CREEPSHOW 3 (2006)

Studio:       Taurus Entertainment Company
Director:    James Dudelson, Ana Clavell
Writer:       Ana Clavell, Alex Ugelow, Pablo C. Pappano, James Dudelson, Scott Frazelle
Producer:  James Dudelson, Ana Clavell
Stars:     A.J. Bowen, Roy Abramsohn, Elwood Carlisle, Bunny Gibson, Elina Madison, Eileen Dietz, Stephanie Pettee

Review Score:

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Summary:

Five horror stories with a touch of humor are loosely connected by an eccentric professor, a call girl ring, a homeless street vendor, and a mysterious hot dog stand.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Alice – Alice is a somewhat typical bratty teenager who comes home from school to find her father fuddling with a new universal remote control. When he presses the Color button, Alice’s family suddenly becomes Black while Alice remains White, although a deformation begins to grow on her hand. The next button press turns the family Hispanic, and Alice’s mutation grows worse. She seeks refuge at the eccentric professor’s house down the street, but entering a doorway there takes her back to her house. There, she becomes a completely mutated pus blob and her family tries to kill her. She flees the house once more and is rescued by the professor, who uses another remote control to turn her into a white rabbit.

The Radio – Jerry is a security guard who lives in a seedy apartment populated by hookers, drug users, and a violent pimp. When his radio breaks, he finds a homeless man with two radios to sell. Jerry buys the cheaper radio and returns home where the radio begins speaking to him. It tells him everything from what to eat to what stocks he should buy. The radio eventually leads Jerry to the pimp’s hidden money stash and Jerry steals it. The radio then convinces him to kill a junkie who witnessed Jerry with the stash as well as the girl living next door. A police detective, Alice’s father from the first segment, questions Jerry, but the radio has prepared him for the interview. Jerry decides to move out and, against the radio’s wishes, he brings along a hooker from his building who pleaded for his help. Out on the road, Jerry smashes the radio when he tires of its warnings, only to be shot dead by the hooker. The hooker is then shot immediately afterward by the pimp who Jerry robbed. In the passenger seat of the pimp’s car sits the other sentient radio that Jerry did not purchase.

Call Girl – After stabbing a john offscreen, a hooker murders a homeless woman following after her. She then drives away while a radio report warns of “The Call Girl Killer.” The hooker receives a call from a young man named Victor and drives to the address he provides. He offers an explanation as to why he is not in any of the pictures she sees in the house but as they move to the bedroom, three strung up bodies are revealed in the living room. Victor asks to be cuffed and blindfolded, but is then stabbed to death. The hooker puts a pillow over his face and takes a shower. She hears his voice taunting her and when she comes back to remove the pillow from his body, Victor is shown to have transformed into a wide-mouthed monster that promptly tears her apart with his teeth. He later calmly escapes in her car, undetected by neighbors.

The Professor’s Wife – Two former students come to the home of eccentric Professor Dayton to meet his soon-to-be wife. With her odd behavior and the professor’s penchant for practical jokes, the two men come to believe that the woman is actually a sophisticated robot built by the professor. When Dayton steps out, the two men take the woman apart piece by piece to see how she works, only to discover that she was a real human after all. In the subsequent segment, an epilogue shows the professor buying a voodoo kit from the homeless street vendor. The wedding later goes on as planned, with Dayton’s new wife as a bandaged, re-animated corpse.

Haunted Dog – An arrogant, self-absorbed doctor with no regard for his patients buys a hot dog from a street vendor. After he drops it on the ground, he gives it to a homeless man who had been begging him for money. The homeless man dies as a result. The selfish doctor begins to see the homeless man’s ghost haunting him outside the free clinic where he is serving a court sentence, at the apartment building where he solicits hookers, and at his own home while making a sandwich. The drug-addled doctor eventually succumbs to the constant haunting of the man with the haunted hot dog and he drops dead on the street.

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Review:

Do not be angry with the people who soiled the name “Creepshow” by making this.  They only wanted to sell their movie.  Be upset with the people who willingly sold the naming rights to a production company that could not even come close to meeting the standard set by George A. Romero and Stephen King.

If blackmail was not involved, then I have to assume Taurus Entertainment purchased the title for a song, or else spent the entire budget acquiring the rights, because little money is noticed anywhere else in the production.  And despite the hundreds and hundreds of worthwhile short horror stories out in the wild, somehow the five questionable tales in this anthology were the ones they chose to make into a film.

“Creepshow III” at least has the courtesy to warn you about its quality right away.  Underneath the opening credits sequence is one solitary comic book image (the DVD cover) that displays with every title card.  But the camera spins around on the negative space above or around the image rather than on the actual drawing itself.  Amateur night continues with a mercifully brief animated sequence that may as well have been a cartoon flip book from a grade school art project.  With the relatively inexpensive digital software available to any armchair animator, it is unacceptable to include a sequence this poorly done.  I find it unbelievable that there was not a single aspiring artist in Los Angeles who would have created something infinitely better, probably free of charge just for the credit.  If this were an art school assignment, it would earn an F for both effort and execution.

The first story is ridiculous.  It concerns a young girl who finds herself with a different family every time her father presses a button on his strange new remote control.  She gradually deforms into a mutated creature with each button press until finally she becomes a white rabbit.  That summary will not make any more sense even if you actually watch the segment.  The lowlight is that we see one scene replayed three different times with three sets of actors.  Each time it is terribly overacted and staged, which only serves to highlight the unilaterally poor casting, dialogue, and direction.

The second story is the most watchable, although it plays like a poor man’s episode of “Tales from the Crypt.”  A.J. Bowen lives in a world where he listens to the radio for entertainment at home, even with a TV sitting in the corner.  When his radio breaks, he buys another one from a homeless street vendor.  Because why go to Best Buy when there is homeless street vendor in your neighborhood, right?  Soon, the radio begins speaking to Bowen and eventually leads him to commit a series of questionable acts.  The “twist” ending is the closest the movie comes to emulating the style of an EC comic, so at least it demonstrates some knowledge of the formula.

Tables are turned on a john-killing call girl in the third segment when Victor, her latest client, reveals his true nature.  Victor turns into a vampire that can best be described as a cross between Colin Hanks and the Zuni fetish doll from “Trilogy of Terror.”  I guess you are supposed to know he is a vampire because of the fact that he devours her neck.  I know he was a vampire because I read it on Wikipedia while trying to make sense of this movie.

Separated at birth?

Fun fact:  The homeless woman in the “Call Girl” segment is played by Eileen Dietz, who was the face of the demon Pazuzu in William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist.”

The nutty professor from the first segment returns for the fourth story when two of his students question whether his fiancé is real or a robot.  This idea might have been entertaining black comedy were it handled with a modicum of skill, but the cartoonish approach and hammy characters instead show just how far the filmmakers are out of their wheelhouse.  It is not sly.  It is just silly.

The fifth story involves a haunted hot dog.  Do not reread that sentence.  It said exactly what you think it did.

Aside from the fact that shooting was actually done on the Universal Studios backlot, nearly every aspect of the movie shows poor production values and filmmaking inexperience.  Unless you want to see A.J. Bowen’s first acting foray in the horror genre, there is no reason to watch this.  Smartly titling it “Creepshow” fooled a lot of us into seeing the film, but that does not mean we cannot save the rest of you from having to suffer the same way we did.

Review Score:  15

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