The Corpse Grinders (Ted V. Mikels, 1971)

Happy new year. Let's ring it in with The Corpse Grinders. My last run-in with the impressively mustachioed b-movie director Ted V. Mikels was 1973's marvelously titled Blood Orgy of the She-Devils. Unfortunately, that title promised way more than it delivered, and the film was extremely light on blood, orgies, and she-devils, though its highlights included one of the wildest ensembles ever worn to a picnic (the penultimate pic in my 2018 review). The Corpse Grinders is a much more honest title. This film delivers on the corpse grinding, my friends.

With a screenplay cowritten by Joe Cranston, working actor (mostly in TV and theater) and the father of Bryan Cranston (seriously!), and fellow b-movie legend Arch Hall Sr., the writer/director/producer of 1962's Eegah! (tagline: "the crazed love of a prehistoric giant for a ravishing teen-age girl!"), starring Arch Hall Jr. and future Bond villain Richard Kiel, The Corpse Grinders is nutty as hell. The movie's bonkers premise is not even remotely plausible, but Mikels carries on anyway with much enthusiasm, which is how it should be.

What is that insane premise? The Lotus Cat Food Company, an independent factory producing high-end cat food (the factory consists of a tiny office and one industrial grinder in the basement; besides the two owners, the staff consists of a bug-eyed elderly alcoholic and a one-legged deaf-mute woman who one of the owners converses with in sign language that does not resemble any known sign language on planet Earth), runs into some money trouble when their wealthy investor mysteriously "disappears." The owners, Landau (Sanford Mitchell, who eerily resembles David Geffen) and Maltby (J. Byron Foster), decide to cut costs by grinding up corpses and turning the ground-up corpse meat into cat food. What could go wrong?

The corpses are stolen from the cemetery by an ill-tempered man named Caleb (Warren Ball), who is fueled in his work by beef jerky delivered to him by his insane wife Cleo (Ann Noble). Cleo carries around a doll she believes is a real child and is constantly making terrible-looking soup. Landau promises to pay Caleb later, but he keeps delaying payment. Note to self: don't rob graves without receiving the cash first.

The corpse grinding initially pays off. Cats love the taste of human meat, and the company is making bank. (I really don't understand how this factory makes money considering that their setup allows for maybe thirty cans of cat food production a week, tops, but we are not here to ask questions of The Corpse Grinders. The Corpse Grinders asks questions of us.)

Unfortunately, once cats taste people-flesh, they crave it forever. If they're hungry and no can of Lotus Cat Food is nearby, they attack humans. This gets the attention of surgeon Dr. Howard Glass (Sean Kenney), who is attacked by the cat of his nurse and girlfriend Angie Robinson (Monika Kelly), who strangely keeps her cat at the hospital. Does the health department know about this? Howard and Angie begin to suspect that Lotus Cat Food is full of human meat and start to snoop around the factory, sometimes during their hospital shifts. What the hell is going on at that hospital? Meanwhile, a mysterious man with a mustache spies on everyone.

While the doctor and the nurse conduct their covert investigation, cats keep attacking their owners, including the secretary at the food adulteration registry, who leaves work early to turn on a soap opera, strip down to her underwear, and chug a beer. This is my kind of woman. Sadly, she feeds her Siamese cat Lotus Cat Food. I hope she pulls through.

This is a low, low, low budget movie with only a handful of locations, but it has a charming weirdness, and every actor in it has an interesting face. Cassavetes regular Vincent Barbi even shows up. It's compelling and kooky in all the ways Blood Orgy of the She-Devils wasn't. Mikels claimed The Corpse Grinders was the most memorable movie the Boomer generation ever saw (is The Corpse Grinders to blame for melting Boomers' brains?). He also said Corpse Grinders was the only profitable movie he ever directed. I don't judge a movie by its financial success or failure, but I'm happy that something as weird and goofy as this thing made some bank.

   

Creepshow 2 (Michael Gornick, 1987)

My Creepshow post a few weeks back began with warm reminiscences of my love for the movie and its power to transport me to an idyllic childhood state every time I see it. I also watched Creepshow 2 as a kid, but the sequel, arriving five years after the first installment (what are they, freakin' Avatar over here?) and with a diminished budget, fewer stories, and a less exciting cast, does not repeat the magic, despite the involvement of George A. Romero, Stephen King, Tom Savini, and Michael Gornick, the cinematographer on the first film who moves into the director's chair here. Creepshow 2 just doesn't work, man. The vibes are off. (I let Hippie Johnny write those last two sentences.)

