Let’s All Go to the Lobby to Get Ourselves Some Meat! – CREEPSHOW 2 (1987)

Let’s face it–Romero and King are slumming it here, but there’s still a lot of fun to be had.

There are always plenty of things to be thankful for in life. A loving family, robust health, a loyal pet, and a good job all qualify. 

But let’s get stupid about this, shall we? 

Forget about the usual blessings you rattle off every Thanksgiving as your turkey and stuffing are getting cold. Let’s talk about the little joys in life that are the real reasons you get you out of bed every morning. A Starbucks frappuccino? A blowjob? Marlboro 100s? And don’t tell me you wake-and-bakers don’t know what I’m talking about.

When I was in junior high, one of my reasons for getting out of bed was the Boulevard Cinema. It was a disgusting grindhouse theater on Topanga Canyon Boulevard that showed two movies for 99 cents. 99 cents! You could scrounge up that admission price just by kicking quarters out of the cigarette machines at the nearby mall. 

There seemed to be three things these kinds of theaters weren’t known for. First and foremost was cleanliness–I’m assuming it was just one step above the porn theater just down the block. If you stood in place too long, your feet would literally stick to the floor, and the less said about the men’s room, the better. Second on this shit list was security. On some days, kids outnumbered adults during the showing of R-rated films. Third, the place wasn’t exactly concerned with variety. 

This is where CREEPSHOW 2 comes in. They must have paired this fucking movie with at least four other things during the summer of 1987. Just when you thought it was gone, up it would pop again, sometimes hilariously paired with some incongruent, PG-rated family film. For this reason, CREEPSHOW 2 still holds the distinction of being the movie I’ve seen the most times in a theater. 

Director George Romero and first-time screenwriter Stephen King struck a small but lucrative vein of gold with the original CREEPSHOW (1982), a candy-colored pastiche of old EC horror comics. It was a surprise box office success that brought five gory tales to the table while doubling-down on the giggles, to boot. 

Though its first sequel is lacking a lot of the tongue-in-cheek laughs (and, quite frankly, short changes its audience with only three stories this time around), there’s still a lot of fun to be had. Sure, the tales are flimsier in CREEPSHOW 2, but the absence of giddy laughs gives it the space to play out as more of a straight horror anthology. No better evidence of this is its middle offering, “The Raft”, in which things get sticky for four college kids squaring off against an oil slick from hell as it slithers around the surface of a remote lake. The story’s terror comes from its simplicity, and King makes the right call by remaining faithful to his own source material. Before you know it, this unknown blob is drowning and disintegrating people right and left until the story’s only survivor is left to try and make it back to shore. 

In hindsight, I can now appreciate seeing CREEPSHOW 2 about four more times than I needed to at the Boulevard Cinema all those years ago. Tacky, crappy, and just this side of dangerous, it turned out to be the perfect horror rollercoaster to experience in a grimy, pitch-dark grindhouse theater. 

Thanks for the ride, indeed.

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