Main cast: Lois Chiles (Annie Lansing), George Kennedy (Ray Spruce), Dorothy Lamour (Martha Spruce), Daniel Beer (Randy), Jeremy Green (Laverne), Page Hannah (Rachel), Don Harvey (Andy Cavanaugh), David Holbrook (Vince “Fat Stuff” Gribbens), Stephen King (Truck Driver), Holt McCallany (Sam Whitemoon), Frank S Salsedo (Ben Whitemoon), Paul Satterfield (Deke), Tom Wright (The Hitchhiker), and Tom Savini (The Creep)
Director: Michael Gornick
Five years after the original Creepshow delighted audiences with its perfect blend of horror and comic book aesthetics, someone decided what the world really needed was… well, this. George A Romero wisely limited his involvement to writing the script based on two Stephen King stories and one by someone who clearly wasn’t Stephen King, then presumably fled the premises before anyone could ask him to do more.
Gone are the stylish comic book panels and Tom Atkins’ magnificent mustache, replaced by animated segments that feel more Tales from the Cryptkeeper than its more sophisticated older sibling. The shift from live-action comic book panels to Saturday morning cartoon aesthetics is less artistic evolution and more akin to budget constraints meet a complete misunderstanding of the original intent of the first movie.
Our first tale Old Chief Wood’nhead introduces us to an elderly couple struggling to keep their general store afloat in the appropriately named Dead River, a town so economically depressed that locals pay for groceries with family heirlooms. It’s like Little House on the Prairie if Laura Ingalls Wilder had a really dark sense of humor about rural economic decline.
Things take a turn for the worse when some local troublemakers decide to rob a store that — and hear me out here — clearly has no money. It’s like trying to rob a lemonade stand run by children: technically possible, but what exactly is the endgame? After murdering the sweet elderly proprietors, the criminals face the wrath of Old Chief Wood’nhead, a cigar store Indian mascot who apparently moonlights as a supernatural vigilante.
This segment tries to be a morality tale about respect for elders and indigenous culture, but lands somewhere between vaguely racist and accidentally hilarious. The wooden chief’s revenge is appropriately bloody but watching cartoon villains get their comeuppance from a creaky statue lacks the sophisticated nastiness that made the original work. It’s less horrifying justice and more of a very special episode of a supernatural western.
## Segment Two: “The Raft” – Hot Bodies, Cold Lake, Stupid Decisions
Finally, we arrive at The Raft, the crown jewel of Creepshow 2 – and by “crown jewel,” I mean the ones wrapped in a speedo.
Four teenagers, apparently suffering from a severe shortage of imagination, decide the perfect weekend activity is swimming to a raft in the middle of a lake to smoke weed. Because nothing says good times like combining recreational drug use with isolated aquatic locations.
But let’s address the elephant in the room: Paul Sattefield in that yellow speedo. The man is so devastatingly attractive that he single-handedly justifies the segment’s existence. Watching him emerge from the water is like witnessing a Calvin Klein commercial accidentally wander into a horror movie. It’s genuinely distracting — you find yourself rooting for his survival not because of character development, but because the world would be a darker place without that level of physical perfection.
The actual horror involves a mysterious floating… thing… that looks like a rejected prop from a car wash commercial. This gelatinous menace slowly devours anything it touches, turning what should be terrifying into something resembling a very violent nature documentary.
The teenagers make predictably poor decisions, though to be fair, two of them are high, which at least provides some explanation for their survival strategies.
It’s a standard “humans versus nature” tale where nature wins because the humans are too busy being attractive and/or intoxicated to mount an effective defense. The segment works primarily as eye candy with a side of mild horror, like a beach volleyball game that accidentally wandered into a slasher film.
Our final tale The Hitchhiker follows a trophy wife speeding home from what we can diplomatically call a “business meeting” with her gigolo. In her rush to maintain her alibi, she accidentally turns a hitchhiker into roadkill and decides the best course of action is to flee the scene like she’s starring in a very special episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Morally Bankrupt.
What follows is essentially a greatest hits collection of every horror movie cliché from 1987, as the mangled hitchhiker begins appearing with the persistence of a door-to-door salesman and about as much genuine menace. The corpse delivers puns that would make the Crypt Keeper file a restraining order for excessive corniness, while engaging in jump scares so predictable you could set your watch by them.
The dialogue reaches levels of hokiness usually reserved for community theater productions of Shakespeare performed by middle schoolers, and the acting suggests everyone involved was either severely overmedicated or participating in some kind of dare. It’s repetitive, predictable, and features a zombie whose idea of terrorizing someone involves an endless game of supernatural peek-a-boo.
Creepshow 2 serves as a masterclass in how not to follow up a beloved original. The first film understood that horror anthologies work best when they balance genuine scares with dark humor and stylish presentation, but the sequel has generic TV movie production values and stories lack the twisted intelligence that made their predecessor memorable.
That said, the film isn’t completely without merit. The Raft provides enough attractive people in swimwear to justify a viewing, and if you enjoy watching supernatural revenge fantasies play out with all the subtlety of a Saturday morning cartoon, Old Chief Wood’nhead might hit the spot. The Hitchhiker is… well, it exists, and sometimes that’s enough.