Adapting three short stories by King (who also appears in a cameo in the final segment), Romero's screenplay is several notches below his usual high standards and feels like it was contractually tossed off in an afternoon. Savini was a makeup effects consultant on the film and also appears in the opening and closing wraparound segments under heavy prosthetics as The Creep, the motormouthed new host (taking over from the silent, much cooler looking Creep in the first film).

The Creep is the first tipoff that this Creepshow is not going to live up to its predecessor. Besides the Savini-starring live-action moments, the introductory segments are sloppily animated, sub-Crypt Keeper energy-sucks boringly voiced by Joe Silver. Silver was an enjoyable character and voice actor with a boomingly deep voice who memorably appeared in two of David Cronenberg's '70s films, so I'm going to blame Gornick's direction and the writing of either Romero or Lucille Fletcher (who did some revisions of Romero's screenplay) for the lackluster delivery. It's like hearing an accountant deliver several weak horror puns in between figuring out a client's tax write-offs.

Tone poorly established, we move into the first segment, "Old Chief Wood'nhead." A badly dated case of white people depicting Native people, the segment spends way too much time on the aw-shucks small-town goodness of Ray Spruce (George Kennedy, probably the biggest name in the cast ca. 1987), who runs a general store in a dying town with his wife, Martha (Dorothy Lamour in her final role). Ray spends his days touching up the war paint on his wooden Indian, delivering folksy homilies about the goodness in people, and doing good deeds for the Native people who make up the bulk of the population. When something bad happens to Ray and Martha, the wooden Indian comes alive and gets revenge. Most of the indigenous characters are played by indigenous people, but, for some reason, Irish-American Holt McCallany (in one of his earliest roles) plays Sam Whitemoon in brownface. In 1987. Come on now. On the plus side, the kills are pretty sweet, and Bruce Alan Miller's production design really stands out, especially the inside of the general store and the trailer home of Fatso Gribbens (the '80s-mandated overweight sidekick who is always eating snacks).

The second segment, "The Raft," is thin soup but a slight improvement. Four 29-year-old teenagers (two boy-men and two girl-women), decide to celebrate a break from school by driving to a hard-to-find private lake in chilly fall weather, swimming out to a raft in the middle of the lake, and then just hanging out on the raft being cold for some reason. Excellent plan. (As someone who grew up in a small town in the Midwest, I find this teenage plan semi-plausible. I spent too many miserable days and nights doing "fun" things in stupidly cold temperatures that would have actually been fun had we waited for spring and summer.) This plan has a problem even bigger than the temperature. The lake has a damn human-eating blob floating in it. Oh shiiiiiiittttt! 

Again, we get some sweet kills, and it's reasonably entertaining dumb fun, but one of the male characters pretty much molests one of the sleeping female characters for no narrative reason other than to have the camera focus on some naked breasts. I'm no puritan, but this scene feels gross.

Weird celeb factoid: One of the actors in this segment, soap opera veteran Paul Satterfield, is the son of Rita Coolidge's sister Priscilla. His biological father was a Nashville firefighter who was killed on the job. His mother later married and divorced Booker T. Jones of Booker T. & The MG's and 60 Minutes anchor Ed Bradley but was tragically murdered in 2014 by her fourth husband Michael Seibert, who then killed himself.

Awkward transition to segment three, "The Hitchhiker." This is probably the strongest of the three segments, with Lois Chiles playing Annie Lansing, the wife of a wealthy attorney. Annie is having an affair and loses track of time while having sex with her lover. Unable to think of a valid excuse to give her husband, she hauls ass home and accidentally hits and kills a hitchhiker (Tom Wright). She flees the scene, but the hitchhiker keeps reappearing in an increasingly more mangled state. Chiles, a successful model and actress in the '60s and '70s who mostly played small roles and TV guest appearances after that (her career suffered when she quit acting for three years to help care for one of her brothers, who was dying of lymphoma; ain't Hollywood great?), carries this segment. She has a relaxed, natural delivery and presence that give this simple story a bit more weight than the other two segments.

