Horror movie fans of a certain again look back fondly on the late 60s/early 70s when rival British studios Hammer and Amicus established their names in the genre with a series of anthology films with titles such as Tales from the Crypt, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, Asylum, Torture Garden, From Beyond the Grave, and many more. Over the years, Hollywood has tried to re-start the genre with films like Cat’s Eye, Two Evil Eyes, Nightmares, The Monster Club, and most recently the shamefully overlooked Trick ‘r Treat (which was finally given a video release after being on the shelf for a couple of years). The usual complaint for a movie is that it’s too long, but these films had to tell a story within about 25 minutes before moving on to the next one with some kind of linking narrative to keep the stories flowing.
My favorite of the horror anthologies (and I do recommend Trick ‘r Treat very highly) is the Stephen King/George A. Romero collaboration, Creepshow. The film used a great gimmick as the format to tell the stories. In the old movies, it was usually someone telling the stories in some way, but Creepshow used a comic book as its storytelling device. The film opens with a boy (King’s son!) reading his Creepshow comic and for each segment, the comic panels come to life and returns to comic form as the page turns to the next segment. What I really love about Romero’s style here is his replication of the comic book style for the “stinger” shots at the end of each story. Here the backgrounds change to a bright, primary color or have some kind of graphical element like a spiral that gives the shot a real comic book panel look. That really is my favorite part of the movie.
The stories themselves run the gamut from mediocre to great. The first story, “Father’s Day,” about an old man who wants his birthday cake but is murdered for being annoying about it, sets the tone with a lot of humor and a gruesome stinger. Carrie Nye gets to deliver her lines with the drollest of humor, and Ed Harris (just on the verge of becoming a star) gets squashed by a tombstone. The second story, “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill,” stars Stephen King as a farmer who finds a meteroite that oozes some kind of liquid that eventually turns him into a giant clump of grass, is probably the least successful of the bunch and more sad than scary. Chapter three, “Something to Tide You Over,” stars Leslie Nielsen and Ted Danson in a typical romantic triangle revenge story with a creepy twist, and chapter five, “They’re Creeping Up On You,” stars E.G. Marshall as a rich, old kook who has basically sealed himself in his apartment to keep the germs out … except something always manages to find a way in, and the ending of this episode always had audiences screaming and squirming.
My favorite episode of the movie is the fourth story, “The Crate,” with Hal Holbrook, Adrienne Barbeau (reuniting after 1980’s The Fog) and Fritz Weaver. In it, Holbrook and Weaver are friends and co-workers at a university and Barbeau is Holbrook’s bitchy wife, Wilma. She’s just an awful person, always degrading her husband, his friends and just about anyone else she sets her sights on, and her ever-present cocktail doesn’t help matters. When Holbrook’s character, Henry, finds a crate under a set of stairs and discovers that the contents are still very much alive, he hatches a plan to lure Wilma to the school to introduce her to his new friend. Barbeau gives a great performance as one of the worst human beings you’d ever want to meet and Holbrook plays the mousy husband to perfection. Romero builds the suspense nicely as Wilma crawls under the stairs — she thinks Henry’s friend has done something terrible to a coed — and meets Fluffy (the name of the creature during production). It’s all suspensful and funny, and probably the one scene I watched over and over again while I was working at the local cineplex showing the movie (that’s me in the plaid shirt as Jordy Verrill — I designed and painted the frame too, which was used so people could have a picture taken with our own grass monster for charity).
Creepshow has its highs and lows, but is pretty successful overall and a great movie to enjoy on Halloween.
Trivia Treats:
Clacked by Chuck Duncan 
on Oct 15, 2011 @ 09:00 EST5EDT
