In modern Hollywood, some films seem designed for the VCR, not for the theater. A case in point: "Creepshow 2," a sequel to 1982's generally desultory "Creepshow," an attempt to revive the long-dormant anthology film. Though it was no "Dead of Night," "Creepshow" had...

Despite King's plodding prose and facile characters, he's managed to concoct plots multilayered enough to sustain the length, and sometimes the scrutiny, a feature film demands. At his best, he puts everyone in touch with the nightmare anxieties of youth…. [Creepshow] is a salute to the cult-beloved EC horror comic books of the early Fifties. As a movie, Creepshow is negligible, but as a cultural indicator, it's terrific—a big clue to what even the most skillful and likabl...

Revenge—the more horrible the better—is a favorite adolescent fantasy, and it is the subject of four of the five tales of horror that comprise Creepshow, an unashamedly adolescent spectacle dreamed up by director George Romero and writer Stephen King. A murdered patriarch bursts from his grave to take revenge on his family. A cuckolded husband … buries his wife and her lover up to their necks in the sand and forces them to watch each other drown on closed-circuit TV. The appearance of a...

In the past, Novelist Stephen King … and Director George A. Romero … have shown that they know how to scare people through the poetry of pulp…. In Creepshow they have aimed lower, and hit the mark. The film is an elaborate tribute to Tales from the Crypt and other horror comic books of the early '50s. Five tales play with the theme of moral revenge taken on corrupt humankind by nature, alien forces or the Undead. But the treatment manages to be both perfunctory and languid; the j...