Census Bloodbath: You Don't Know Jack

Year:
1985
Director:
E.W. Swackhamer
Cast:
David Hasselhoff, Stepfanie Kramer, Adrienne Barbeau
Run Time:
1 hour 37 minutes

Plot: Terror at London Bridge (also known as Bridge Across Time) is somehow neither the first Jack the Ripper slasher movie of 1985 (that would be The Ripper) nor the first movie set at London Bridge in Lake Havasu City, Arizona (that would be Olivia - by the way, that bridge really does use the exterior masonry from the actual London Bridge).

Anyway, back in 1888 London, Jack the Ripper is being chased by the bobbies after his latest bloody murder. He is shot and falls into the river, knocking one of the bridge's stones down with him. In 1985, the final stone has been recovered and Lake Havasu City is holding a ceremony commemorating the official completion of the bridge, more than 20 years after they originally acquired it and built up a chintzy Little England tourist trap around it.

When traveler Alice Williamson (Barbara Bingham of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan) accidentally smears her blood on that stone, the spirit of Jack the Ripper is resurrected and he kills her. 

Her husband Dave's (Michael Boyle of Luther the Geek) frantic attempts to find her go unheeded by police chief Peter Dawson (Clu Gulager of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, The Return of the Living Dead, The Initiation, and Hunter's Blood) and local city council member Anson Whitfield (Lane Smith of Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Prison, and Night Game), but they do catch the attention of Detective Don Gregory (Baywatch's David Hasselhoff, who at the time would have been Knight Rider's David Hasselhoff), a Chicago transplant with a tortured past.

He tries to solve the case while also flirting with local fishing boat operator Angie (Stepfanie Kramer), whose librarian friend Lynn Chandler (Adrienne Barbeau of The Fog, Escape from New York, Swamp Thing, and Creepshow) finds herself flirting with two different oddly stiff British weirdos (David Fox-Brenton and Paul Rossilli) who are new to town, and either of whom might be the Ripper. Can Det. Gregory uncover the fantastical mysteries behind this case as the bodies continue to pile up?

Analysis: As you may have been able to surmise from my unusually long plot synopsis, there are a lot of moving parts in Terror at London Bridge. This isn't terribly shocking, considering it's a full-on sci-fi-fantasy slasher. But this is also the case because it's an NBC TV movie, so they had to lard up the plot with characters and incidents in order to fill time that might otherwise have been taken up by sequences of nudity or gore in a regular degular theatrical slasher movie.

That said, it's really not a half-bad mystery thriller, especially in its first two acts. There are quite a few reasons for this. One is its weirdly pedigreed cast and crew, which also includes the composer, who is six-time Oscar nominee Lalo Schifrin (of the Mission: Impossible theme, The Amityville Horror, The Seduction, and the original rejected score for The Exorcist).

Another reason is the fact that spending time with this cast of characters is actually mostly worth your while. David Hasselhoff's limited range does not lend itself to playing such a troubled character, but everyone around him believably inhabits their roles, resulting in the movie inexplicably becoming a solid slice-of-life drama that paints a compelling picture of how the townies at a tourist trap relate to one another.

Plus, the stalk-and-kill scenes that take place before the reveal of which character truly is Jack the Ripper (which is predictable and comes probably 20 minutes too early, but happens in a scene so eerie that it almost doesn't matter) have enough shadow-drenched melodrama and squeeze enough realistic "girl walks home alone at night" atmosphere from their scenarios that they are quite satisfying.

Unfortunately, the third act sputters and stalls when it turns into a classic "Hoff wears unbuttoned shirts and punches bad guys" extravaganza that lacks the zesty campiness of some of his other television roles. His scenes are also frustrating because they mostly involve telling us he solved a clue about the mystery without showing us. 

However, even with a lead who drags down the proceedings, Terror at London Bridge is quite charming, and manages to surpass both The Ripper and Olivia as the definitive installment in their weirdly specific subgenres. That maybe wasn't the highest bar to clear, but for a TV movie slasher this late into the 1980s, it's about as impressive as climbing Mount Everest.

Killer: The Ripper (Paul Rossilli)

Final Girl: Angie (Stepfanie Kramer) feat. Det. Don Gregory (David Hasselhoff)

Best Kill: There really isn't one, but the slit throat makeup is most lovingly displayed in Alice's death.

