Synopsis
Five different horror stories play out in this film, though they are all loosely interconnected, in that main characters in one story put in cameos in another, and the same locations are revisited. A sullen teenage girl comes home to her fractious family to see her father struggle with a newfangled remote. It doesn’t change the TV channel, but does zap her through alternate universes. A young man living in a dilapidated building starts taking orders from his possessed radio. A serial killer …all girl encounters a vampire. And so it goes.
This utterly uncalled-for sequel is from the team who are responsible for Day of the Dead 2: Contagium, an act that made Baby Jesus cry. He’s weeping again with this release. The first Creepshow was a tribute to the EC horror comics of the 50s, and benefited from the combined talents of Stephen King, George A. Romero and Bernie Wrightson. It did nothing to redefine the genre, but it was good-humoured fun. Any connection this new effort has to comics is tenuous at best (an attempt is made with an opening cartoon that is indistinguishable from a million sophomoric Flash efforts out on the web). The stories lack any internal logic. As for what passes the film passes for funny, well, two guys dismembering a woman they think is a robot is hardly amusing. Evil Dead 2 is funny splatstick. So is Dead/Alive. This ain’t. The gore looks pretty convincing, though some of the other make-up FX are worthy of John Carl Buechler in the 80s, and that is no compliment.
Audio
In a word, LOUD. The surround elements for both score and sound effects aren’t bad, but everything is drowned out by the overwhelmingly deafening dialogue. Now, it’s true that this is perhaps better than having the dialogue drowned by secondary elements, but it isn’t as if this is deathless prose in the first place, and the it is so loud that the balance is out of whack, and some distortion creeps in.
Video
Generally, the picture quality is quite strong. There are some scenes where grain is more noticeable, and the colours (notably the skin tones) are decidedly pale. But for the most part, contrasts are good, the blacks are fine, and the image is decently sharp. Overall, the picture looks better than the movie deserves.
Special Features
There’s a making-of featurette, and that’s it.
Closing Thoughts
As effective a way of killing the horror anthology film once and for all as I can imagine.
Special Features List
- Behind-the-Scenes Featurette
