King of Halloween '22: Creepshow 2 (1987)
Without Romero, the magic's gone.
Just as I did last October, I’ll be tackling one unseen-by-me Stephen King adaptation each week leading up to Halloween.
When I did this Stephen King series last year, I started with Creepshow, a movie I instantly fell in love with and proclaimed would one day be my son’s first R-rated horror flick. I like including at least one anthology in my Halloween viewing rotation, as it dovetails with my usual October habit of reading one horror short collection, usually by King (this year, I’m finally reading Nightmares and Dreamscapes). So, it made sense to start this year’s series with Creepshow 2.
After seeing it, maybe I should have gone with Cat’s Eye.
The original Creepshow is a delightful mix of horror and comedy that pulses with the personalities of its creators, screenwriter King and director George Romero. It has a gorgeous design right out of the horror comics that inspired it, the dialogue is unmistakably King, and the stories bounce back and forth between creature feature, sci-fi horror and morality tale without ever losing the bead on its very specific tone. It’s a perfect Halloween movie.
Released five years later, Creepshow 2 is a decidedly cheaper affair. It was produced by New World Features at half the budget of the original, and Romero was replaced by director Michael Gornick. The swap makes sense in theory; Gornick was the director of photography on the first film, as well as a long-time collaborator of Romero’s, and he’d previously adapted the King short story “Word Processor of the Gods” for the Tales from the Darkside TV series.
But whether it was the lack of budget or Gornick just didn’t have Romero’s sense of vision, Creepshow 2 doesn’t make much of an attempt to match the colorful vibe of its predecessor. Rather than the atmospheric interstitial sequences of the original, in which a ghoul urges a young boy to take revenge for having his comics thrown out, there’s a confusing live-action prologue with Tom Savini in a really bad Halloween mask and then a series of cheaply animated episodes that look like rejects from a bad Saturday morning cartoon. The tales themselves have the flat, dank look of most cheap ‘80s horror movies. Maybe the producers wanted this to feel darker and more sinister or just wanted to do something more explicitly R-rated (which would explain the gratuitous nudity). Whatever the case, Creepshow 2 might bear a faint resemblance to the first film, but its vibe is gone.
Romero wrote the screenplay, based on three Stephen King stories, only one of which had been published. The original plan was to do five stories, as in the first film, but the budget necessitated hacking two. That leads to the film’s next problem: these stories are all too long, stretching out for about 20 minutes apiece, when a good anthology knows to let its stories get in, deliver their jolts, and then move on to the next. King’s absence in the screenwriting department is also noticeable, as the dialogue that feels so genuinely his in the first film (“meteor shit!”) is stilted and lifeless here.
As with the first film, it probably makes sense to break this retrospective down into segments.
“Old Chief Woodenhead”
It’s never a good sign when the primary question you ask during a story is, “is this racist?” But Creepshow 2 kicks things off with not only its weakest entry, but also one that feels a bit cringey, as modern kids would say.
George Kennedy stars as a salt-of-the-earth shopkeeper in a dying southwest town. He’s urged to close it since business is slight, but the local tribes appreciate his commitment to their community, even stopping by to gift him with some precious cultural artifacts. They don’t seem bothered by the stereotypical wooden statue outside his shop. When the shopkeeper and his wife are robbed and then killed by three local ruffians, their deaths are avenged by the supernatural statue.
I could see this being an effective early King short story that wove its themes of cultural stewardship and ancient myths with suspense and short bursts of violence. But then again, there’s likely a reason why King never finished the story, and maybe he also realized it was kind of a whiff. The entry is a 20-minute slasher flick without the tension or payoffs; most of its kills happen off screen, and the makeup/costuming on the actor playing the sentient statue is laughably bad.
It doesn’t help that the pacing is completely off. The short spends way too much time setting up the shopkeeper’s plight and relationship with the tribal residents. Creepshow stories tend to be morality tales, and the setup originally appears to be that the shopkeeper and his wife will betray the tribe and then be punished for it. But when the robbers show up, it’s genuinely surprising to realize the story hasn’t even arrived at its proper setup yet.
Kennedy knows to play this straight (similar to the way his Naked Gun co-star Leslie Nielsen did in the first film, in a much better story), and his sweet and sincere shopkeeper initially seems an interesting central character. The three young actors playing the robbers, unfortunately, are less engaging. They’re loud, vulgar and abrasive, and the robbery scene itself is mean in a way that feels at odds with the spirit of this enterprise. I guess that, in concept, it’s meant to make the villains so reprehensible that we root for their eventual deaths, but the best slasher movies work when there’s at least once sympathetic character. Also, the actual scare scenes are so rushed that whatever payoff Gornick was hoping for never arrives.
