Ever wondered what a CREEPSHOW movie would look like by the makers of DAY OF THE DEAD 2 : CONTAGIUM? Here’s your chance! Like that ill-fated in-name-only sequel from Taurus Entertainment, CREEPSHOW 3 is a dispiritingly limp and embarrassing attempt to revive a Romero-driven franchise without gory George involved. That movie at least had a wealth of unintended laughs to make it mildly entertaining; this one opts for intended laughs and strains so hard to achieve them it’s painful to watch.
Some really chintzy looking CG animation provides a half-hearted framing story echoing the traditionally drawn animated skits that punctuated the earlier two movies. The movie’s only real tie to the CREEPSHOW universe other than the title is the fact that it’s an anthology flick; otherwise, there is no reference to the “Creep” character, nor is there any use of the EC-style horror comic that provided the stories to the 1982 and 1987 movies. Instead, the stories are linked by the fact that they unfold in the same town, where a tramp hands out cursed goods and characters recur in different stories (the detective at the core of the first story appears in the second, the call girl glimpsed in the second is the star of the third and so on).
In the opener, “Alice”, Stephanie Pettee has the title role of a teenage girl whose dad buys a universal remote that, when used, totally alters the identities of her horrible family. They act the same but, at the click of a button, become black, then Spanish…for no readily apparent reason. Also without any concessions to plot cohesiveness, the remote’s usage starts to mutate Pettee’s body and face. This variation on key episodes of THE TWILIGHT ZONE (“A Little Peace and Quiet”, “It’s A Good Life”) and CLICK aims for skewed humor and gross out make-up effects but its slapped-together messiness proves to be typical of the film as a whole, and the twist makes no sense whatsoever.
Expectations become low, then, for “The Radio”, in which down on his luck security guard A J Bowen buys a radio from a bum from which he starts receiving bizarre personal messages and instructions from a mysterious female voice. Innocuous at first, they eventually encourage him to murder. As with the first episode, this has nowhere to go from its one-note gimmicky premise and, out of all the five stories, contains the least actual horror.
By this point, intelligent viewers will have lost the will to live, and “Rachel The Call Girl” won’t reinstate it though, in the tradition of damning with faint praise, it proves to be the least useless of the lot. Here, nerdish skinny loser Ryan Carty hires busty escort Karen Agnes for $1000 not realizing she’s a serial killer with a penchant for male victims…though she gets more than she bargained for too. Carty turns out to be a toothy vampire creature in a twist telegraphed much earlier by a pan revealing some bound corpses in his dining room, unnoticed by Agnes. It’s not scary or very interesting, though there are mild nice touches like the gaudy red blood that spatters the camera lens during the climactic sequence.
“Professor Dayton’s Wife” has Emmett McGuire playing it to the hilt and beyond as the eponymous character, a long-time bachelor who announces his engagement to a vacuous, much-younger blonde whose cup size is roughly equivalent to her IQ. A pair of dumbass ex-students visit the Prof and become convinced that the perky woman is the Prof’s long-planned fem-bot. Naturally, to prove this, they do what any of us would do – they hack her to pieces…though in a too-late fashion they learn she’s very much human and merely a mail order bride. Set to goofy “comic” music and featuring the most grating of the movie’s generally dire, OTT acting, this astonishingly misguided episode is the most overtly comedic of the five but so heavy handed and dumb that you may be tempted to hack up your own body just in the vain hope that you won’t have to sit through any more of CREEPSHOW 3.
After this, about the only things you need to know about the final story, “Haunted Dog”, is that it features Kris Allen as an obnoxious, callous doctor who has recurring visions of a decaying spectre vomiting up a hot dog. It’s as good as it sounds.
Capped by a predictably pathetic punch line, this irredeemable sludge is a real insult to the good CREEPSHOW name. The earlier films, though no classics, were spirited, old-school horror anthology flicks with a nice balance of ghoulish Crypt keeper-style wit and gruesome physical horror. This mistakes mugging performances and silliness for humor, and stupid fake gore for horror. Of the many things that are deeply irritating about this movie, the relentless, elevator-style music will really, really piss you off.
-Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
