Creepshow might have made a good movie to watch in my Audient Audit series a couple years ago, where I watched movies that had made it on to my lists of movies viewed even though I couldn't be 100% sure I'd actually seen it. Having seen it now, I can only be sure I've seen the last of the five sequences, but more on that in a minute.
I said in yesterday's post that the universe sometimes sends you signs about movies you should see, the example being the fact that I had been pondering a rewatch of The Death of Stalin for a couple months, and then on Friday night, Only Murders in the Building made overt reference to the death of Joseph Stalin.
I can't claim the same for my Saturday night viewing of Creepshow. I decided to watch it after it came up in a Flickchart duel, but that's nothing special, because lots of movies come up in Flickchart duels.
Still, there was a reason a revisit seemed overdue: One of the "five jolting tales of horror," as promised in that poster above, had scared the shit out of me when I saw George Romero's movie on cable back in the 1980s.
But first, the other four tales. Had I seen them or hadn't I? Or had I seen them, but they just didn't make much of an impression on me?
This is sort of at the heart of the aforementioned Audient Audit series, since I shouldn't add the movie to my Microsoft Word document called "seen multiple.doc" unless the first viewing was a true viewing.
After this viewing, I'm still not sure.
Spoilers for Creepshow to follow.
I don't remember much if anything about "Father's Day," the first story, which features the ghoulish corpse of a rich asshole who was brained to death with a marble ashtray by his wife. The corpse comes back and kills a bunch of descendants, including a very young Ed Harris.
However, the second tale, "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill," contains familiar elements for sure, namely, none other than Stephen King in only his second acting performance. King plays the titular hillbilly who finds a meteor crashed into his farm. I'm not sure if it's fair to call Jordy Verrill a hillbilly, except that King plays him very broadly with crossed eyes, so there's meant to be some sort of intellectual challenge to the man. In any case, I definitely remember footage of King in this role, though whether I remember it from seeing the film or from other sources remains in doubt. I definitely did not remember what happens to poor Jordy Verrill.
The third sequence was the one I liked the best. It's called "Something to Tide You Over" and features Leslie Nielsen getting revenge on his ex-wife and her lover (Ted Danson) by burying them in sand and letting the tide come in on them until they drown. We only really see this play out with Danson's character, as he watches her suffer the same fate on a TV screen. The premise was chilling and I enjoyed seeing both Nielsen and Danson so young, but I can't say I remember actually seeing it before. Only Danson probably would have stood out to me at the time because of Cheers, as The Naked Gun and Nielsen's other spoof movies were still a few years off. (Actually Airplane! would have preceded this.)
Probably the least effective segment is "The Crate," featuring Hal Holbrook and Adrienne Barbeau, in which some kind of abominable snowman (a primate with giant fangs) gets loose and takes bites out of people. I don't remember this at all.
And then finally "They're Creeping Up on You," the segment that gave me the willies so long ago.
In this short, E.G. Marshall plays a germphobic captain of industry type -- think Howard Hughes -- living in a Manhattan penthouse bathed in white, containing his high-tech (for the time) devices that allow him to contact people outside the room and keep up to do date on his stocks. We know the man is a monster because of how he treats the people who work for him and that he's gleeful over the suicide of the CEO of a company his company is taking over.
And we know the man is going to have a serious cockroach infestation because I remembered the way this one ended.
I didn't actually remember that it was cockroaches -- all I remembered was that it was bugs. But I remembered that his apartment gets full of them, as some sort of inexplicable plague, and that even after he secludes himself in the apparent safety of a panic room, there are so many inside the panic room that a blanket-like bed covering is writhing with their unseen presence.
They attack, and we see that he is unable to fend them off. But then in the next shot, he is just lying still on the bed, obviously dead but with no sign of the cockroaches anywhere. We have just long enough to wonder if this was all in his head, if he died of some kind of anxiety-induced heart episode ...
... until the bugs burst forth from his body, coming out his mouth and breaking through the skin in his neck. So many flow out that soon the room is full of them.
This image stuck with me for a long time when I was a kid. While some people's defining skeevy bug experience at the movies was something like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Creepshow was the one that stuck with me, even though I think it's likely that I saw Indiana Jones first and Creepshow second.
The difference, I suppose, is that no one dies of the bugs in Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Doom. Not only is this bastard in Creepshow killed by the bugs, but they don't kill him through external injury. They get inside him, presumably clear out his insides, and then burst forth.
Creepy, indeed.
I think it's very likely that I caught this last segment on cable and nothing else. In fact, I have a half-baked memory of coming in on the movie, not knowing what it was, and only realizing what I'd been watching after "They're Creeping Up on You" had ended. Although I have a hard-and-fast rule about coming in late on a movie nowadays, I would not have had that rule at the time, and sometimes you just become entranced by something you stumble across.
But because I also remember parts of the Stephen King segment, I'm going to say that I did watch Creepshow -- if not at that time, then some other time -- and I just don't remember the other segments because they were not very memorable, other than the one where Ted Danson gets buried in sand. Maybe instead of "not very memorable" I should say "not equally scarring."
Incidentally, that makes two movies I've seen in 2024 -- along with Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence -- where a person is buried in sand and left to die. That must have been a big theme in 1982 and 1983.
Oops, I should have said spoilers for Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence.
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