Tag Archives: Stephen King

Creepshow 2 (1987)

Posted on October 21, 2024 | Leave a comment

creepshow2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Three stories of terror.

Due to the success of the 1982 installment Stephen King and George Romero got together to write a second script based on three of King’s short stories and directing duties were turned over to Michael Gornick who had been the cinematographer on the first one. The budget was much lower than the first, which hampered the special effects and critical reception though it still made $14 million at the box office and has garnered a cult following amongst contemporary audiences.

The first, which is the weakest, stars George Kennedy and Dorothy Lamour, in her last film appearance, as owners of a small-town general store that’s no longer making any profit. An Indian tribe elder (Frank Selsado) gives the couple a bag filled with jewelry as repayment for a debt and then later that night three hooligans lead by the long-haired Sam (Holt McCallany) rob the store and kill the couple. The three think they’ve gotten off scot-free, but then the cigar store Indian that stood in front of the store comes to life and avenges the couple’s deaths by murdering the three boys one-by-one.

This segment takes a while to get going and really doesn’t get interesting until the robbery happens, which should’ve occurred sooner. While the effects of showing the wooden Indian moving around is impressive as it really looks like he’s made of wood and not just somebody in a costume it would’ve been more intriguing had it not given away who the killer was. Simply shown the three being hacked by some mysterious, shadowy figure and then only at the very, very end alluded to it being the Indian.

The second story is better and deals with four college friends (Paul Satterfield, Jeremy Green, Daniel Beer, Page Hannah) going for a swim on a remote lake. They leave their car running and then all dive into the water and swim out onto a wooden raft, but then notice a black, gooey substance that surrounds them. The four feel trapped and when one of the young ladies puts her hand into the water the blob sucks her in and drowns her. The blob then seeps its way through the cracks of the raft and kills another one leaving only two left.

This one is genuinely creepy and I liked how it’s shot under a bright sunny sky making the area appear inviting and no need for anyone to be guarded until it’s too late. The constant shots of the running car sitting on the beach not far from where the swimmers are on the raft, but still unable to get to it, heightens the tension as well as the fact that there’s never any answer to just what this substance is, which in this case accentuates the intrigue. The only thing that I didn’t like is that after being stuck on the raft for an entire day the guy holding the sleeping girl lays her down onto the raft floor, but then uses the opportunity to undress her and admire her breasts, but I’d think with the situation they were in he’d be too exhausted and frightened to think about sex. The ‘twist’ at the end, which shows a No Swimming sign posted in a grove of trees, which the young adults hadn’t spotted, doesn’t totally work because if there’s no swimming in that lake then why would there be a wooden raft in the middle of it and who put it there?

The third story is the best and features a middle-aged woman, played by Lois Chiles, who goes on a drive late one night and accidentally kills a hitchhiker (Tom Wright) when her car goes spinning out-of-control. Instead of offering aid to the man she just drives-off, but then becomes plagued by visions of him constantly reappearing during the rest of her trip making her panic as she attempts to ‘re-kill’ the man, so she can be rid of him once and for all.

Initially this one seemed like a redo of the classic ‘Twilight Zone’ episode that featured actress Inger Stevens who went on a car trip and kept seeing the same hitch-hiker at various intervals on her drive, but this one takes it a step further by having Chiles use her car to literally smash the guy again and again, which gives it a gruesome over-the-top quality that deftly mixes in gore and black humor perfectly.

The film was set to have two other stories, ‘Cat from Hell’ and ‘Pinfall’, but due to budgetary limitations it was decided not to proceed with those and they were never filmed. In the ‘Cat from Hell’ one a hitman gets paid $100,000 to kill a cat that’s supposedly killed three other people. The ‘Pinfall’ one deals with competing bowling teams where the one team kills the other one, by tinkering with the van they ride in, and then the dead team coming back to life as zombies and killing the other team in unique ways by using things only available in a bowling alley, which sounded really cool and it’s a shame this segment wasn’t made as it would’ve been the best of the bunch.

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: May 1, 1987

Runtime: 1 Hour 30 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Michael Gornick

Studio: New World Pictures

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, Plex, Pluto TV, Tubi, Roku, YouTube

Leave a comment

Posted in 80's Movies, Black Comedy, Cult, Horror, Movies Based on Short Stories, Movies with Nudity

Tagged , , , , , , ,

Cat’s Eye (1985)

Posted on October 30, 2023 | 1 comment

cats

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Three stories involving feline.

With a screenplay written by Stephen King the film is made up of three of his short stories with two of them taken from his 1978 novel ‘Night Shift’ while the third one was penned directly for the screen. The only connecting thread is a stray cat and actress Drew Barrymore who appear in all three tales though only have major parts in the third one.

