Creepshow 2 (1987)

I didn’t exactly do cartwheels over the first Creepshow, but I admit that it had its moments.  Any collaboration between Stephen King and George Romero, even when it doesn’t work, has to yield something that is at least memorable.  That first movie, an anthology of icky horror stories written by King and Romero were designed as an homage to the classic EC comics of their youth, was generally a mess but it was a fun mess.

Creepshow 2, also a collaboration between King and Romero, is also a mess but without the benefit of being fun.  It feels like over-baked leftovers.  It suffers from the same problem as the first in that the segments run too long – the difference is that here they are ragingly predictable and wear on your patience.

Take, for example, “The Raft”, the story of a group of twenty-somethings playing teenagers who go out on a raft in the middle of an abandoned lake and are menaced by a sinister . . . oil slick?  Blob?  Whatever it is, it won’t let them back to shore and they are picked off one by one.  The Final Guy yields the segment’s surprise but it’s not really a surprise, more of a perfunctory conclusion.

The second, “Old Chief Woodn’head” is predictable before it even gets started.  It takes place in a small dustbowl town where George Kennedy is a shopkeeper who is married to Dorothy Lamour and has dreams that someday the town will come back to its former glory.  Then, one night, they are accosted and murdered by three very talky criminals.  That’s when the old cigar store Indian in front of Kennedy’s shop comes to live in order to exact revenge.  My question of course, why didn’t he come to life before the couple was killed?

The third is called “The Hitchhiker” and stars Lois Chiles as a woman who is late leaving her boyfriend to pick up her husband at the airport.  In a caustic, but woefully underused, statement against the 1% she drives her Mercedes Benz too fast runs over a hitchhiker, and leaves him in the road to die.  What happens I won’t spoil but I can say that this is the best of the three and might have made a feature all its own.

The movie pales in comparison with what is floating around the TV and video.  It has none of the creepy vibes of HBO’s “The Hitchhiker” or the far better Deadtime Stories nor “Tales from the Darkside”.  Creepshow 2 feels late to the party, all dressed-up with nowhere to go.