Gornick, a longtime Romero collaborator and the cinematographer on five Romero films (Martin, Dawn of the Dead, Knightriders, Creepshow, and Day of the Dead), has a disappointingly flat visual style in Creepshow 2 (though a few moments come alive in each segment) and it remains his only feature as director, though he also directed episodes of Tales from the Darkside and Monsters. He appears to have left show business behind for a real estate career in the mid-'90s.

Like its predecessor, Creepshow 2 was meant to have five stories, but the two most ambitious segments were dropped when the budget was slashed. Considering how the rest of it turned out, that was probably a blessing. One of the dropped segments eventually made it to the screen as a part of Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, but the other, set in a bowling alley, never happened.

   

Dracula's Daughter (Lambert Hillyer, 1936)

A major influence on Anne Rice's vampire novels as well as a canonical work of queer horror (the excellent Shudder documentary miniseries Queer for Fear covers it at length), Dracula's Daughter is in the top tier of '30s Universal horror movies despite having a generally subdued tone and almost no special effects (we never see our vampires turn into vampires) and confining most of the horror off-screen. The film does so much with suggestion, atmosphere, performance, movement, and dialogue (and smoke machines) that I didn't really miss any of the bells and whistles (though I wish we could have seen Drac's daughter show some vampire fangs). If you're receptive to it, the film will give your imagination plenty of room to run wild.

Set in London and filmed on Universal's Hollywood sets, Dracula's Daughter opens with two policemen stumbling across a dead body. An elderly man (Edward Van Sloan) appears out of the shadows, telling the police that his name is Von Helsing (weirdly changed from Van Helsing even though he's the only actor reprising his role from Dracula) and that the body is a bug-eating man named Renfield. He also tells them there is another dead body nearby and that he killed that body. It was no man, though; it was a vampire. The dead bloodsucker, with a stake through his heart, is, of course, Count Dracula.

The inexperienced local policemen think the old man's a murdering kook and call in Scotland Yard. While guarding the bodies and awaiting Scotland Yard's arrival, the most easily scared of the two policemen encounters a late-night visitor, Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden). After she's denied visitation, she hypnotizes the hapless cop with help from a mysterious jeweled ring, steals Dracula's body, and burns the remains on a pyre in a fog-shrouded country cemetery.

Marya is, of course, Dracula's daughter. She has the same curse of vampirism, but, unlike her pops, she hasn't fully embraced it. She's tortured by it but can't resist giving in to its urges. She's enabled in her vampiric lifestyle by her oddball assistant Sandor (Irving Pichel). (Pichel had parallel careers as an actor and director. Horror fans will probably know him best from his debut directorial film The Most Dangerous Game, co-directed with Ernest B. Schoedsack, who co-directed King Kong with Merian C. Cooper. Heeeyyyy, that's a lotta co-directin' ovah heah!) We're not quite sure what Sandor's deal is at this point in the film, but the relationship will become clearer by the film's end.

Interestingly, Sandor is instructed to procure young women as victims for Marya through a ruse that they will pose as subjects for Marya's paintings, but when Marya is seen on the hunt for herself, she chooses male victims. There's a real internal struggle here not just between whether to be a vampire or not, but also between who will get the fangs.

Back in Van Helsing land, the old doc is trying to convince Scotland Yard that vampires exist and he's not a cold-blooded killer, so he asks former student turned prominent psychiatrist Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger) to help him out. Garth doesn't believe the vampire story, but he's a big fan of Van Von Helsing, so he's willing to help.

Meanwhile, Countess Marya believes Garth is just the man to stop her vampiric urges and turn her into a "normal" woman, so she enlists him as her psychiatrist, much to the chagrin of both Sandor and Garth's secretary/personal assistant Janet Blake (Marguerite Churchill), who is not-so-secretly in love with Garth and also not afraid to give him the business. Kruger is a much more interesting actor and his character has more personality than a lot of the milquetoast dud romantic male leads in '30s horror, but he's not particularly erotically charismatic or handsome, so it's still a mystery why both Janet and Marya are so drawn to him other than for narrative requirements. The real sparks in the movie are between the women characters.

The gay subtext is pretty obvious, though much of it may have still sailed over my head if I hadn't watched Queer for Fear. It leaps from subtext to text, however, in the tense, beautifully filmed scenes between Marya and a young victim named Lili (Nan Grey). The sexual tension in these scenes is almost a visible character in the room, and the facial expressions and movements of the actors captured by the camera are unmistakably filled with desire, lust, and the nervousness and fear that exist alongside desire.

