CERT: 15 | PLATFORM: BLU-RAY | RELEASE DATE: JULY 13TH
How do you follow up the greatest anthology movie in the history of horror? Well, you don’t do what 1987’s Creepshow 2 did, that’s for sure.
Consisting of three separate horror offerings penned by George A. Romero and Lucille Fletcher, and based on Stephen King stories, here we have Native American trinkets at the centre of Old Chief Wood’nhead, the gooey threat of The Raft, and the unrelenting car crash carnage of The Hitch-hiker. Of course, all are tied together by short sequences headed up by the Creep (genre fave Tom Savini).
All of these stories look to scare the pants off the audience, yet none of them manage to successfully hit in the right way. They do all manage to start in a promising manner, but it’s not long before that promise and potential descends into bland and formulaic territory.
Sadly, Creepshow 2 never quite hits in the same way as its predecessor. Obviously, that was always going to be a tall task, given the sheer quality of that 1982 film, but one of the main issues of this sequel offering is that its stories just seem too long and stretched out.
Rather than keeping each individual story to the brisk 20-ish minutes of Creepshow, the biggest downfall of Creepshow 2 is that it instead opts to centre on just three stories that clock in at 30-minutes apiece. And frankly, none of the three tales are engaging or interesting enough to be allotted a half-hour spot. Would the stories have worked better with a reduced time? Absolutely. Would they have all of a sudden become great terror tales? That’s debatable.
On the plus side, Creepshow 2 does feature some impressive practical SFX work on display, and things get particularly gnarly in The Raft. Likewise, Lois Chiles puts in the feature’s standout performance in The Hitch-hiker. Unfortunately, good gore and the odd solid turn can only get you so far, and the end result for Creepshow 2 is a movie that’s shockingly dull.
The new 2K restoration of the movie makes it look better than it ever has, and there’s a huge amount of great special features included on this typically crammed Arrow Video release – including a booklet of new writing on the sequel and some fresh interview content for die-hard horror hounds – but this really is only a release for the completists out there.
