Main cast: Stephanie Pettee (Alice), A J Bowen (Jerry), Elina Madison (Eva), Akil Wingate (Leon), Cara Cameron (The Radio), Camille Lacey (Rachael), Ryan Carty (Victor), Emmet McGuire (Professor Dayton), Bo Kresic (Kathy), Michael Madrid (Charles), Ben Pronsky (John), Kris Allen (Dr Farewell), and Ed Dyer (Cliffie)
Directors: Ana Clavell and James Dudelson
Once upon a time, in a dimension where justice doesn’t exist, Ana Clavell and James Dudelson managed to get their grubby hands on some beloved horror franchises and proceeded to make some horribly cheap and horribly ghastly sequels — an act that made fans recoil in more terror than watching the actual films themselves.
Mind you, Mr Dudelson somehow managed to turn this career move into producing the small-screen Creepshow anthology decades later, so… full closure? Character arc? The universe rewarding bad behavior? The universe is unfair and we’re all just living in it, apparently.
While some of their fortunately few works can be so awful they’re awesome, Creepshow 3 isn’t one of them. It has zero connection to the previous two films in terms of style, structure, quality, or basic human decency. No George A Romero, no Stephen King, not even a cameo from the latter, who probably saw the script and immediately fled to Maine to hide in his attic.
Hence, the original Creepshow films were love letters to EC Comics horror anthologies. This is more like a restraining order written in crayon.
Also, this movie takes on the format of having everyone and everything in every story taking place in the same neighborhood at the same time — perhaps in an ambitious but deeply deluded hope that viewers will rewatch every segment to find Easter eggs that tie everything together.
No, no one is rewatching this. They’d have better luck convincing people to rewatch their own colonoscopy footage.
One story is about some rude and entitled young woman whose fiddling with a TV remote sends her to various… multiverses? Dimensions? Alternate realities explained by someone who’s never seen a sci-fi movie? With each trip, her family has more and more melanin content, while she becomes more and more disfigured, until she finally turns into a rabbit. Yes, a rabbit. There is nothing scary here aside from how catastrophically bad the story is — just borderline racist jokes masquerading as social commentary. It’s offensive, it’s stupid, and worst of all, it’s boring.
Another segment is about a guy who buys a radio from a homeless man and is led by a sultry voice to commit increasingly violent crimes. It’s as silly as it sounds, which is very silly. The voice is about as menacing as a GPS navigation system. There’s no tension, no buildup, just a guy doing crimes because a radio told him to. This is less horror anthology and more rejected Black Mirror pitch written on a napkin.
Next up: A call girl-serial killer. One supposes she steals from her victims, or else she’s not making any money, which raises serious questions about her business model. She has a client that… whoa, that’s the same guy on the DVD cover! He’s a vampire-monster! There goes the suspense in the only halfway decent story in the entire movie. Congratulations?
Then we have two idiots — and I mean “How do they remember to breathe?” idiots — who become convinced that their professor is going to marry a robot woman. Their solution? Dismember her to… prove a point? Save him? Get attention? Who knows! Despite blood and viscera spraying all over them, they can’t seem to grasp that they’re dismembering actual flesh and blood. How did these morons graduate from university? Did they buy their degrees on eBay? Are we supposed to believe these two can operate a car but not recognize human anatomy? The sheer stupidity is almost impressive. Almost.
The last story is the absolute worst, which is saying something in a movie where someone turns into a rabbit. It goes on and on and on about a drunkard, bad-tempered doctor forced to do community service that makes him continue treating patients while inebriated. Punishment for whom, exactly? His patients?
He causes the death of a homeless guy because of course he does and spends the rest of this interminable segment being a jackass and screaming at the sight of the worst CGI ghost ever committed to film. This ghost looks like it was rendered on a Commodore 64 by someone who’s never seen a ghost or a computer.
This segment is not scary or funny, just sad. Like watching someone’s career die in real-time.
It’s hard to fully describe how stupid and illogical these stories are. There’s no build-up. No payoff. Just segments starting and then ending right when you’re beginning to realize how monumentally stupid the whole thing is — which, mercifully, happens pretty quickly except for that freaking last segment.
Add in some of the worst CGI effects ever and you have a joyless waste of time that is a crime against the horror genre. Someone should file charges. Actual legal charges.