The first segment is called ‘Quitters, Inc.’ and involves James Wood playing the part of a man named Dick Morrison who is trying to quit smoking and enters an agency that boasts a high success rate of getting their clients to stop. It’s run by Vinny (Alan King) who tells Dick that if he doesn’t stop smoking instantly that they’ll kidnap his wife (Mary D’Arcy) and put her into a room where she’ll receive electrical shocks. To prove his point he puts the cat in the cage and then through a glass partition Dick witnesses the feline getting shocked, which is enough to scare him into quitting on the spot. Yet as the days progress Dick finds himself constantly getting the urge to light-up, but Vinny warns him that he has people who’ll be watching him and if he does dare to backtrack they’ll immediately grab his wife and bring her into the cage. Eventually though the compulsion to have a cigarette gets to be too much and he sneaks a puff only to then face the dire consequences.

This segment tries for black comedy, but doesn’t go far enough with it. While Woods, who usually excels as the twisted types, is quite good as the straight man, I couldn’t understand why he didn’t go the police when his wife gets taken, or why any of the other clients didn’t either, which should’ve gotten the business quickly shut down and the owners prosecuted for running an unethical operation. Famously brash comedian Alan King isn’t given enough leeway to allow his cantankerous persona to go full throttle though watching him wearing a white leisure suit and lip synch the words to the song ‘Every Breath You Take’ makes it almost worth it. It’s interesting seeing James Rebhorn in a bit part as a drunken business man at a party as he later had a prominent role in the movie The Game, which had a very similar storyline to this one involving a business that overtakes their client’s lives and is constantly watching them.

The second segment called ‘The Ledge’ involves a man named Johnny (Robert Hays) who must walk across a thin, outdoor ledge along a penthouse wall many feet above a busy street. If he succeeds then the penthouse owner, Cressner (Kenneth McMillan), will grant his wife a divorce and allow her to marry Johnny whom she’s been dating.

This story is the best one mainly because it has McMillan who is one of the finest character actors of all time and supplies his role with an amazing amount of energy and dark campiness. The scenes of watching Hays trying to maneuver his way on the ledge while being simultaneously attacked by a pigeon and at times McMillan who throws things at him out his window, is really terrifying. You feel like you’re on the ledge with him and I cringed all the way through this one, but in a good way as I really got swept up in it though the twist ending is a letdown.

The third and final segment called ‘The General’ involves a young girl living in North Carolina, named Amanda (Drew Barrymore) who takes in a stray cat much to her nagging mother’s (Candy  Clark) chagrin as she feels the animal may attack Amanda’s pet bird named Polly whom she keeps in a cage in her room. Amanda though likes the cat, whom she’s named General, because he scares away the evil troll, who’s the size of a rat and sneaks into her bedroom at night through a small opening in the wall to steal away her breath while also attacking Polly.

This segment has some interesting special effects, but it’s hard to tell if this is intended to be scary, or comical. It’s probably supposed to be a mixture of both, but I wished it went more for the scares since the movie, which gets billed as being a ‘horror’ doesn’t really have much of them otherwise. This segment also doesn’t really have any twist to it other than the parents finally believing that a troll really does exist in their daughter’s bedroom, but then telling her not to tell anyone about it, but why? It seems like if there’s one of them there could be others and the whole home should be inspected and fumigated and if I were the homeowner I wouldn’t want to spend another minute in there until it was, so having this family just forget about it and go back to normal didn’t seem like a normal response. The troll is also too reminiscent of the devil doll in Trilogy of Terror, which was far more frightening.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: April 12, 1985

Runtime: 1 Hour 34 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Director: Lewis Teague

Studio: MGM/UA

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

1 Comment

Posted in 80's Movies, Black Comedy, Horror, Movies Based on Short Stories, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Movies that take place in the South

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Tourist Trap (1979)

Posted on October 31, 2020 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Mannequins come to life.

A group of college kids go driving through the countryside in two separate vehicles. When one of the vehicles breaks down, Woody (Keith McDermott), the driver, decides to go off looking for a replacement to his flat tire. He finds an abandoned gas station and when he enters the backroom gets attacked by mannequins and flying objects. Later the young adults in the other car also have their vehicle break down near an old museum that features wax dummies and an eccentric owner named Mr. Slausen (Chuck Connors). Soon the same fate that befell Woody starts to occur to them one-by-one.

With the critical success of director David Schmoeller’s first film, the movie short The Spider will Kill You, which will be reviewed tomorrow, he managed to find enough funding to expand the idea into a feature film. The film though did not do well when first released and sat in virtual obscurity until Stephen King lauded it in his book ‘Danse Macabre’, which brought new attention to it and eventually garnered it a strong cult following. Now, I know everyone has their own unique ideas of what’s scary, but honestly I can’t see what King found about this that was so great.

To me it comes off as just another cheesy low budget slasher flick with very little that is original or interesting. Having the bad guy able to use telekinetic powers I thought was dumb. Why would this backwoods hillbilly be able to harness special powers that 99.9% of the rest of the world’s population doesn’t have? The original version of the script did not have the telekinetic powers present, but the filmmakers were forced to incorporate it at the behest of producer Charles Band, who refused to give the money for the project unless they did.

