Streamin’ King: ‘Creepshow 2’ Is A Mixed Bag, But Features One Truly Knockout Segment

Welcome to Streamin’ King, a series grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on your favorite streaming services. This time we’re watching Creepshow 2, the 1987 anthology movie featuring a screenplay penned by the legendary horror auteur George A. Romero.

STREAMIN’ KING: CREEPSHOW 2

THE GIST: Five years after 1982’s Creepshow became only the third Stephen King-related movie, the sequel joined the crowded field with three new stories framed by an overarching cartoon narrative. The first and last of the 20- to 30-minute tales, “Old Chief Wood’nhead” and “The Hitch-hiker,” are based on ideas by King; “The Raft” is directly adapted from one of his stories.
PEDIGREE: Zombie horror originator George A. Romero, coming off Day of the Dead, moved from directing Creepshow to writing and producing the sequel. His cinematographer Michael Gornick made the jump to big screen director for the first and last time, eventually working on the King miniseries The Stand, The Langoliers and Golden Years.
Almost no consequential actors, many first-timers, one being Mindhunter lead Holt McCallany. For veterans, there’s Cool Hand Luke Oscar-winner George Kennedy (Naked Gun) and, in a perplexing final role 51 years into her career, old-school Hollywood actress Dorothy Lamour.
WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? If you prefer King’s short fiction to his doorstops, definitely. If you’ve already seen the first film and aren’t totally averse to his shorts, it’s fairly worthwhile. You’ve got the option to easily bail two-thirds in, once you’ve seen “The Raft” get movie-fied. If you haven’t seen the superior Creepshow and are presented with the opportunity to watch the sequel, just go with it. It’s still got an Uncle Stevie cameo, even if it doesn’t compare to the iconic plant-man of the first one.

As a bonus, it’ll motivate you to go devour some King stories. His latest collection, 2015’s Bazaar of Bad Dreams, has 20 great yarns including “Mile 81,” “Ur,” and “Drunken Fireworks.”
WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? Unless you happen to just love the “Raft” short story, no. Gleaning some unique pleasure from seeing fun-sized SK treats adapted as segments in a single movie is the objective; without that, you might quit as soon as the formalist-Disney-on-one-hit-of-weed animation kicks in right at the start. The midrange filmmaking, acting, and score are bearable and era-typical, and Romero’s script usually hoists it to a C+ experience, but the gore fundamentally needed to be more extreme and voluminous for these comical morality tales. It’s tough to recover after the first deaths come via the least impactful close-range shotgun blasts imaginable. Maybe try the original Creepshow; you’ll at least get Ted Danson, Ed Harris, and Leslie Nielsen.
One Creepshow 2 strike worth individually noting: the opening salvo’s problematic and cliché “mystical Native Americans” concept features white, first-time actor Holt McCallany in redface as the lustrously long-haired murderer Sam Whitemoon. McCallany’s dispiriting recollection from 2015:

“I auditioned to play a college frat boy but the producer offered me the role of an American Indian. I said ‘I can’t play an Indian, I’m a white Irish guy who was born in New York.’ He said ‘You have good bone structure, we’ll give you make-up and a wig. Burt Lancaster did it.’ I replied ‘But I have blue eyes!’ The producer took a beat, looked at the director, then looked back at me and said ‘We’ll make you a half-breed.’ I’ve never forgotten that. ‘We’ll make you a half-breed.'”

9 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. Condensed original Creepshow rundown: directed by George A. Romero, screenplay by King, five segments, “Weeds,” and “The Crate” adapted from existing SK stories. Young son/now-famous author Joe Hill/King has an excellent, devilish little role.

2. A Creepshow anthology series is coming later this year on horror streaming service Shudder. It’s executive produced by makeup artist-turned-director Greg Nicotero (The Walking Dead), who will helm the first episode, an interpretation of King’s “Gray Matter” with original Creepshow actress Adrienne Barbeau. Teen Nicotero’s first time visiting a set happened to be Creepshow; then he worked on its sequel, Misery, The Green Mile, The Mist, and Desperation.
   