Lambert Hillyer, who was surprisingly primarily a director of westerns (of his hundreds of films and television episodes, only two are horror), has a natural touch for the material, and he does so much with closeups, shadow, and suggestion. I wish he'd directed more horror, but he loved his westerns. He's also the first director to put Batman on the big screen, directing a Batman serial in 1943. If Hillyer was an odd but ultimately successful choice for director, the screenwriters, Garrett Fort and John L. Balderston, were horror veterans, co-writing the screenplays for Universal's Dracula and Frankenstein. Fort also worked on The Devil-Doll, while Balderston's other horror credits include The Mummy, Mystery of Edwin Drood, Bride of Frankenstein, Mark of the Vampire, Mad Love, and The Mummy's Hand.

If you want some classic vampire bat flying, fang-baring, neck-biting, blood-trickling, garlic-recoiling action, you will be disappointed in Dracula's Daughter (though there is a scene set in Transylvania where we get to hang out in Dracula's castle), but if you're open to an atmospheric, slow-burn, character-based, woman-centric approach to vampirism, it's a damn good movie. And it's pretty effectively creepy. I liked it a lot. 

The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984)

A strange and heady blend of postmodern art film about storytelling, fairy tale, and folk tale, YA tween movie for and about girls dealing with puberty, and full-on '80s flesh-ripping horror, The Company of Wolves confused audiences on initial release before becoming a popular cult film. It also confused my friends and I when we rented it in junior high expecting some traditional werewolf action. I have since grown up (mostly) and become much more interested in the lives and experiences of women and girls and the art they make, but in late '80s/early '90s small town Midwest U.S.A., where gender roles were (intentionally and unintentionally) fixed, frozen in place, and rigidly adhered to, a movie about the internal lives of girls using fairy tale imagery and metaphor and featuring a major role for the Murder, She Wrote lady was pretty baffling for four 13-year-old boys hoping for An American Werewolf in London part two.

Watching it again at the age of 45 (how can this happen? how could this happen?), I was much more receptive to and excited by the film than when I was going through my own puberty hell and convinced by society that girls' interests and experiences were silly compared to my own. What a stupid world we live in sometimes.

Neil Jordan's second film as director, The Company of Wolves was adapted from several short stories in Angela Carter's 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber, with Carter and Jordan collaborating on the screenplay. (After reading up on the fascinating life of Angela Carter, I am excited to read some of her work.) Carter's book was advertised by its American publisher as "adult fairy tales," a phrase Carter despised, considering it a fundamental misunderstanding of what she was trying to do. Instead of making these tales more adult, Carter said she was attempting instead to "extract the latent content from the stories." This approach carries over to the film, which clearly exists in a fairy tale world but also expresses the moments fairy tales hint at, imply, or conceal.

Beginning in what appears to be the present in an English country house, the film makes the unusual move of revealing from the near-beginning that we are watching a dream in the sleeping mind of 12-year-old Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson). Audiences in the '80s, given too many "it was all a dream" endings, may have been turned off by this approach, but lazy viewers such as myself and my fellow 13-year-old bros are missing the forest for the trees in getting upset about this narrative device. The Company of Wolves is concerned with the subconscious, the inner life, the storytelling tradition and its effects on shaping societal roles, physical transformation, and the dreamlife bleeding into the waking world, so having the narrative exist within a dream shouldn't be a deal-breaker here. Never mind that there is something surreally "off" about Rosaleen and her bedroom, and the forest outside her window. The boundaries between these worlds are not as clearly delineated as we'd like to believe, the movie repeatedly tells us.

The main narrative thread (the dream) is a composite of several short stories in Carter's book, mostly inspired by Little Red Riding Hood, and the characters within this thread also tell stories of their own (adapted from other Bloody Chamber stories), creating a complex stories-within-a-dream-within-a-story structure. Jordan and Carter keep excellent control of this tricky tone, and the movie never runs away from them.