Sign of the Times: There's an E.T. poster proudly displayed on the wall of the library where Adrienne Barbeau's character works.

Scariest Moment: David Fox-Brenton's character Mr. Latting meets Lynn at the local House of Horrors, and invites her to go for a walk to discuss the nature of good and evil. Because red flags hadn't been invented yet in 1985, she says yes. However, as she walks, the things he says grow creepier and creepier and she desperately tries to find a way to get out of the conversation, only to be rescued and then menaced afresh by a different weird British man. 

Weirdest Moment: After an ad break, there is a brief interlude where David Hasselhoff is boxing while shirtless.

Champion Dialogue: “That's a theory, Gregory. That's all it is, it's a theory, and it's your theory, and I don't wanna see your theories in the newspaper!"

Body Count: 6

1. 1888 Woman is stabbed.
2. Alice Williamson has her throat slit.
3. Elaine is stabbed.
4. Kid is shot by Don Gregory in flashback.
5. Lynn has her throat slit offscreen.
6. The Ripper is shot.

TL;DR: Terror at London Bridge is surprisingly good for a mid-1980s TV movie slasher, but that doesn't necessarily get it as far as being a proper hidden gem.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1008

It Ain't Easy Being Green

[EN: Check out my collected writings on Wes Craven's works in the new "Wes Craven" page on the top bar or right here.]

Year: 1982

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Louis Jourdan, Adrienne Barbeau, Ray Wise

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

The early 80’s were a tough time for Wes Craven. A decade or so out from his terrifying debut The Last House on the Left, and half that from his grisly but mediocre sophomore effort The Hills Have Eyes, he just wasn’t finding purchase in Hollywood. In 1982 he was only two years off from altering the face of world cinema with A Nightmare on Elm Street, but for now his CV boasted the meager one-two punch of Deadly Blessing and Stranger in Our House, a TV movie with Linda Blair (yeah, we’re gonna get to that one).

So when he was offered the opportunity to direct a high profile superhero movie based on the DC Comics character Swamp Thing, do you think he would say no? Of course not. Superhero movies didn’t have quite the caché that they do today, but Superman had crushed box office coal into diamonds, so who was Wes Craven to tempt fate? Now, was the grindhouse horror director remotely equipped to handle an action-oriented blockbuster with a studio breathing down his neck and slashing the budget to ribbons so savagely they probably inspired Freddy Krueger?

Of course not.

In Swamp Thing, government scientist Alice Cable (Adrienne Barbeau) is sent to a remote research lab in the swamp to replace an injured worker during the last week of the operation. There she meets and becomes enamored with Dr. Alec Holland (Ray Wise), who is working with his sister to create a recombinant cell with both animal and plant DNA for… reasons. Science reasons. When the wicked Dr. Arcane (Louis Jordan) storms the lab to steal the formula, Holland is accidentally coated in it and falls into the swamp. This transforms him into the monstrous Swamp Thing (Dick Durock), and he sets out to save Cable from Arcane’s clutches, while he attempts to recreate the formula and use it on himself.

I mean, wouldn’t YOU want to look like this?

Swamp Thing represents a lot of firsts for Wes Craven. His first superhero movie. His first action movie. His first Wilhelm Scream. Of course, it also represents a lot of lasts because he would never do any of those things again. And while I’m delighted that he got a shot at operating outside of his horror wheelhouse before his single true departure from the genre in 1999’s Music of the Heart, it’s for the best that his action career didn’t go anywhere.

The sequences in the first act that develop character and build the world are pretty solid, but Craven’s script flails once the actual Swamp Thing is introduced. And yes, Craven himself got to write the script on this thing, because literally nobody gave a rat’s ass about overseeing comic book movies in the 80’s. But I digress. Swamp Thing’s powers are ill-defined (we don’t find out a key strength of his until the final 20 minutes, in which Cable sedately repeats it to him as if we should’ve known this the whole time) and his heroism is poorly staged, as Adrienne Barbeau wanders vacantly through the swamp, gets captured, and twiddles her thumbs until he leaps from the reeds to her rescue over and over and over again. It’s like Groundhog Day if Bill Murray were a damsel in distress.

