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 an ancient, very abominable snowman on a college campus gives a henpecked professor … a novel chance to do away with his shrewish wife…. And in the final story, destined to be the gross-out favorite at grammar schools, a malicious millionaire … gets his cosmic comeuppance at the hands of millions of carnivorous cockroaches.
Creepshow is conceived as an E. C. Comic come to life, complete with panels, balloons and the lurid colorings of an old issue of "Tales From the Crypt." Romero and King want to be as unsophisticated as possible, while maintaining a sense of humor, and they succeed all too well. The characters, story lines and images are studiously one-dimensional. For anyone over 12 there's not much pleasure to be had watching two masters of horror deliberately working beneath themselves. Creepshow is a faux naïf horror film: too arch to be truly scary, too elemental to succeed as satire.
David Ansen, "The Roaches Did It," in Newsweek (copyright 1982, by Newsweek, Inc.; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission), Vol. C. No. 21, November 22, 1982, p. 118A.
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