   The streaming series’ source material will come from numerous authors, including Joe Hill, whose story will be directed by famed makeup artist/actor Tom Savini, a veteran of both movies. Riding the Bullet star David Arquette is another King alum on board.

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How I get to spend my birthday! Day 1 episode five! Huge thanks to the cast and crew who have literally moved mountains for this show.

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3. King cameos as a truck driver in the final segment; his then-secretary Shirley Sonderegger appears in the first story.

4. In the pretty solid book version of “The Raft,” they arrive at dusk in mid-October, with snow flurries are predicted for the next day. The non–oil slick threatens to hypnotize them with colors, “fantastic reds and yellows and blues spiralling across an ebony surface like limp plastic or dark, lithe Naugahyde.” The entity slurps a slowwwly liquefying Deke through the tiny cracks in the board, not a newly busted big hole, emitting “a sound like strong teeth crunching up a mouthful of candy jawbreakers.” It ends with Randy still standing on the raft after multiple days; the film’s ending is more fun.
   

   Also, the problem of being stuck in a lakeside predicament after the summer season is over is a thing in Gerald’s Game.

5. It is prominently showcased in the first scene of “The Hitch-hiker.” And while the segment isn’t based on an existing King work, the short stories “Chattery Teeth,” “Mute,” and “Riding the Bullet” are all hitchhiker centric.

6. A fourth segment, the bowling-centric “Pinfall,” based on a never-published King piece, didn’t make it past the script stage since “the gruesome special effects would have pushed the production way over budget,” per The Shape Under the Sheet: The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia. It’s been adapted as a comic, and a crowdfunded fan film looked like it would happen, but there hasn’t been any news in years. When “Pinfall” was included, the script opened with “The Raft” and closed with eventual opener “Old Chief Wood’nhead.”

7. The dubious Creepshow III was released in 2006 with no involvement from King or Romero. George’s Tales from the Darkside: The Movie—featuring one SK adaptation, “Cat from Hell”—has been referred to as the real third film. The prior Tales TV series was conceived as a Creepshow continuation initially, and wound up with two King-based episodes, one of which he self-adapted.

8. LaVerne in “The Raft” wears a Horlicks University shirt, a school mentioned in Christine as well as the short story “The Crate,” adapted in Creepshow and referenced on The Walking Dead.

9. David Holbrook has a memorable turn as Fatso in “Old Chief Wood’nhead.” His dad, Hal Holbrook, was in Creepshow.

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: About as kind as the kids who kill the elderly couple 20 minutes in. People mag recommended that fans looking “to keep up with the King oeuvre may want to bring a flashlight so they can read one of his novels while watching this film. It’s hardly worth devoting a whole attention span to.” The New York Times said it “can’t really compare with its predecessor” with its ideas being “only glancingly developed,” while USA Today noted the “trouble with anthology films, even good ones, is that one lousy episode can sink the entire package”—in this case, the “deadly, barrel-bottom opener.”

The Washington Post declared King’s “American Express ad is better” than his cameo, while the Chicago Tribune said the animated bits are “a complicated framing device” that leave “the film squarely in the camp of kids’ movies,” a strange thing to say about a flick that depicts a guy grossly fondling a sleeping girl’s bare breast.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR CREEPSHOW 2 (1987): “The Raft,” the only book-to-screen bit, began as a story called “The Float” in 1968. King has written that he lost the manuscript and recreated it from memory in ’81 during Creepshow postproduction in Pittsburgh because “I was bored.” It appeared in the skin mag Gallery in ’82, the year of Different Seasons, The Running Man, The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger, and Creepshow and its accompanying comic. Collected in ’85’s Skeleton Crew, King’s only book that year except The Bachman Books, itself containing four novels. Crew yielded a number of adaptations, including The Mist and The Jaunt, being developed by It director Andy Muschietti.
Zach Dionne is a North Carolina writer who’s thrilled we’re only a few months out from It: Chapter Two and SK’s novel The Institute.

Where to stream Creepshow 2