Super Movies! The one about a comic that never existed

 

Title: Creepshow

What Year?: 1982

Classification: Parody/ Mashup

Rating: That’s Good! (4/4)

 

Something I’ve pondered on and off for this feature is that there have been quite a few “comic book” movies that had nothing to do with superheroes. What’s truly counterintuitive is that this category includes a number of entries from the 1990s and even the 1980s, well before adult-oriented comics reached their current level of acceptance and “respectability”. For the current review, I’m getting to one of the earliest and most egregious examples, conceived as a tribute to a whole genre of comics that adult authority figures had willfully sought to wipe out of existence and out of memory. Here is Creepshow, the movie based on a horror comic that technically didn’t exist.

Our story begins with a framing scene of a father berating his son for reading a comic book, featuring not superheroes but tales of horror and the undead. The comic goes in the trash, and as the boy goes to bed fuming, a gruesome specter appears outside his window. The figure then leads us into a series of stories from the comic, beginning with a father who returns during a family reunion and a farmer who discovers a meteorite that unleashes a plague of rapidly growing vegetation. Things get more serious in the middle of a segment where a man puts his wife’s lover through a grueling ordeal. Then we have the tale of two academics who find a creature in the campus basement, and finally the ordeal of an obsessive-compulsive businessman who discovers that his high-tech apartment has more than an ordinary roach infestation. There’s still one more discovery in the morning, when the comic is found by the garbagemen with something missing…

Creepshow was the first of several collaborations between zombie-movie pioneer George Romero and author Stephen King, with the latter credited as screenwriter. The movie was based on 1950s horror comics like Tales From The Crypt (previously the basis for the 1973 anthology of the same name), a major source of the “moral panic” over comic books at the time, with the fictional Creepshow comic serving as a composite of the genre. The cast included Leslie Nielsen and Ted Danson as the husband and lover of the middle segment, Adrienne Barbeau of Swamp Thing as the wife of one of the academics, E.G. Marshall as the businessman, and King himself as the doomed farmer Jordy. The film was a moderate commercial success with a $21 million box office against an $8M budget, leading to a sequel Creepshow 2 as well as the Romero/ King anthology film Tales From The Darkside. The franchise was revived in 2020 with the Shudder TV series of the same name. (Creepshow 3 will by consensus be ignored.) Ironically, there has also been at least one Creepshow comic, based directly on the movie. The two King stories directly adapted for the film, "Weeds" and "The Crate", have never been collected in any of the author’s anthologies, though both have been reprinted elsewhere.

It should go without saying that I have long been familiar with Creepshow; however, I must say it took me a long time to appreciate it fully. It suffers from the unevenness common to anthologies, though the only one I personally dislike isn’t the one critics usually pick on. It also feels out of left field for anyone introduced to Romero by his zombie films, and without his usual flare for social satire/ commentary up to the final story. The real reason I haven’t reviewed it before, however, is that it just doesn’t “fit”, even among the ranks of genre-bending films I usually praise. It’s not exactly science fiction, though it comes closer than usually acknowledged, nor do I readily accept it as a zombie movie, at least of the weird and wonky variety I usually cover. I finally thought of reviewing this one after mentioning it in my reviews of The Nest and especially Two Evil Eyes, which brought me to the further epiphany that it “belonged” among comic book movies more than anywhere else. Thus, I bought it digitally for half again what I’m sure I had seen it for at other times, just to do this review while inspiration was fresh.

On any amount of consideration, the core problem for the reviewer is not to be overwhelmed. There’s so many good performances packed in, often portraying characters far more terrifying than the ghouls and monsters that appear. The highlight is Nielsen, still a little before his typecasting as a comedy goofball, a cold-blooded and steely-eyed villain with a worthy foil in Danson’s subdued tough guy. Barely behind, if at all, is Marshall as the businessman, at first charming in a horrible sort of way, with a ruthless controlling streak that becomes all the more apparent as he finds himself in a situation beyond control. The big surprise is King, in what is unfortunately by far his best direct contribution to the screen, with an impressive command of mannerisms and comic timing. (I must do something with Maximum Overdrive sooner or later.) Then I didn’t even mention Tom Atkins, previously sighted in Night of the Creeps, Lethal Weapon and Two Evil Eyes, perfectly playing the kid’s father in the framing scenes. I even like Barbeau as the hilariously appalling wife in “The Crate”, though I find the segment (and for that matter the original story) weak with a very generous “cringe” factor.

In all of this, the parts that have fascinated me from the first viewing onward are the second segment and the finale. It is these segments in particular that have always struck me as science fictional, the earlier one more obviously so. Here, the rural setting is realized concisely and rather too well, matched by King as a bumpkin whose wild fantasies top out at two hundred dollars. The already grim setting becomes outright apocalyptic with the onslaught of the clearly cheap butt incredibly vile alien weed effects, enveloping Jordy, his house and the landscape in short order. It is here, incidentally, that I find the film most acutely begs the question whether it is or should have been set in the Fifties. The businessman’s apartment is night and day but more than a fitting counterpoint, sleek, high-tech and blindingly white with speakers and control panels distributed throughout. The unsettlingly clean and brightly lit setting only accentuates the onslaught of the invading roaches, which could easily be taken as a psychological-horror creation of an unsettled mind. However, any intended ambiguity is quickly overshadowed by a relentless sense of physicality as the bugs are sprayed, stomped, crushed and blendered, invariably with graphic and lasting results. It all stands out in further contrast to the revenants of earlier segments, who tend to ignore the laws of physical reality when they don’t suit the story.

That brings me to the “one scene”, our introduction to the businessman as he conducts his actual business. He starts cheerfully enough to tell a subordinate to seek out a lady friend, quickly amending, “But wear a rubber, everyone has the herpes these days.” He then takes a call about the acquisition of a humiliated competitor, barely pausing when he learns the president committed suicide. Then he gets an unannounced call from the former rival’s widow, to which he responds, “Lots of people will rejoice when I’m dead, who are you?” While the grieving wife goes on with a string of threats and curses, he interrupts to ask, “Can you tell me who gave you my private number so I can fire him?” The women promptly says it was in the departed’s address book, and he hangs up with the comment, “Well, I can’t fire him.” It’s a perfect moment in a superb performance, at just the right point to set up the events that will unfold.

In closing, I can’t add much that others haven’t said already. This is an excellent film in its own or any other genre(s), certainly among the very best I am likely to cover for this feature. But the most important thing worth saying is that it tried to remind the public of an already bygone era when comic books were most definitely more than stories of superheroes supposedly for children. Even a superficial look at the underlying history will show a darker truth about the power of stereotyping: As in animation, it was the superficial perception that comics were “for kids” that malicious actors used to beat down the ones that tried to be anything else. Fortunately, we have come far past the point where puritans can pretend to believe that anything pushing the boundaries of a medium is a plot to corrupt the young, but it cannot be supposed that we will never be there again. In the meantime, we have one more reminder that  no film has to be “just” a comic book movie.