Rosaleen's modern English family are transformed into fairy tale characters in the dream, living in a fairy tale past in a storybook village near a dangerous forest full of wolves (and werewolves). Rosaleen is warned repeatedly by her grandmother (Angela Lansbury) to stay on the path, and that wolves can't be trusted, particularly the other kind of wolf that presents as a man. Rosaleen is skeptical of her grandmother's warnings and curious about the world of boys, men, and wolves. She frequently veers off the path, causing her family, who already lost their oldest daughter to wolves, much worry. When she finally meets a huntsman (Micha Bergese) in the woods, the film's skill at both meeting and subverting expectations reaches its height.

I'm not going to attempt a smarty-pants lecture about what the film is really about, but I will say that it gives you a whole lot to chew on about coming of age, repression and expression of women's sexuality, the role of storytelling in enforcing and subverting traditional roles, patriarchy and the complicity of some women in enforcing their own submission and repression, and the inner life versus the external one.

Jordan (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire, The Butcher Boy, The End of the Affair) was dealing with a much smaller budget than he'd have to work with on many later projects, but he creates a compelling visual world to frame Carter's ideas. Like the story and its themes, Jordan's sets and images feel both viscerally real and artificially heightened, and the werewolf transformation scenes are weird, wild, and gruesome.

The nature of the project means that there is some distance and remove between the characters and the audience, but Jordan makes it all connect in honest, human ways. It also doesn't hurt that he's got a pretty fine cast to bring it to life. In addition to the recently deceased Lansbury (RIP), we also get the recently deceased David Warner (RIP), Jordan regular Stephen Rea, Kathryn Pogson, Brian Glover, a great cameo from Terence Stamp, and, in her only film role, cult musician Danielle Dax as a naked wolfwoman. The Company of Wolves is a gem and way better than I remembered it.

          

Creepshow (George A. Romero, 1982)

I don't think it's possible for me to watch Creepshow with anything other than childhood eyes. Each revisit takes me back to that highly anticipated first watch, but in feeling more than specific memory. I don't recall too many of the details surrounding that first viewing, including how old I was (I had to have been somewhere between fourth and sixth grade), but I remember exactly how I felt, and nearly every frame of the movie imprinted itself on my young, spongy brain. I'm sure there are flaws in Creepshow, and I know George Romero made stronger and deeper films, but I can't see anything wrong with it. It was everything I wanted as a kid, and I feel like that kid every time I revisit it.

Creepshow managed to put several of my childhood horror obsessions into one brightly colored package. My mother, who was extremely strict about keeping R-rated movies away from me until I was 13 unless she'd heard from a reliable source that the movie wasn't too brutally violent or filled with sex or constant f-bombs, was much more lenient when it came to books, and she mostly let me read whatever I wanted. And most of what I wanted to read were Stephen King books. I started devouring them at age nine (my mom had to tell the skeptical local librarian in my tiny hometown that it was okay for me to check out King books) and kept it up through my 13th year, though, oddly, I haven't read one since then. (My love for horror movies never died, but I stopped enjoying horror fiction in high school. I don't really know why.) 

I was also obsessed with George Romero, which is a little stranger, since the only Romero film my mother allowed me to watch was the original Night of the Living Dead. Despite having little exposure to the rest of his body of work, I knew Romero was my guy just from the glimpses of his other films I'd seen in the Fangoria magazines I would covertly pore over at the grocery store magazine rack, working up the courage to beg my mother for a copy. (It almost never worked out, though I was finally able to buy my own once I earned a little pocket money from babysitting my cousins and mowing my grandparents' lawn.)

The '50s EC horror comics were also a staple of my terror-obsessed childhood. Though I was born two decades after their heyday, originals or their '70s reprints would occasionally turn up at garage sales in the early and mid-'80s. My mother and grandmother were big garage sale people, and I spent many Saturday mornings accompanying them to sales. On a handful of occasions, I hit the jackpot and cheaply acquired a decent little collection of Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear, and Shock SuspenStories issues. I wish I knew what the hell I did with those comics.

Finally, the horror anthology format was a big television trend in the '80s (kickstarted by the success of Creepshow), and I was a devoted fan, regularly watching Tales from the Darkside, the reboots of The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Friday the 13th: The Series (not really an anthology, but the main characters were thrust into a different terrifying scenario every week), Amazing Stories (not always horror, but sometimes it delivered the horror goods), Monsters, and Tales from the Crypt whenever I could get access to HBO (my family were not premium cable people).

