Creepshow 3
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, R, 104 m, 2006
Directed by Ana Clavell, James Glen Dudelson. Stars Stephen Pettee, Roy Abramsohn, Susan Schramm, et al.

Creepshow, director George A. Romero’s 1982 homage to the gruesome graphic novels put out by E.C. Publications in the ‘50s, was something of a mixed trick ‘r treat bag (unfortunately, this is the case with most horror anthologies): for every Twin Bing there was a Chick tract; for every Dove Dark Chocolate Promise, a rock. And though it was received at the outset with dismissive write-ups and so-so box office, it went on to become a minor pop classic (thanks in part to cable TV and home video) and continues to haunt the minds of the little ghosts and goblins who dare to sneak a peek at it around the spooky season. It’s been eons since I watched the ungodly thing, but a lot of its images continue to haunt my mind: a red-eyed beast sinking its pointy pearlies into the head of a foul-mouthed, cocktail-swilling harpy (Adrienne Barbeau at her most exasperating); alien crabgrass transforming a dimwitted loner (the pic’s scribe himself, Stephen King) into the Son of Swamp Thing; and a gazillion and one cockroaches scuttling out of the piehole of a mysophobic fat cat (E.G. Marshall having the time of his life playing the tetchiest of old farts). Romero kept the movie’s tone more or less consistent all the way through; he didn’t take full advantage of the episodic structure and distinguish each segment with its own look, as, say, Woody Allen did in Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex*. But Romero has never been much of an artist; his method is, at best, workmanlike. (It’s hard to get jazzed about his stuff because the arrangements are so literal, so on-the-nose.) Though more than a few horror aficionados consider the guy to be a “master” of the genre, I can’t point to anything in his canon that even approaches the depraved grandeur that made Peter Jackson’s and Sam Raimi’s early works so bleeding hysterical. 

But if Romero knows how to do anything, it’s how to milk his successes for all they’re worth. (As of this writing, he’s churned out no less than five sequels to his claim to fame, Night of the Living Dead.) In 1987, he collaborated with King on a new batch of scary stories for Creepshow 2, though only three of the five (which was the number we were treated to in the original) were ultimately shot. (One of the rejected yarns, “The Cat from Hell,” found its way into Tales from the Darkside: The Movie.) Romero also gave up his director’s chair, so entrusting the whole shebang to his Creepshow DP, Michael Gornick. But Gornick wasn’t a stranger to running the show; he had helmed several episodes of “Tales from the Darkside” (which was brought to us by Creepshow’s production company, Laurel Entertainment Inc.) and “Monsters.” (“Monsters” is long overdue for a reassessment; it’s not often that the idiot box produces something as emotionally devastating as “Glim-Glim.”) And while Creepshow 2 lacked the B-movie trashiness of its predecessor, it had lots of fun and games with a vengeance-seeking wooden Indian, an undead hitchhiker, and a man-eating oil slick. (So far, the finest visualization of a King quickie is a tossup between “Quitters, Inc.” in Cat’s Eye and “Battleground” from the TNT miniseries “Nightmares & Dreamscapes.”) Of course, Creepshow 2 didn’t attract the cult following that Creepshow did, but it fared well enough to justify the continuation of the franchise.

So why did we have to wait twenty years to get our creep on again? I’m not really sure, but nobody—and I mean nobody—associated with the preceding collections of yell-tales had anything to do with the unmitigated mess that is Creepshow 3. (Even Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror wasn’t this crude, this slipshod, this all over the ever-lovin’ place.) Those responsible for resurrecting and then damning our dear series to the boiling pit of sewage are Ana Clavell and James Glen Dudelson, each of whom had a hand (and what grubby hands they are) in directing, writing, and producing this fuck-all jumble. But who, you may ask, are Clavell and Dudelson? Good question, and until I did a little research for this critique, I had no idea either. But I’ve since learned that this isn’t the first time these two have plundered Romero’s catalog: In 2005, they put out Day of the Dead 2: Contagium, one of the most despised zombie flicks this side of Ulli Lommel’s Zombie Nation.

