Creepshow

Managed to pick up a Blu-Ray of the 1982 film Creepshow while in NYC recently, and watched it the other night. I remembered it as being pretty good, and overall I still feel the same about it. The release has a really good picture - sharp and good colours which helped immensely, and the stories were all good and creepy. For those not in the know, it was written by Stephen King and directed by George A Romero, and there is a certain zombie slant to the stories presented. First up is the wrap-around tale wherein a boy (played by Stephen King's real life son, Joe, now a horror novelist in his own right) has his copy of Creepshow magazine confiscated and thrown in the rubbish bin by his dad - who is somewhat against horror stories. I guess this is irony. Then we get our first glimpse of the brilliant EC-Comics inspired decayed corpse at the boy's window ... and we're off into the first story. 'Father's Day' is a lovely short piece about an aged father who was boorish by day, murdered by his daughter, and who now comes back from the grave on the seventh anniversary of his death to get his own cake. The zombie is brilliant, all decaying flesh and earth and worms ... with a cracked, horrific voice to boot. No wonder everyone who sees him screams! Next up is 'The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill' in which King himself plays a country hick who sees a meteorite fall in his field. He touches it, and starts to grow green plantlife on his fingers. The stuff spreads and soon his mouth, face and body is covered. He ends by killing himself with a shotgun as the greenery spreads across his farm, and onwards across America. King is brilliant in this, playing the hick with sympathy, and the spreading growth is pretty horrific. The third story, 'Something to Tide You Over', is a wonderful little tale of revenge and retribution. Leslie Neilson (yes, he from the Naked Gun and Airplane films) plays a man whose wife has been seeing another. So he buries both her and her lover on the beach up to their necks and waits for the tide to come in. This is horrific and creepy as the man can see his lover being drowned on a television set helpfully provided by Neilson. Once dead, the sodden corpses then return to haunt and kill Neilson. 'The Crate' is perhaps the weakest tale, if only because the monster is a little too much like a man-in-a-suit. A college professor sees the chance to do away with his nagging wife by letting a hungry creature in a crate devour her ... the effects are good, and the acting excellent, but it's totally let down by the monster. The final segment is 'They're Creeping Up On You' wherein a Howard Hughes-like recluse finds his sterile apartment overrun with cockroaches ... they take over and end up spilling from his screaming cadaver! Pretty good considering there is no CGI here to generate the bugs, and that they were all wrangled on set! The film ends back with the boy and his dad ... and it's lucky that the boy sent off for a voodoo doll from the magazine as it means he can now take out his anger on his hapless father. Overall it's an enjoyable film, if a little long, and the zombies are brilliant. I mentioned the 'Fathers Day' one above, but the two corpses in 'Something to Tide You Over' are equally excellent, squelching water as they walk, and leaking seawater when they are hit with bullets. Lovely stuff. Somewhere I still have the comic book adaptation of Creepshow ...