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.
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