The action sequences are spectacularly hammy, too. There’s a decent boat chase at one point, but every fistfight is as lumbering and slow as an old Godzilla movie, using that 40’s cinema standby of people falling down even though their opponent’s fist is clearly a foot and a half away from them. What makes this even more embarrassing is that most of the fight scenes involve David Hess, a participant in Craven’s most luridly brutal and realistic depiction of violence, in 1972’s The Last House on the Left. It’s a major stumble for a director who had found his voice, but hadn’t quite locked down his visual mastery yet.

Watching Swamp Thing, it’s almost impossible to believe this was only two years later.

The second and third acts range from boring to dreadful, but when Swamp Thing is good, it’s at least amusingly campy comic book fun. Wise and Barbeau have enough chemistry that I’m willing to go along with their preposterous love story, and though Cable is hardly an empowered female character, she gets a couple opportunities to kick an appropriate amount of ass. Then the comic-y flair comes in with the absurd squiggly wipes Craven uses to transition between scenes. And it’s impossible to completely hate a movie that has a scene where a character grabs the corner of their face and removes their impeccably lifelike Mission: Impossible mask.

Probably the single best element of the film is Jude, a ten-year-old comic relief gas station attendant who accompanies Cable on her Act Two journey. This is almost certainly damning Swamp Thing with faint praise, because he’d probably be the worst thing in any other movie, but the characters (played by Reggie Batts) exemplifies the best of Craven’s occasionally lever, quippy, and warm screenplay. Too bad he’s shunted to the side for a grand finale featuring this masterpiece. 

And I didn’t think any Craven effect could be worse than the werewolf in Cursed.

As you can see, Swamp Thing is no charmer. It’s a parade of shoddy special effects and circuitous narrative, plodding endlessly through a flat, tedious swamp. And the cherry on top is the score by Harry Manfredini, who – as he has with every other film he’s composed since 1980 – liberally slathers the film with shrill outtakes from his Friday the 13th score, smothering it with blunt strings that completely ignore the tone of whatever scene they’re in, blasting it into sub-slasher oblivion. Swamp Thing is a disappointment, but so were most comic movies of that era (Hell, DC is still churning them out). I’m not shifting the blame entirely from Craven, whose hands were all over this project, but the director took a shot at material he was wholly incompatible with. It’s an admirable venture but an unsuccessful one.

TL;DR: Swamp Thing is an admirable failure from a director ill-equipped to handle the genre.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1049

Tricks and Treats

Year: 2015

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I was very excited to see Tales of Halloween, a holiday anthology film that features a very unique group of indie directors and actors, many of whom I personally know. I learned a very important lesson from this screening: Don’t write reviews where your friends can read them.

Don’t get me wrong, the film isn’t awful, but the relative quality of each segment makes for some wild swings across either end of the spectrum. At the end of the day, it’s a fun flick with a real sense of community (cemented in by bucketloads of cameos and lots of crossover performers that highlight the fact that every story takes place in the same town) made for the most microscopic of budgets, so it can be forgiven  few flaws. There’s a patch in the middle that is a rough trudge to get through, but it comes out sparkly clean by the time the substantial credits roll.

What follows is a review of each individual segment in order, capped off by a ranking of the worst to the best.

Sweet Tooth

Director: Dave Parker

Cast: Daniel DiMaggio, Madison Iseman, Hunter Smit

A vengeful ghost pursues those who don't save him any Halloween candy.

Sweet Tooth is an excellent place to begin any proper Halloween anthology. It’s intrinsically focused on the childlike perception of the holiday as a night of sweet candy joy laced with spooky figures lurking in the shadows. It also introduces a compelling local legend, a boogeyman used to scare kids away from overindulging on treats. Sweet Tooth is simple, compact, and bloody, just right for a night of cinematic trick or treating.

Fun-Size Treat: One of the candies is called a Carpenter Bar, which is a sly reference to the Halloween auteur but probably doesn’t taste very good.

The Night Billy Raised Hell

Director: Darren Lynn Bousman

Cast: Barry Bostwick, Marcus Eckert, Christophe Zajac-Denek

A young kid attempts to egg an elderly neighbor's house and learns what a real Halloween prank is.

The Night Billy Raised Hell is an organic but regrettable follow-up to Sweet Tooth. It carries on that short’s sense of glib spooky fun with a stellar twist attached, but it’s over marinated in humor There are several reasonably diverting twists on Halloween pranks that escalate to absurd levels, but the short is marred by some truly unfortunate sound design. As the lead actor hams around like a Keystone stooge, wacky effects accompany his every move like he’s on one of those awful wacky radio shows. It’s an immensely frustrating, over-the-top approach to what could have been a taut, reasonably silly piece.

