Creepshow (AMC edit)

Creepshow (1982) came on AMC early Sunday morning and instead of just looking for my copy I lazily just watched it from the recording instead. This was just right for my Sunday early afternoon. Just the profanity seemed to be censored, while the violence remained almost completely—if not completely—intact. At a summer camp during 1990, I was acquainted with this for the first time but I was still too resistant to horror films to watch it in whole. Just too scared, I guess. But I grew out of that shit. Anyway, this was often discussed during the 80s and 90s among King and Romero (and horror comic book) fans. It was traded among those of us who had it on VHS or recorded it from HBO. It was a favorite of mine when I didn’t have a copy and hit the rental store shelves in my small town. It was a chance for Romero to slide out of the shadow of the Living Dead films and do other things. Granted, it was only three years later and he was making another one. There is a little bit of everything in the film from rotted corpses rising from both the grave (thanks to bottle emptying liqueur) looking for a Father’s Day cake to drowned adulterers dragging seaweed and damp wet to the impressively technological abode of their murderer (insane jealous rage spawned by learning about the affair). There is a repulsive OCD businessmen living in a penthouse that is supposed to be hermetically sealed from pollutants or contaminants eventually besieged by roaches of different sizes who eventually burns of the creepy crawlies and a simple-minded , potty-mouthed farmer who touches a meteorite and infects himself with not just a green thumb but green-devouring body. And not to be bested is a professor who learns from his colleague at the University of an Arctic Expedition crate (found under a stairwell that seems to have been left there for well past a century!) containing a furry monster with so much sharp teeth it can’t close its mouth, soon feasting on a janitor and lab assistant who got too close for comfort…this professor, upon hearing about the monster from his terrified, hysterical friend, sees a chance to be rid of a boozing, obnoxious wife. My son, much like last year when I watched Night of the Living Dead (1968), couldn’t get enough of this, much to my trepidation. I mean, Hal Holbrook fantasizes about not only shooting wife Barbeau in the head (with folks attending a soirée for faculty at the college and their spouses clapping in applause!) but choking her with his tie. Leslie Nielsen’s sociopath with security cameras, monitors, televisions in every room, and plentiful VCRs shoots the two victims he left to drown slowly while buried up to their neck in sand on his purchased and secluded private beach, Danson and Ross over and over with silt, salty water pouring from the holes in their heads as they reach out for him, telling him he’d have to learn to hold his breath. The monster in the crate takes a bite out of one student after slashing his face with its protruding claws. Roaches burst from EG Marshall’s  corpse filling up a room…those who hate bugs/insects/roaches might find that bit of nasty business to much to handle. Not to mention you have Stephen King growing grass from his hands, face, and chest imagining his father in the bathroom mirror forewarning him not to immerse himself in a bathtub of water to satisfy the discomfort the meteorite goo has caused him thanks to the growth overtaking him. Ed Harris shaking his groove thang before a tombstone drops on his head, a twisted-off head on a platter serving as the Father’s Day cake an undead patriarch has been seeking out, Harrison’s potent score which isn’t just atmospheric when all the horror is displayed but also melancholy when need-be, Atkins’ abusive father receiving his own abuse from a son who orders a voodoo doll to get even with him, a cryptkeeper like ghoul levitating outside a boy’s window before animating into a host introducing sequences for each story in comic-book form, and Tom Savini as a garbage man who joins his buddy for a peek inside the discarded Creepshow comic: the film maintains its 80s cult status, sure to haunt many more October nights in the distant future. 4.5/5