The segments in both Creepshow and Creepshow 2 were self-contained, but Creepshow 3 (or III, depending on if you go by the opening or closing credits) breaks from that tradition by intertwining its stories in a way that evokes Pulp Fiction, Trick ‘r Treat, and that Oscar-winning heap of hooey, Crash. The first chapter, a gross-out joke entitled “Alice,” is by far the worst of the lot. Not only is it about as funny as an embalming, it doesn’t make a lick of sense. A high school girl, the titular Alice (she thinks she’s all that, but even a star-nosed mole can see that she’s sooo not), has had it up to here with her hood, what with all the ruffians and whores and assorted sillies running around. (You’d think you were in the ghetto, for crying out loud, but this is a white-collar ‘burb!) Her goofy (and very sitcom-ish) kinfolk are another source of aggravation: her younger brother listens in on her phone calls, her grandmother puts her down for not having an ass, etc. But imploring the gods for a different family backfires when the new universal remote that Alice’s father bought from a deranged street vendor turns everyone in the house into African-Americans. This gag could’ve gone somewhere interesting had those involved in developing it shared more than two and a half brain cells, but the only business that the black family is given to do is a line-by-line rehash of the previous scene. And once the remote is hit, we have to go through the whole rigmarole again, only this time with a Spanish-speaking clan. That’s some perplexing shit, but I defy even the biggest brain to account for why Alice, sweet Alice becomes more and more deformed every time she’s bounced from one alternate universe to another. The first trip reduces her left hand to a nasty stump (it looks a bit like Borans’ hand did after Brundle hacked a corrosive enzyme on it in The Fly), but after a couple of more cosmic jumps hither and thither, her entire body is misshapen and covered in big, fat, pulsating pustules. (Come to think of it, that’s the same trajectory this lousy picture follows.)

Next up is “The Radio,” which stars AJ Bowen (The House of the Devil) as a scruffy security guard, Jerry, who lives in a crumbling, graffiti-covered apartment building that’s been virtually taken over by the scum of the earth. Though he carries a gun, he allows himself to be intimidated by his lawbreaking neighbors, particularly a pimp with an Eddie Murphy-ish grin and a huge, gold dollar sign hanging from his neck. One night Jerry buys a broken down radio from the same screwy bum who sold Alice’s pops the aforementioned remote from Hell. The radio begins to speak to Jerry in a womanly voice, giving him advice on, I dunno, stuff. It also tells him where he can find the pimp’s hidden cache of dead presidents. A fellow lodger gets wind of Jerry’s ill-gotten treasure and tries to break into his place to swipe it, but Jerry ain’t about to part with his ticket out of Crack City, so he sends the would-be thief off to meet his maker. Sorry to say, the girlfriend of the deceased witnessed the whole grisly scene, leaving our hero with no other choice but to tie her up and airhole her real horror show. Cue the tenacious homicide detective, who likes Jerry for the murders. And now Jerry and his radio must hatch a plan to… Er… Uh… Okay, I’m a little murky on where this all wound up going; the arms of Morpheus reached out to me and I’ll be damned if I could resist. Suffice it to say that this pseudo-“Twilight Zone” offering wouldn’t have cut the muster on UPN’s half-assed (and thankfully short-lived) revival of Rod Serling’s classic show. (CBS’s mid-‘80s “Zone” reboot was far more successful, if for no reason than William Friedkin fashioned one of the most riveting half-hours of episodic television ever with “Nightcrawlers.”) 

The evil remote control and radio were let loose on the street not by Mr. Scratch, but rather a local mad scientist known as Professor Dayton. As played by Emmet McGuire, Dayton comes off a screaming queen (the frames of his eyeglasses have multi-colored striping), so it’s a little jarring when we learn that he’s betrothed to some blonde dish instead of a towel boy from a Frisco bathhouse. In “The Professor’s Wife,” a couple of his former students, Charles and John (they could just as well be called Frick and Frack), have returned home for his wedding. Needless to say, the boys are in eye-rubbing disbelief over the old queen’s, er, old man’s good fortune. They conclude that the woman is just another one of the prof’s crazy inventions, so while he’s off running an errand, they deconstruct her—literally. Blood spurts everywhere as they hack off her limbs and yank out her guts, but even though nary a microchip is ever found, these geniuses refuse to concede that the woman they’re playing Boxing Helena with was actually built by God. This bit has a sort of perverse kick to it, but it doesn’t go anywhere—there’s no twist. And the moral was lost on me. Dayton may have deserved a good karmic paddling, but why did his bride-to-be have to pay the ultimate price for his transgressions?

“Alice” and “The Professor’s Wife” may leave you scratching your head, but “Call Girl” is much less ambiguous and its message is clearer. The title character is, of all things, a serial killer: when’s she’s not getting poked by her johns, she’s poking them—with a whopper of a knife! Why, she even offs a homeless gal who suggests that she should repent before JC comes back and puts his perfumed foot up her (admittedly well-formed) ass. You’ve probably noted by now that Creepshow 3 has something of an obsession with the down-and-out; they figure into just about every piece. In the atrocious “Haunted Dog,” an egotistical medico inadvertently kills a tramp after presenting him with a hot dog that fell in the street. (But we’re clueless as to how it does the poor bastard in. I mean, what kind of contaminant from the pavement could’ve choked off his life after just one bite?) Rest assured, the dishonorable doc gets his comeuppance when the beggar’s ghost hounds him to the brink of madness, and the murderous hooker gets hers when she tries to whack a customer who turns out to be a very thirsty vampire. But will the cretins who dumped this stinking mess on Creepshow fans ever get their comeuppance? I doubt it. They’ll probably just go on to make The Crazies II: Plagiaristic Bugaboo. 

October 31, 2010 

© Copyright 2010 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.