Creepshow

 

   Happy Spooky Month, everybody! In the spirit of Halloween, I will do a review on this amazingly scary movie made by Stephen King and the late George A. Romero. A movie entitled Creepshow. This movie is a series of five short scary stories written by Stephen King in the form of a comic book. Starring an all-star cast including Leslie Nielsen, E.G. Marshall, Adrienne Barbeau, Ted Danson (Cheers), Ed Harris (Christof from The Truman Show), Hal Holbrook, and even Stephen King himself! (Crazy, I know!) 

  Father's Day: In our first spooky story, we deal with a demented old man returning from the grave to get his Father's Day cake he kept whining about, and his daughter refused to give it to him and murdered him.

  The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill: Stephen King plays a not too smart farmer who discovers a meteor that fell in his field. What he didn't realized until later was that the meteor turns everything into plants... including him! 

  Something to Tide You Over: This story is my favorite. A vengeful husband buries his wife and her lover up to their heads in the sand on the beach and leaves them there to drown by the high tides. Later, they come back as underwater corpses and get revenge on the husband. 

  The Crate: A college professor chooses his mean and nagging wife to be the bait of a strange and scary human eating monster that lives in a crate that was hidden under the steps of the college for almost a century. 

  They're Creeping Up On You: In this last story, a millionaire who has a huge phobia of bugs becomes the prey of hundreds of thousands of cockroaches. This story will be intensively gross. 

  The tagline for this movie was "The Most Fun You'll Ever Have Being Scared". Boy, was that right, because I had fun being scared at this Stephen King masterpiece. I love the fact that the visuals were emulating the art styles of the old comic books from the '50s, which was the inspiration for the movie. I mean, it's like a comic book on film. Pretty cool. 

  My favorite story, as I mentioned, was the one about the high tides. Leslie Nielsen played a really dark character compared to his other performances. But what I loved in this story was when the intense part of Ted Danson and Gaylen Ross were drowning from the tides, and the shot of Ted Danson's head underwater, no longer able to hold his breath any longer, with the red and blue lighting in the background. (You see those color hues a lot in the movie whenever something scary comes up.)

 

This is almost as scary as the shot of Jack Torrance frozen to death in The Shining. 

If you want a great Stephen King flick for Halloween Night, check out the original Creepshow movie. Also, check out the TV series of Creepshow on AMC and Shudder Network. 

Parent's Guide: Like most Stephen King movies, this is rated R for lots of scary content. I don't think kids at the age of five or six should see this. Especially the cockroach story. This movie could give little kids nightmares. 

Did You Know?: The little boy at the beginning and end of the movie is actually Stephen King's son, Joe Hill. Hill would later follow his dad's footsteps and become a bestselling author and later write a story for the Creepshow TV series. A marble ashtray is seen throughout the movie. Stephen King was told to play Jordy Verrill like Wilie E. Coyote from Looney Tunes, the way his face looks when he's about to fall off a cliff. (You know that look.) While on break, Stephen King took his son, Joe to a McDonald's for lunch and as a joke, Joe was made up with a bunch of bruises, cuts and scabs. The drive-thru girl freaked out and called the cops on them.

Can you believe that this is Stephen King's son as Billy??