Fun-Size Treat: The final coda as the segment cuts to black is by far the best-timed punch line of the whole film.

Trick

Director: Adam Gierasch

Cast: John F. Beach, Tiffany Shepis, Trent Haaga

A group of drunk and stoned adults is beset by homicidal trick or treaters.

Here’s where things really start to backslide. Trick starts off strong with some deft Steadicam work and impeccable timing, but it swiftly degenerates into a nonsensical twist ending. The twist is bad enough, but it is introduced in a manner so ham-handed that it’s like an entire supermarket meat department topples over your head. This segment is the one where you really start to notice how the actors are indicating more than truly performing heir roles. This works for the basic, sketch-like nature of the film, which needs to set up each story ASAP, but makes the weaker entries even more unbearable to watch.

Fun-Size Treat: A friend of mine’s daughter is a trick or treater in this one, and she’s the most adorable punkin you’ve ever seen.

The Weak and the Wicked

Director: Paul Solet

Cast: Keir Gilchrist, Grace Phipps, Booboo Stewart

A young teen seeks revenge on the hoodlums that wreak havoc in the streets.

This teenybopper revenge tale is a right mess. I have literally zero bead on what the tone is supposed to be. The baddies are intended to be archetypes, but the flit from cliché to cliché without piecing any of it together. Are they dirt biking bullies? Anarchical hood rats? Straight-up sociopaths? Their motivations are obliterated by a startlingly weak reveal that undermines comprehension and ruins any catharsis that may have come out of the story.

Fun-Size Treat: The lead actor, Keir Gilchrist, will forever live in my heart thanks to United States of Tara.

Grim Grinning Ghost

Director: Axelle Carolyn

Cast: Alex Essoe, Lin Shaye, Barbara Crampton

A frightened woman thinks she's being stalked by a ghost who kills those who see her face.

This one’s a return to form following two incredibly weak entries. It’s not complex or particularly striking, but it’s eerie and enjoyable with some fun cameos (though I do feel that Barbara Crampton is cruelly wasted here). This segment has the strongest visual sense of the first half of the anthology, making smart use of shadow, silhouette, and encroaching fog to drive home the sense of being followed. The dialogue is a bit oversimplified (“Sh*t. Sh*t. Sh*t!”), but there’s excellent use of a song and the story clips by at a steady pace. Nothing to complain about here.

Fun-Size Treat: Lin Shaye!

Ding Dong

Director: Lucky McKee

Cast: Marc Senter, Pollyanna McIntosh, Lilly Von Woodenshoe

A barren woman forces her husband to act out a twisted Hansel and Gretel delusion while handing out candy.

Oh man. I almost didn’t make it through this one. The gender politics alone are execrable (a woman doesn’t have a baby, so she becomes a shrieking demonic harpy), but this entire segment is right next door to unwatchable. The wacky sound effects are back, this time accompanying an infuriatingly frequent shot of the lady adjusting her boobs before opening the door to children (why?), the scene frequently cuts to faux avant-garde shots of a four-armed demon lady (why??), and the acting brings to mind the bat guano shrieking of the John Waters-esque aunt from Sleepaway Camp. It’s a shrill, unappetizing descent into madness. Nestled within the various segments in this film, coming across Ding Dong is like the classic Charlie Brown scene: “I got a jumbo candy bar!” “I got a regular candy bar!” “I got a rock.”

Fun-Size Treat: The husband, who looks like he’s 14 years old, is too squeamish to say the word “vasectomy.” Maybe he IS 14.

This Means War

Director: John Skipp & Andrew Kasch

Cast: Dana Gould, James Duval

A polite, orderly neighbor attempts to shut down the raucous party across the street.

An overly simple story that goes absolutely nowhere, at least This Means War feels like a coherent anthology piece, albeit a slightly weak one. There’s a frankly astonishing amount of air guitar, which I’m pretty sure no human being had actually done since 1997, but other than that, this one slides in one ear and out the other.

Fun-Size Treat: The phrase “monster up” is used at though it’s slang that we’re actually supposed to know.

Friday the 31st

Director: Mike Mendez

Cast: Amanda Moyer, Jennifer Wenger, Nick Principe

A slasher villain is visited by a trick or treating alien.

