Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.
I can’t say I didn’t learn anything from Creepshow 3. For instance, I learned that, at some point, there must have been a Creepshow 2. I also learned that, unlike the first two Creepshow movies, the third one is not based on short stories by Stephen King. This is a good thing for him, as it saves him the trouble of having to file a lawsuit to have his name removed from the credits as he did with The Lawnmower Man. It’s not a good thing for us, the viewers, because King is someone who knows how to construct a horror story in the EC Comics mold, and the makers of Creepshow 3 could not construct a successful dump if you gave them three extra assholes.
Pardon my crudity but, after all, I just finished watching Creepshow 3, which is so crude it should be selling for $45 a barrel. Like the previous Creepshows, it’s an anthology film consisting of five loosely connected tales o’ terror. This time it took five different writers to come up with the stories, and if any of them had even a passing familiarity with EC Comics, I’ll eat my complete run of Tales From the Crypt. In fact, I’m not convinced that any of these scribes has ever read anything more challenging than the back of a cereal box. As a group, they don’t seem to understand that a good story is usually not simply a series of random events punctuated by gruesome bursts of gore – that a good story should have some sort of, I dunno, point.
Take the Creepshow 3 opener, “Alice.” The title character is a snotty teen who comes home to find that her father has purchased a new universal remote. Apparently he bought it at the same store Adam Sandler shopped at in Click, because this is a crazy remote that does crazy things! When he hits the “hue” button, Alice’s entire family turns black! When he pressed the button for subtitles, they all start speaking Spanish. And when he tries to get a better signal, Alice sprouts unsightly blotches all over her face and body. I guess this is her comeuppance for being such a brat, but it seems just a little disproportionate and out of left field.
In “The Radio,” a schlubby security guard buys a portable radio from a flea market to listen to the game, but instead all he hears is a female voice bossing him around. The first thing you or I might think to do in this situation is to turn off the radio or throw it out the window, but this guy just keeps following orders until he gets himself killed by the pimp down the hall. It’s just a bit unsatisfying that there’s no sort of logical progression or sense of building tension here – just a dumb guy getting dumber until he’s dead.
One story, “The Professor’s Wife,” at least boasts a promising kernel of an idea: an eccentric professor invites two ex-students to meet his new bride-to-be. The students become convinced that the professor has built himself a robot wife, and when the prof steps out to run an errand, they decide to prove it. Again, in the hands of King and original Creepshow director George Romero, this could be a giddily squirm-inducing premise, but in the sweaty grip of co-directors Ana Clavell and James Glenn Dudelson (Day of the Dead 2: Contagium), it’s just a repulsive mess.
Clavell and Dudelson save the worst for last with “Haunted Dog” – the dog in question being a bad hot dog – in which they inexplicably allow Toad the Wet Sprocket bassist Dean Dinning to run wild with his nonexistent improvisatory skills as an ethically-challenged doctor. Physicians found guilty of malpractice should be forced to watch this on a continuous loop; anyone without access to large quantities of prescription drugs should avoid prolonged exposure to Creepshow 3.
Previously on Unwatchable:
48. Cool as Ice
49. Laserblast
50. Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace
51. Simon Sez
52. In the Mix
