Creepshow 2 4K Ultra HD

Before the MCU there was the SKU: the Stephen King Universe.  A playfully interconnected series of stories and characters that crossed over as cameos, easter eggs and full-blown sequels to King’s novels and short fiction.  Almost all of King’s work was set in Maine, so it only made sense that these supernatural events bled into one another.  What made it even more fun was that the author himself was steering the ship, not some corporate entity out to milk his brand for all it was worth.  Unfortunately, that’s the feeling you get from Creepshow 2 (1987), a legit follow-up with a script from George Romero based on King’s handpicked stories but lacking budget, fun and creativity of the original.

A near perfect highlight reel of Stephen King's storytelling skills and Romero's homegrown horror approach, the original Creepshow (1982) was definitely a hard act to follow.  Perhaps that why both men pulled back a bit from the sequel produced five years later, with Romero adapting three lesser King tales and passing off directing duties to his longtime cinematographer, Michael Gornick.  The film can't help but suffer by comparison, so it's best to stack it up against Romero's other horror anthology series, Tales from the Darkside, which beat HBO's Tales from the Crypt to the punch by a good seven years, mining the same E.C. Comics aesthetic of ghastly goings-on with a darkly humorous moral lesson.

With fewer stories and a cast of virtual unknowns, Creepshow 2 feels much more like a small screen production; and from that perspective, it's a fairly successful one.  Old Chief Wood'nhead is a golem-type revenge story with a cigar-store Indian coming to life to avenge the death of his longtime owner, played by a cuddly George Kennedy.  The Raft finds a quartet of horny teens trapped on a frigid lake by a ravenous floating oil slick.  And The Hitchhiker follows a cheating wife who gets her comeuppance after fleeing from the scene of a particularly bloody hit-and-run.  Animated cut scenes featuring “The Creep,” a carbon copy of horror comic hosts from decades past, bracket each story.

Without Romero's steady hand at the helm, and lacking the original's stellar cast of recognizable old Hollywood faces, the onus falls more than ever on King's stories.  And, unfortunately, only The Raft delivers what audiences probably expected, with its unique aquatic blob monster dissolving each victim in gruesome fashion.  The other two bookends simply fall flat, failing to deliver anything worthy of the big screen.  From the opening gag - with make-up legend Tom Savini poorly disguised as a live action Creep delivering a new edition of the Creepshow comic - there's a cut-rate feel to the sequel that only intermittently achieves feature film quality.   Even the extended animation segments, a nice idea to build off the original, fail to impress. 

As usual, Romero has a great feel for King's regional dialogue and quirky characterization, and his script isn't really to blame; it's director Michael Gornick, whose bland set-ups and unpolished effects photography mute the lush colorful palate of the original.  Since Creepshow 2 was shooting at the same time as Romero's TV series, it's no surprise that the majority of the film would feel more comfortable on a Zenith.

In that respect, the movie plays much better on home video and Arrow Video, as they're prone to do, goes pleasantly overboard with a 4K Ultra HD upgrade of their original special edition.  This one doesn’t have the supersaturated color scheme of the original with but it looks terrific all the same with a HDR enhancement. The supplements are mostly carry-overs but there’s a lot of them: an audio commentary with Gornick, effects featurette with Howard Berger and Greg Nicotero, interviews with actors Tom Wright and Daniel Beer and two archival sit-downs with Romero and Savini.  But the new package also includes the original screenplay, which cut two stories from the finished film and a comic adaptation of Pinfall, one of King’s stories that never made it to the screen.