If you survived the gauntlet that is the middle third of this anthology, you earned the bliss that is the next three segments. Friday the 31st is the weakest of the trifecta, but it’s a zany, gooey genre exercise with the world’s most adorable Claymation alien. The pure enthusiasm of this pieces even excuses the extremely silly Monty Python-esque effects, though I do wish that the climactic battle didn’t feel like such a turn-based, unvaried hack ‘n slash.

Fun-Size Treat: “Twick or Tweet!”

The Ransom of Rusty Rex

Director: Ryan Schifrin

Cast: Ben Woolf, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Sam Witwer

Two criminals attempt to kidnap a millionaire's son for ransom, but get more than they bargained for.

Now that’s what I’m talking about! With a classic anthology reversal setup, this segment is witty, exciting, and packed with Halloween cheer, propelled by two of the strongest performances of the entire film (American Horror Story’s Ben Woolf – may he rest in peace – and the lead kidnapper), The Ransom of Rusty Rex is quippy, over-the-top fun!

Fun-Size Treat: The millionaire is played by John Landis, director extraordinaire of An American Werewolf in London, The Blues Brothers, and Animal House.

Bad Seed

Director: Neil Marshall

Cast: Kristina Klebe, Pat Healy, Greg McLean

An evil jack-o-lantern stalks the streets, devouring those it comes across.

I suppose I intrinsically trust the director of The Descent, only one of my favorite horror flicks of all time, but I have good reason to. This segment is a great end piece to leave the film on a high note. With references to every other segment, Bad Seed simultaneously wraps everything up while telling its own outrageous story. The pumpkin monster is perfectly realized, and the gags produced from the detective’s pursuit of the monster are some of the best in the entire film. And their ending is a pitch perfect final note for both the Twilight Zone-y piece and Tales of Halloween as a whole.

Fun-Size Treat: Axelle Carolyn, Neil Marshall’s wife (and producer of Tales of Halloween/director of Grim Grinning Ghost) is shown being dragged away by cops in the police station.

Official Ranking:

#10 Ding Dong

#9 The Weak and the Wicked

#8 Trick

#7 This Means War

#6 The Night Billy Raised Hell

#5 Friday the 31st

#4 Grim Grinning Ghost

#3 Sweet Tooth

#2 Bad Seed

#1 The Ransom of Rusty Rex

Only the top six are worth watching, but that’s honestly a decent track record for this type of anthology.

TL;DR: Tales of Halloween is an uneven, but enjoyable ode to the October holiday season.

Rating: 6/10, quite literally in this case.

Word Count: 1639

Comic Relief

Year: 1982

Director: George A. Romero

Run Time: 2 hours

MPAA Rating: R

A five part horror anthology series based on the old EC comics like Tales From the Crypt directed by George Romero, written by Stephen King, and made up by Tom Savini, Creepshow is a classic horror fan's wet dream.

EC horror comics used to be all the rage in the 1950s, but declined in popularity due to a moral panic (gee, where have I head that one before?). Naturally, fans were outraged and Creepshow is at heart an enormous middle finger to the people who hoped those tales would never see the light of day again. These five stories and their overarching connecting story are all original stories (well, two of them were adapted from previously published shorts by Stephen King), but not a one of them would be out of place in the popular issues of yore.

Even more direct of a callback than the stories is the format itself. The editing, acting, framing, color design, opening titles, and even the poster are all deliberate homages to that lost style of storytelling. Think what Scott Pilgrim vs. the World did for classic video games, but twenty years earlier.

But let's let this clever, campy, and imaginative film speak for itself as we dive on into the individual stories.

"Prologue/Epilogue"

Cast: Joe Hill, Tom Atkins, Tom Savini

In this brief setup story, Billy, a young boy (Hill, Stephen King's son), is harangued by his father (Atkins) for reading filth like those daggum horror comics. He tosses his son's beloved entertainment in the trash, but a nighttime visit from The Creep allows Billy (and us) to revisit his favorite stories, and when his mail order voodoo doll comes in the mail, he puts it to good use.

As if the entire nature of the film wasn't enough, this segment fully drives in the "screw you, comics-haters" vibe.

"Father's Day"

Cast: Carrie Nye, Viveca Lindfors, Ed Harris

A fairly straightforward piece, this segment details the story of a murdered man returning from the grave on the anniversary of his death to wreak havoc on a party thrown in his honor by his killer and the family members that benefitted from his will. This sequence is the most similar to the slasher craze that had begun but two years before.

