Joan Collins and Peter Cushing, and featured a memorably stirring tale involving a tunnel of razors and a German Shepherd that can be seen as a precursor to today's Saw franchise.

Creepshow is all about tongue-in-cheek camp. Romero uses comic book fonts to segue from one tale to another, and often implements it into the stories themselves. This gives the film a playful vibe that many films in the 'grunge' era would use 10 years later. King adapts five stories, two from previously published short works, and three written exclusively for the screen. They range from zombies to aliens to (gulp) bugs.

The first two are obviously the weakest, but both have their guilty pleasures. In Father's Day, a demented older woman and her snobbish relatives (one played by a 31-year-old, pre-The Right Stuff Ed Harris) are murdered one-by-one by the abusive father she had killed seven years earlier, now a zombie out for his "Father's Day cake". In The Lonesome Death Of Jody Verrill, King himself plays the dim-witted titular character, who finds a meteorite that turns everything it touches into a grassy substance. King's performance is majorly ostentatious, but engrossingly fun to watch at the same time.

Something To Tide You Over starts off good, albeit without much 'horror' element, but then loses its steam at the end. Leslie Nielsen, fresh off Airplane! and the original Prom Night, devises a murder plot against his cheating wife and her lover Harry (Ted Danson, with Cheers in its first season). He forces them to be buried in sand up to their neck and eventually drown when the tide comes in. Nielsen's Richard takes glee in his set-up, but the segment soon spirals into a zombie revenge plot.

The best, longest and most realized segment is The Crate, based off of a King short story. Hal Holbrook (All The President's Men, Into The Wild) stars as Henry, a college professor who loathes his brash, foul-mouthed wife Billie (early 80s sexpot Adrienne Barbeau). When Dexter Stanley (longtime character actor Fritz Weaver), a colleague of his, finds a box under the laboratory stairs that contains a man-eating primate, Henry seizes this opportunity to put Billie away once and for all. The plot may sound stupid, but unlike the previous three stories, The Crate is actually quite suspenseful and holds a steady pace the entire segment.

Finally we have They're Creeping Up On You, which for me personally, was almost impossible to watch. E.G. Marshall goes to town as a rich millionaire germaphobe with a soulless attitude and a fear of cockroaches. I have my own major fear of certain insects, not so much the cockroaches themselves but seeing their bodies up close (which is why I don't own The Fly, Mimic, Joe's Apartment etc) . So suffice to say, the whole story revolving around his eventual demise by the deed of many, many cockroaches left me very, very uneasy.

The whole film has the fun and charisma of laughably dated makeup/effects by Tom Savini (Friday The 13th, Dawn Of The Dead) and over-the-top acting. But in a way, these kinds of films are long gone and sort of missed. While Creepshow may look garish compared to some of the best special effect efforts of our time, it was a labor of love. Many of the features we see today that look cheap are effectively because they were made strictly for money and a job. Creepshow may be frightening, but it has a lot of heart, something many horror films are missing in this generation.