CREEPSHOW: 4K UHD Blu-ray (Warner Bros., 1982) Shout!/Scream Factory

The common misconception is Creepshow – the movie (1982) is based on a popularized comic book/horror franchise when, in reality, the franchise directly followed this weirdly satisfying George A. Romero-directed anthology, written by Stephen King, marking his screenwriting debut. Viewing Creepshow today, one is immediately startled by how much of it holds together under revised scrutiny. Times have changed. And horror movies in general either tend to enter immortality under a quaintness for the effort poured into their movieland macabre now turned to vinegar, or, most commonly, because of their fatal and timely unintelligence that, with maturing tastes, becomes even less plausible and more idiotic. That has not happened to Creepshow.  The picture’s ensemble has some interesting one-time/hit-makers and has-beens to recommend it: Ed Harris, Hal Holbrook, Ted Danson, Adrienne Barbeau, Fritz Weaver, Leslie Nielsen, Carrie Nye, E. G. Marshall, and Viveca Lindfors. Perhaps, best of all, we get Stephen King in the flesh – or rather, as transformed into lime-green, fuzzy/toxic Kudzu after an encounter with a meteor from outer space. Much of the picture was shot in Pittsburgh, utilizing the grounds of an abandoned all-girls prep school in Greensburg as well as Carnegie-Mellon University, and Island Beach State Park in New Jersey. And while we can muchly recommend Michael Gornick’s atmosphere-evoking cinematography – a cross between American gothic and Transylvania burlesque – what makes Creepshow so gosh-darn amusing today is Romano’s verve for the storytelling, never to take either the tales being told, or the movie’s deliberately cheesy special effects too seriously. As such, the audience is ‘in’ on the joke. This is horror with an edge, or, as publicity first suggested in 1981, “the most fun you’ll ever have being scared!”

Creepshow’s wide release garnered an impressive $21,028,755 at the box office, ousting First Blood as the top draw and making it the highest-grossing horror flick of its year. The movie’s infectious blend of exaggeratedly staged, crass silliness also lent more than an ounce of creative ballast to the ghoulish nature in the exercise. So, Creepshow is as much pure camp as it pays deference to the scare-tactics of a good fright night after the houselights fade – the pleasure to be derived, that of a carnival dark ride as Romano and King pivot the audience through five unrelated tales of terror – each, with a twist all their own. The show is book-ended (pun intended) by a pro- and epi-logue concerning a young boy, Billy Hopkins (played by King’s son, Joe) set upon by an abusive father, Stan (Tom Atkins) to stop reading sleazy horror comics.  In the first vignette - ‘Father’s Day,’ Sylvia Grantham (Carrie Nye) meets her nephew, Richard (Warner Shook), niece, Cass (Elizabeth Regan), and Cass’ hubby, Hank Blaine (Ed Harris) – the family gathered for a ritual feast to commemorate the third Sunday in June. In wait of this celebration, Slyvia regales everyone with the tale of how their Aunt Bedelia (Viveca Lindfors) murdered her father, Nathan (Jon Lormer) a crude and parsimonious authoritarian, to have accrued the family’s wealth through ill-gotten gains. Bedelia’s arrival at Grantham Manor is thwarted when she accidentally spills whiskey on Nathan’s grave – the rotting corpse emerging to strangle her. Nathan then sets about disposing of the rest of the family – one at a time, serving up Sylvia’s head on a platter to Cass and Richard.

In the second vignette, The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill, we are introduced to the titular country bumpkin (played by Steven King) who, upon observing a meteorite to fall from the sky at dusk, pokes it until it splits in two, unleashing a devastating toxin that spreads like kudzu across Jordy’s land and house. Eventually, the ravenous plant consumes Jordy as well, forcing him to take his own life with a double-barrel shotgun.  In the third vignette, Something to Tide You Over, we meet Richard Vickers (Leslie Nielsen) a spiteful millionaire who confronts, Harry Wentworth (Ted Danson), the stud with whom Vickers’ wife, Becky (Gaylen Ross) has been having an affair. Vickers goads Harry into accompanying him to the beach where Becky is, supposedly, in fear of her life. But once there, Vickers forces Harry at the point of a gun to bury himself up to his head in the sand, waiting for the incoming tide to drown him. He also reveals to Harry, a similar fate has already befallen his unfaithful wife. Observing their demise with the aid of a video monitor, Vickers is unprepared when the bloated corpses of Becky and Harry come back to life to exact their revenge.