In the end, Old Chief Woodenhead kills the bad guys, scalping the final one and justice is set right. But ugh, what a slog to start things off with.
“The Raft”
The best entry in the film, and it’s based on one of King’s gnarliest short stories. In this story, four college students head off to a secluded lake for an afternoon of partying, only to be stranded on a raft in the middle of the water, at the mercy of a slimy entity that glides across the water and devours them.
“The Raft” isn’t my favorite of the Skeleton Crew stories (that would be either “The Jaunt,” “The Mist” or “Survivor Type”), but it’s memorable for its mounting dread and graphic deaths. Almost the inverse of “Woodenhead,” this entry also suffers from a pacing issue, but it’s problem is that it moves too fast. Where the wind up in the first film took forever, here the four aren’t in the water for 30 seconds before the threat is fully unleashed, first devouring a duck and then one of the girls. From there, it’s just waiting to see how long the remaining three will last.
The lower budget for Creepshow 2 hinders the first entry (I’m guessing that’s why we didn’t see many of the kills), but it kind of works for the disgusting, raw horror of “The Raft.” In King’s story, the threat is described as a living oil slick, and the effect is pulled off by what appears to be a clear plastic bag dragged under the water, littered with chunks of meat and debris. It looks cheap, but that’s ultimately to its benefit. It’s gross, unseemly and grotesque, and just an up-close look at what the slick has devoured churns the stomach.
“The Raft” continues the mean-spirited tone of the sequel, with several horrific and graphic deaths. One character is literally pulled through the slats in the raft’s deck, his death punctuated by his leg sticking up at a supremely unnatural angle. Another character wakes up after a night’s rest to find the goo has stuck to the side of her head and is in her hair, pulling her through. But even more disturbing is the gratuitous sexual assault that takes place right before her death.
In King’s story, the two remaining protagonists spend the night on the raft and, in an act of desperation and panic, have sex. It’s not exactly romantic, but at least it’s consensual. In Creepshow 2, the girl is asleep and the boy starts to undress and kiss her, and tries to have sex before she wakes up. It’s totally unnecessary and off-putting, and just adds to the film’s sleazy undercurrent.
The protagonist doesn’t get off the hook; he abandons the girl to die and then, as in the novel, tries to swim to shore before he’s devoured. Again, I’m guessing his attempted rape was included to treat this as some sort of half-assed morality tale, but in reality it adds nothing. There is, to be fair, a pretty great shot when he crawls to land and thinks he’s safe, only to be taken away by a tidal wave of sludge. And the short’s final shot has some of the black humor the first film packed.
“The Raft” is the film’s best entry only because it’s the only one to feel truly scary and gross. But again, the abrasive tone of the film hurts it, and that last bleak joke only serves as a reminder how much of the first film’s humor is missing.
“The Hitch-Hiker”
I was surprised to learn this story was not based on a published King tale. Out of all the stories, it’s the only one feel like it has his blend of character depth and terror, at least in the outset, but once again the film’s hard edge and mean spirit drag it down.
Lois Chiles is solid as a woman cheating on her husband with a gigolo. As she’s making a mad rush to get home before her controlling spouse finds out, she runs down a hitchhiker. She drives away from the scene before any bystanders (including King in a brief cameo) can identify her, but is stalked and haunted by the victim, who keeps burbling “thanks for the ride, lady.”
It’s a simple premise, and the makeup effects on the dead hitchhiker are effective. And for the first time, Gorkin successfully builds the tension. It’s legitimately scary the first few times the hitcher shows up, and Chiles goes all-in with her escalating rage. When she finally mows the entity down again, plowing her car into him over and over until nothing but a gooey red mess remains, it’s gross and scary.
But it’s a thread-bare story, and it exists as nothing more than another half-assed morality tale. Far be it from me to support adultery, but the film feels like one constant punishment for the poor woman, and it never lets her off the hook. Even when she’s finally enraged enough to take matters into her own hands, there’s not a come-down; she ends up killed in her garage, displayed as a gory tableau for her husband to discover.
It’s the third example of Creepshow 2 trading the first film’s humor and gleeful love of the macabre for meanness, and it sends the film out with a bitter taste.
None of this works. While two out of three of the individual stories have their moments, nothing measures up to the ghoulish and fun tone of the original movie, and the sleazy, mean streak leaves a bitter taste. The animated wrap-around segments also hurt; they look cheap, they’re confusing, and the animation never sets the tone for the stories that follow.
It’s a real bummer. Creepshow was a delightful surprise when I watched it last year, and I was looking forward to how the series would continue to adapt King’s stories. I’ve heard Creepshow 3 is even worse, although the Shudder TV series has its defenders, and might be worth checking out. But for now, I’m happy to just close the book and move on.