I knew Creepshow was an anthology film inspired by EC comics, written by Stephen King, and directed by George Romero, with special effects by Tom Savini. I had to see it. I had to. This was totally and completely my shit. The only problem? It was rated R. This was like Conan the Barbarian all over again. The pain. The agony. The misery. C'mon, Mom, it'll be a hundred years until I'm 13. Just let me watch it. I was saved by my uncle's then-girlfriend, Tammy. Like me, she was a horror movie fan, and luckily for me, my mom trusted her judgment. She gave my mom the good word that Creepshow was appropriate viewing material (other than some swearing and cartoonish violence, it's a very mild R), and I finally got to see it. (Tammy also talked my mom into letting me watch A Nightmare on Elm Street and Witchboard when I was in fifth grade, so she really did the Lord's work for me back then. Thanks, Tammy, wherever you are.)

Unlike most delayed gratification experiences, Creepshow lived up to the hype. It was exactly what I wanted it to be, and it felt like it was created especially for me. I loved all five stories and the wraparound segments, I loved the title of the movie, I loved the way it looked, and I never got bored or impatient with it. If I'd never seen it before and watched it for the first time this week, I think I'd have a favorable opinion, but my first encounter was so pleasurable and it's so inextricably tied into a happy stretch in my life that I am thoroughly incapable of approaching it critically. To paraphrase Ray Parker Jr.'s endorsement of bustin', Creepshow makes me feel good.

I haven't even talked about the movie part of the damn movie yet, but you've all seen it. If you haven't, log off and go watch it. We've got Tom Atkins doing his best asshole since The Rockford Files throwing away young Joe Hill's horror comic, Ed Harris disco dancing, Stephen King saying "meteor shit!" after sticking his hand in meteor goo (and also watching Bob Backlund wrestling Samoa #1 at the tail end of the Vince Sr. era of WWF), Leslie Nielsen burying Ted Danson up to his neck at high tide, Hal Holbrook feeding Adrienne Barbeau to one of the greatest monsters in '80s horror, and E.G. Marshall fighting the worst cockroach problem since my own goddamn 1960s-built Austin, TX house every goddamn summer.

Part of what makes Creepshow so enjoyable is the sense that everyone involved in this thing is having a blast. I don't know if that's true (part of movie magic is convincing an audience that miserable people are having fun), but it sure feels that way. Romero, King, and the entire cast (made up of veteran character actors, future stars, and members of Romero's Pittsburgh troupe of players and family friends) seem like they're having the time of their lives. Part of that feeling comes from the departure in Romero's visual style. Unlike Romero's other features (with the partial exception of some of the Day of the Dead OTT violence and mayhem), Creepshow is deliberately stylized in its framing and colors, in this case to mimic and pay tribute to the EC horror comics, and it's a real departure for the filmmaker. No matter how implausible the scenario, Romero's other films are played mostly straight (though not without humor) and attempt to convince the audience that this is happening in our world or one very much like it. Creepshow, however, is deliberately artificial and tongue-in-cheek and always reminds the audience that it's existing in a cartoonish, comic book universe. (Day of the Dead, Romero's next film, interestingly plays like it has carried over some of the heightened comic book world of Creepshow into the social realism of the rest of the Romero filmography.)

Each story in Creepshow feels distinct from the others but complementary. Interestingly, Romero used a different editor for each segment, editing the third story himself. The Romero-edited segment (with Danson and Nielsen) is also the one that stays closest to his traditional style, operating in a more realist, less overtly artificial mode until the comic book color palette and framing return in the conclusion. (That story is also the only one not filmed in Pittsburgh or its suburbs and was instead shot in Island Beach in New Jersey.)

Creepshow was Romero's biggest hit and his only film to make it to number one at the box office. Besides inspiring several TV shows, most directly Tales from the Darkside (Romero was a producer of the show and wrote several episodes), there have also been two sequels and a Shudder TV series, to diminishing returns. The 1987 sequel was written by Romero based on King short stories and directed by Creepshow's cinematographer Michael Gornick, but the third film is an in-name-only sequel made without Romero, King, or Gornick and based on none of King's writing. The TV series is a direct tribute and has adapted King and Joe Hill stories, but, except for a few episodes, it lacks the pep, humor, and inspiration of Romero's original and suffers from the modern epidemic of characters who speak like they're reading their Twitter feed. You can't rebottle magic, baby.