"Father's Day" features some of the loopiest comic strip sequences, especially during the flashback to the father's murder in which a car zooms in and out of two panels and images slash across the screen diagonally while framed by vibrant colors. In addition, the night is lit by a sheer blue glow that is reminiscent of the overwhelmingly technicolor masterpiece Suspiria.

The zombie makeup is pretty cheesy, as should be expected of a movie from this time period, but Savini is not one to mess around and details like the gooey tendrils holding the monster's skeletal jaws together are masterful.

"The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill"

Cast: Stephen King, Bingo O'Malley

Verrill (King), a young hermit who presumably lives in the Deep South, discovers a meteor that has crashed into his back field and accidentally cracks it open, getting himself covered in a milky secretion. When he imagines the possible outcomes of his discovery, his wacky fantasy life is reminiscent of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. 

Unfortunately, the goo appears to have the adverse effect of turning him into a living plant and he is driven to madness by his transformation and the reappearance of his late father. King proves himself to be a strangely reliable actor, hamming it up in a role that reminds one of Jim Carrey in his prime.

Not to be outdone, this segment is also awash in bright technicolor light, this time green to represent, you know, the plants.

"Something to Tide You Over"

Cast: Leslie Nielsen, Ted Danson, Gaylen Ross

Whereas "Father's Day" was more of a slasher riff and "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill" had a determinedly sci-fi bent, "Something To Tide You Over" definitely feels more like a precursor to psycho trap movies like Cube, Nine Dead, or the Saw franchise.

This segment is easily the most star-studded with Nielsen (Airplane!, Prom Night, The Naked Gun) playing a madman torturing his cheating wife (Gaylen Ross, who appeared four years earlier in Romero's classic Dawn of the Dead) and her young lover, played by Ted Danson (Cheers, Bored to Death) by burying them up to their necks in the sand and letting the tide wash in.

Naturally, the story doesn't end there as things take a turn for the supernatural, mostly lit in a vivid shade of aquamarine.

"The Crate"

Cast: Adrienne Barbeau, Hal Holbrook, Fritz Weaver

A janitor discovers an old crate sealed with chains tucked beneath an old staircase at the university. Its label would imply that it's over 170 years old and may contain artifacts from the Arctic Expedition. When he and a stuffy old professor open it and release the beast inside, his friend Henry (Holbrook) catches wind and must decided whether to detain the beast or utilize its frenzy to get rid of his overbearing wife (Barbeau).

This segment with it's "monster from the arctic" theme would seem to be an homage to John Carpenter's The Thing, released earlier that same year. This idea is cemented in by the crate's label - "via Julia Carpenter" - and the presence of Adrienne Barbeau who had previously worked with the director on 1980's The Fog, 1981's Escape From New York, even appearing The Thing itself in a small cameo.

This segment is the most thematically resonant, with the monster representing Henry's internal desires and rage, augmented by the garish red light that accompanies his dark fantasies and the monster's evil doings.

Tom Savini gets his best work in this segment with a fabulous clawing of a young student's face.

"They're Creeping Up on You!"

Cast: E. G Marshall, David Early

Wow, they really saved all their F-bombs for this one. E. G. Marshall (12 Angry Men) plays a callous businessman whose latest buyout led a rival to suicide. Not at all haunted by this, he is rather more worried about the vermin problem in his pristine penthouse apartment.

Cockroaches appears in larger and larger numbers as he does all he can to squash and spray in between shouting matches with his super. After a citywide blackout, the bugs swarm and overwhelm him in what is, at least to me, the most truly terrifying moment in the film.

Absolutely skin crawling.

Some of Creepshow's segments are more complex than others, but they all maintain the relative simplicity common to comics narratives as they parade a variety of horrors, blaring colors, and talented actors eating it up in supremely over the top campy roles.

Creepshow is horror distilled, perfectly capturing the essence of the childlike wonder of experiencing those EC spooky stories for the first time. The true definition of a cult classic, it's just a whole lot of fun, and the people working on this project were the best and brightest the genre had to offer at the time.

Segment Ranking:

#5 "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill"

#4 "Father's Day"

#3 "They're Creeping Up on You!"

#2 "Something to Tide You Over"

#1 "The Crate"

TL;DR: Creepshow is a living comic book and a rowdy and campy horror classic.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1236