Chuck Connors, best known for his starring role in the TV-show ‘The Rifleman’, is a bit annoying and was the third choice for the role as the part had been offered to Jack Palance and then Gig Young first, both of whom would’ve been much better, but they turned it down. It’s not like Connors is necessarily bad, but he’s too campy and comes-off like just another tired rehashing of Ed Gein. The ultimate reveal of who the masked killer is offers no surprise at all and most if not all viewers will easily predict who it is long before you finally find out.

The cast of victims are boring too and I didn’t like the sexist undertones where the women, with the exception of the very end, never really fight back at all and almost seem to surrender to their fate and it’s only the men who show any gumption to escape and be aggressive. It would’ve been nice too had their been some nudity, as the females, particularly Tanya Roberts sporting a brunette hairstyle instead of her usual blonde one, look great. Most of these types of films would usually show some skin to help keep things interesting during the slow parts and when they all decided to go skinny dipping I was fully expecting this to happen, but instead you get nothing. Apparently Schmoeller, being a first time director, was too shy to ask them to remove their clothes, but it would’ve helped the film get the coveted R-rating as Schmoeller felt the PG-rating is what ultimately hurt it at the box office.

The only time things gets even slightly creepy is when the mannequins come to life, but that doesn’t happen enough. In retrospect the Mr. Slausen character should’ve been scrapped completely and instead featured a surreal storyline where the college kids find themselves trapped inside a warehouse filled with animated mannequins and forced to single-handedly battle them one-by-one in order to escape.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: March 16, 1979

Runtime: 1 Hour 30 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: David Schmoeller

Studio: Compass International Pictures

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video

1 Comment

Posted in 70's Movies, Cult, Horror, Movies with a rural setting, Slasher/Gore

Tagged , , , , , , ,

Creepshow (1982)

Posted on October 23, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Five stories of horror.

This film was the collaboration of Stephen King, making his screenwriting debut, and George Romero, who filmed the entire thing in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with many of the scenes done in an abandoned boy’s school. The production was a homage to the horror comics like ‘Tales of the Crypt’ and ‘The Vault of Horror’, which were published between 1950 and 1955 before being shutdown because they were considered ‘dangerous’ to the well being of children and contributing to juvenile delinquency.

The script consists of five stories with the emphasis more on camp than terror and outside of the cool comic book effects fall pretty much flat.  The first story entitled ‘Father’s Day’  comes off more like a one-joke skit and deals with an adult daughter (Viveca Lindfors) who kills her obnoxious father (Jon Lormer) on his birthday with an ashtray and then years later visits him at his grave site where his corpse comes back to life.

The second story entitled ‘The Lonesome Death of Jody Verrill’ should’ve been extended out more as it has some intriguing possibilities to it. It consists of a redneck (played with campy glee by Stephen King) who finds a meteor that’s landed in his backyard, but realizes to his horror that everything it touches grows a greenish foliage including on himself.

‘Something to Tide You Over’ is the third entry and it’s about a man (Ted Danson) being buried alive in the sand and then drowning as the tide rolls in. It’s shot in a way where the viewer sees the water rushing in from the victim’s point of view, which gives it a frightening quality, but suffers from having the victim  too easily lead into the trap and a twist ending that involves a metaphysical phenomenon, but with no suitable explanation for how it could’ve occurred.

‘The Crate’ involves an arctic monster being found inside a crate that was underneath a college stairwell. One of the professors (Hal Holbrook) uses this monster as a way to kill his obnoxious wife (Adrienne Barbeau), but the logic on this one is loopy. First how was the monster able to survive four decades inside a box without any food or water? Having him encased in a block of ice and then unfrozen would’ve been a little more plausible, but the story is further hampered by the casting of Barbeau, who’s too young for the part, which would’ve been better suited for a fat old bitty that was more Holbrook’s age. The biggest question though is why would Holbrook bank on the idea that the monster would kill his wife and not attack him first and why would the wife, or anyone with half a brain, be dumb enough to get tricked into driving all the over to the college campus and then crawling under the stairwell to begin with as the reason he gives her to do it is pretty dumb.

‘They’re Creeping Up on You’ has the most potential and a fun performance by Marshall, but ultimately gets botched. It’s about a rich Howard Hughes-like billionaire (E.G.Marshall) who lives alone in this fancy, hermetically sealed penthouse that gets overrun with cockroaches. Watching the roaches crawl around is creepy and apparently over 20,000 of them were used. Yet having them pile onto each other until they create a roach-like mountain loses the effect, many of them weren’t even roaches by this point but instead nuts and raisins. This segment would’ve been better had it been a fancy penthouse with all the elaborate furniture trappings as King intended instead of a white room with barely nothing in it. This story also features a dead body, which clearly looks like a wax dummy that ultimately ruins the intended effect.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: November 12, 1982

Runtime: 2 Hours

Rated R

Director: George A. Romero

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

Leave a comment

Posted in 80's Movies, Black Comedy, Campy Comedy, Cult, Horror, Movies based on Comic Books, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Movies with a rural setting

Tagged , , , ,