Anthology films are so hard to judge, because you want to recommend the strong segments and disregard the weaker ones. Inspired by the E.C. horror comics of the 1950s, this film was written by Stephen King and directed by NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD master George A. Romero. The film is comprised of five tales of phobia, bookended by a story of a father who takes his son’s CREEPSHOW comic away.
The first tale is “Father’s Day,” which tells the tale of Sylvia Grantham (Carrie Nye, TV’s THE GUIDING LIGHT) who has a twisted relationship with her now dead father. This segment has an early performance from Ed Harris (APOLLO 13) who has a run-in with a tombstone.
The second segment has a country bumpkin named Jordy Verrill (King) discovering a meteorite that contains a strange substance. The third and best segment — “Something to Tide You Over” — has Richard Vickers (Leslie Nielsen, NAKED GUN) seeking revenge on Harry Wentworth (Ted Danson, TV’s CHEERS), who is having an affair with Richard’s wife. Richard’s revenge has a twisted inspiration to it. It’s hard to remember that Nielsen started out in drama and is very good at it. His latter years of being typecasted as a slapstick man hide his talent as a bona fide actor.
The fourth segment — “The Crate” — follows Professor Henry Northrup (Hal Holbrook, THE FIRM) as he deals with his nagging wife Billie (Adrienne Barbeau, TV’s CARNIVALE) and the mysterious thing in a crate found by his friend Prof. Dexter Stanley (Fritz Weaver, MARATHON MAN). The final segment — “They’re Creeping Up On You” — has a Howard Hughes-like germ-a-phobe named Upson Pratt (E.G. Marshall, 12 ANGRY MEN) plagued by cockroaches in his hermetically sealed apartment.
All the tales have the campy sense of morbid justice that the comics had. They deal with common childhood (and for some adult) phobias like thing growing on you, bugs, things falling on you, creatures under the stairs and the revenge of the dead. The problem with the tales is that their endings are inevitable. If you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. So even though they are short tales some seem to drag, especially “The Crate.” Even the strongest entry “Something to Tide You Over” ends with a whimper rather than a bang.
The stories don’t have ironic twists like TV shows TALES FROM THE CRYPT or TWILIGHT ZONE do. So the problem with the film comes from the source material. However, King and Romero do capture the tone very well and I loved the comic book segues from one tale to the next. Romero even uses light and framing to capture the style of the E.C. Comics’ artwork. But in the end the film doesn’t work as a complete whole. For horror and E.C. Comics fans this is a film worth checking out. For everyone else just rent episodes of the two TV series I mentioned above.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
