Creepshow 2 (1987)

Creepshow 2 arrives from 1987 with three stories and a cartoon wraparound, and it carries almost none of the cultural freight a modern audience has been trained to inspect for. The casting is standard for the era: middle-aged character actors, a handful of young people in swimwear, Stephen King in a cameo. Nobody is present to represent anything. The moral universe is the one horror anthologies have always kept, where curiosity is punished and the punishment is wet and loud. There is no environmental parable in the lake blob. It is a black slick with an appetite, and the water is cold because the water was cold.

The first segment, Old Chief Wood'nhead, is the one place the film touches anything resembling a social register, and it does so in the manner of a pulp comic. A cigar store Indian rises to avenge a murdered shopkeeper couple, scalping the young man who robbed them. Native imagery functions as a prop and a plot device, the turquoise jewelry as collateral, the war paint as a closing image. We are not invited to consider sovereignty, history, or anything else. Greed runs through the anthology as a minor hum: a robbery, a tribal debt, an adulterous businesswoman racing home to her attorney husband. The film notices that people want money. It does not build an argument about it.

Women in these stories die badly, and the camera does not mourn them. The last segment ends with a corpse in a running car and a bloody sign in her lap. The post-credits quotation defends comic books against the delinquency crusaders, which is a period argument about censorship, not a sermon about anything else. The whole enterprise is gruel, served cheerfully, and it asks nothing of us but a tolerance for gore and a short attention span. I have classified it accordingly, and I feel no fatigue in doing so. It is a sequel, it is adapted from Stephen King's fiction, and it is otherwise innocent of the age it never lived to see.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel", "book_adaptation"]}}