Review“Nurse Jacobs, I can’t write a prescription for ugly” – Dr FarwellDirectors Clavell and Dedelson managed to pee all over the memory of George R. Romero’s Day of the Dead with the appallingly bad Day of the Dead 2: Contagium, and here they continue the destruction of the Romero back catalogue with the worst entry yet in the Creepshow franchise. The only horror involved here is in the extras where it’s announced that these monkeys are making a second Creepshow flick. One can only wonder how bad that one will turn out, because on the evidence in the current film they aren’t getting any better at their craft. For people who think Uwe Boll is the worst Director in the business then all I can say is welcome to the suck, no one is going to be better off after watching anything from the collective talents of Clavell and Dedelson.
Five interconnected stories that seem to drag out indefinitely: There’s an adage in horror circles that the hardest sub-genre to successfully make a movie in is the horror/comedy hybrid. Generally if you get a horror movie wrong it ends up in high farce at the best of times, ergo it’s pretty hard to send something up that regularly slips on its own bananas. Clavell and Dedelson make the mistake of trying to come at the horror from a tongue-in-cheek comedic angle and it simply doesn’t work for them. Sure I got the odd grin going down during the final story when Dr Farwell was handing out prescriptions, but other than that the humour was flatter than Paris Hilton. Clavell and Dedelson simply lack the talent to do comedy and haven’t even heard of a little thing called “comedic timing”. Both directors clearly think they are dab hands at this horror stuff, judging from the extras, but neither of them actually are. I didn’t get a jump, a chill, or even a jolt from anything on display in Creepshow III. About the only thing I came away with that was the least bit frightening was a sore butt from trying to get comfortable while the movie kept going for two odd hours that seemed like ten. All five stories left me wondering if the various writers and the production crew knew the least thing about the genre they were working in. Alice is stunning in its disjointed pace, completely wrong for the subject matter, and the fact that the titular character gets punished for being a typical teen female. The punishment in no way fitted the supposed crime, therefore taking the audience out of developments. I don’t even want to know about the whole bunny thing, that was simply lame. The Radio starts out okay but the ending would make it appear that everyone got bored with the whole thing and simply slapped on the quickest scene they could think of to round things out. Once again you have to wonder if anyone involved here has the least idea of what they are doing. Call Girl is bizarre enough to keep you going and is perhaps the best of a sorry bunch. Professor Dayton’s Wife is simply a misguided attempt at comedy that is incredibly predictable. And finally, most audience members would also add mercifully, Haunted Dog rounds us out with a tale of madness that can at least be interpreted from two separate viewpoints. Is Dr Farwell letting the roos run loose up there in the top paddock or is he in fact being haunted? Your call on that one. All five yarns are joined by common characters, a minor character in one story will be a major character in another story. While this works for movies that reference other movies the approach is slightly cumbersome in Creepshow III. In the first film in the franchise – sigh, don’t you miss King and Romero? – the disjointed individual segments were held together by a common plot outside of the stories on display. This approach was superior to Clavell and Dedelson’s mix and match attempt in the current movie, which looks to be entirely script-driven with out the benefit of anything looking natural. Stephanie Pettee (Alice, Alice) does okay in the first few scenes but is unconvincing once the supposed terror starts. What teen chick is going to be unfazed by increasing disfigurement? The bunny at the end of the story wins top marks for outshining everyone else on display. A. J. Bowen (Jerry The Radio) is strictly amateur, where did they dig this guy up from? Camille Lacy (Rachel Call Girl) and Ryan Carty (Victor, Call Girl) are passable but wont trouble the Academy anytime soon or in the distant future if we were being honest. The rest of the cast simply turned up, read their lines, and will no doubt disappear into obscurity pretty quickly. If there was a score involved here then it got lost among the clutter of pop/rock and middle of the road tunes that got sent my way. Nothing to write home about end of day. Clavell and Dedelson have done it again, taken a respected franchise and tarnished it with a substandard cheap sequel. They seem to have a vendetta towards Romero and are doing everything in their collective power to debase Uncle George’s body of work. Creepshow III dragged through two hours of poor horror, bad acting, and jokes that fell flat. Nope, didn’t enjoy myself over here. Creepshow III was direct to DVD as no one was going to be silly enough to try for a cinema release with this rubbish. A bit of net research elicits the fact that James Glenn Dudelson’s family owns the rights to the franchise, which explains how the current clowns got to make their instantly forgettable sacrilege. Avoid this one with every ounce of your fibre as it may lay in ambush at your local DVD place. One of the worst anthologies ever released, we can only imagine how much worse the next one will be. Move on over Dr Boll, we have found a couple of worse moviemakers!
ScaryMinds Rates this movie as ... I would rather watch a Twilight movie.
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