In, The Crate, university janitor, Mike Latimer (Don Keefer) discovers a suspicious storage box while cleaning out the basement. Notifying Prof. Dexter Stanley (Fritz Weaver), taking him away from an academic mixer upstairs, the event is left to kindly Prof. Henry Northrup (Hal Holbrook) and his loud-mouth/alcoholic wife, Wilma ‘Billie’ (Adrienne Barbeau). Billie’s ruthless humiliation of Henry leave him fantasizing about various ways to kill his wife. Meanwhile, Mike and Dexter have inadvertently unleashed a hairy, ape-like creature with sharp fangs from the crate in the basement. It easily devours Mike, leaving a terrorized Dex’ to relay the brutal slaying to grad student, Charlie Gereson (Robert Harper), who remains skeptical. Too late, Charlie is also assaulted and murdered by the creature. Hurrying to Henry’s home after Billie has already gone out for the evening, Dex pleads with Henry to help him dispose of the creature. Believing he has found the ideal way to murder his wife, Henry lures Billie to the lab while drugging Dex with sleeping pills. Not believing Dex’s story, Henry writes a confession note implicating Dex in the disappearances of his wife, Charlie and Mike. The creature emerges and devours Billie. The next day, Henry lies to Dex about the creature’s recapture; sunk to the bottom of the sea. Only, the creature is now seen escaping its watery grave, presumably to return to its old stomping grounds to continue its carnage.

In the final vignette, They're Creeping Up on You!, a reclusive businessman, Upson Pratt (E.G. Marshall), suffering from mysophobia, is informed by his subordinate, George Gendron, that the corporate takeover of a rival company has forced its owner, Norman Castonmeyer, to commit suicide. The news perversely pleases Pratt. Alas, during their conversation he spies a cockroach. One become many. As Pratt receives phone calls from Castonmeyer’s widow and others, he begins to suspect a conspiracy of bug infestation, deliberately designed to make him go mad. A blackout in the building forces Pratt to take refuge in his ‘safe room’ which proves to be anything but. A mass of cockroaches descend upon Pratt, inducing a fatal heart attack. The building’s handyman, Mr. White (David Early) is unable to reach Pratt in time. After discovering Pratt’s body, it bursts open with cockroaches crawling from every orifice. We return to the Hopkins’ house early the next morning as two garbagemen discover the Creepshow comic discarded in an ash can the night before, noting an ad for a voodoo doll has been redeemed. Inside the house, young Billy uses the doll to torture his father to death.

Unlike 90% of all horror movies made in the last 50 years, Creepshow preys upon our genuine fears of commonplace phobias (bugs, death, ghosts, drowning, etc.) rather than relying on the usual bing-bang of super-human evil or alien creatures from another world, on which to extract its dread.  Undeniably inspired by the 1950’s comic book serial, ‘Tales from the Crypt,’ Creepshow weaves its spell of living horror into an uneven, but never dull web of deceit and danger, terror and tease.  The temptation to go for all-out gore is tamped down by the filmmaker’s tongue-in-cheek approach to the more gruesome moments. So, head-snapping, maggot-infested, rotting corpses or recently drowned/seaweed-dampened cadavers coming back to life are counterbalanced by curmudgeonly and chauvinistic jabs of silliness and cynicism. George A. Romero, whose perennially revived horror classic, Night of the Living Dead (1968), skewed toward ‘legit’ horror lore depicting a zombie apocalypse, has, in Creepshow, created a outlandishly gratifying caricature of what makes legit horror tick. The picture is permeated with an almost biblical ‘vengeance is mine’ bent, as virtually all Creepshow’s victims are otiose, self-serving, avaricious bottom-feeders who pretty much deserve what they get. So, what George A. Romano and Stephen King have created is a morality play in which unforeseen circumstances exact their pound of flesh via the ancient cliché about karma being a bitch. Does it come off as it should? Actually - it does, and, in a way too few latter-day copycats have been able to reproduce.

Creepshow arrives in 4K via Shout!/Scream Factory’s new ‘collector’s edition. This set also includes a new to Blu master, derived from the same 4K elements. The heavy lifting here has been done by Warner Bros., the custodians of this catalog title. So, how does Creepshow look? For the most part – exceptional.  Addressing the elephants in the room: owing to primitive, pre-digital compositing, all the opticals and live action/animation matte work here is more softly focused, with amplified grain to really soften the image while adding undue grit to the visuals. There are also instances where age-related artifacts (dirt, dust, etc.) rear their ugly heads, though never to entirely distract from this presentation. Creepshow has been struck from an original camera negative. The only way to improve upon the aforementioned would have been to rediscover all the raw elements that went into creating these opticals, scanning them independently, and then recompositing them digitally – a thoroughly cost-prohibitive exercise and unrealistic expectation, even if such archival elements were in excellent condition.

Moving on. Color saturation is remarkable. Director of Photography, Michael Gornick has supervised the 4K mastering process, helping to massage the use of color-specific lighting and filters so that some of the scenes that failed to completely match when the film was initially assembled for its theatrical release, now have a more homogenized visual continuity from shot to shot and scene to scene. Important to note, this effort is not a reimagining of the visual style, but a subtler effort to gently create a consistency to its overall presentation. Contrast is excellent, even during the darkly lit, night sequences. Overall, the image is crisp, with beautifully rendered colors. Matte work is more transparent. There are 3 audio options to consider: original 2.0 DTS, a 5.1 upgrade previously available on both DVD and Blu-ray releases, and now, a Dolby Atmos 7.1, which just seems like overkill (pun intended). The 7.1 also has a curious audio drop during the movie’s prologue, with Tom Atkins’ dialogue suddenly taking an awkward backseat to John Harrison’s score.  The 2.0 gives the most authentic representation of what Creepshow sounded like at the show. But the 5.1 is a nice upgrade to reconsider. There are 3 audio commentaries; the first, with director, George A. Romero and SFX creator, Tom Savini; the second, with DP, Michael Gornickm and the third, featuring composer/first assistant director, John Harrison and construction coordinator, Ed Fountain.

These commentaries are replicated on the standard Blu-ray, also included herein. On the 4K, we also get featurettes devoted to the restoration of Creepshow, the sound re-recording for the digital age, and, Mondo Macabre – a look at Creepshow’s poster art and collectibles with Rob Jones and Josh Curry. The rest of the goodies are housed on the standard Blu and include a ‘round table’ discussion with John Amplas, Tom Atkins, Tom Savini, and Marty Schiff. It’s a puff piece, at best. There are also interviews with costume designer, Barbara Anderson (who doesn’t really have any good things to say about Viveca Lindfors), and animator, Rick Catizone. Next, another look at the memorabilia cottage industry the movie has sparked since, a slew of audio-only interviews with Gornick, Amplas, Bruce Alan Miller, and Darryl Ferrucci, plus Tom Savini’s behind-the-scenes footage, an episode of Horror’s Hallowed Grounds, deleted scenes, theatrical/TV/radio spots, and two sets of stills galleries. Bottom line: Shout! Factory, in conjunction with Warner Home Video have produced the definitive 4K release of an iconic 80’s horror flick. Creepshow has aged rather well in the intervening decades. If you are a fan, you will definitely want to snatch this one up.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

3.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

4

EXTRAS

5+