MOVIE REVIEW : ‘CREEPSHOW 2’: 3 TALES AS EXCITING AS LEFTOVERS

“Creepshow 2” (citywide) is a cut-rate sequel from those two popular masters of horror, Stephen King and George Romero, that plays like leftovers. Fans of both deserve better.

The film consists of three King tales stitched together by some blah-looking animated sequences featuring an adolescent fan of “Creepshow” comic books who’s plagued by a gang of bullies. (There are also a live-action prologue and epilogue featuring makeup and special-effects expert Tom Savini as our host, the ghoulish “Creep.”)

The first tale finds a not-so-wooden cigar store Indian (Dan Kamin) avenging the murders of a nice older couple (George Kennedy and Dorothy Lamour) who run a general store in a dying Southwestern town.

The second--and the only one of the three stories that King has published--is the best. Four college kids (Paul Satterfield, Jeremy Green, Daniel Beer and Page Hannah, attractive newcomers all) swim out to a raft in an idyllic-looking lake marred by the most ominous oil slick imaginable. This vignette is effective because it’s simple and suspenseful, but it’s not enough to carry the whole movie.

In the third, glamorous cheating wife Lois Chiles, racing home to hubby in her Mercedes, strikes hitchhiker Tom Wright, who proves as hard to kill off as those ghouls in Romero’s classic “Night of the Living Dead.” (King cameos as a truck driver in this sequence.)

Romero, who adapted King’s tales for the screen, has left the directing this time to his longtime cameraman Michael Gornick, which hasn’t helped matters. It’s a pleasure to see Kennedy and Lamour again, but their sequence is awkwardly staged. The timing seems off in the third sequence, which undercuts Chiles’ hysterics. Indeed, the best moment in the final sequence, if not the film, is her very adult repartee with her paid lover, well played by David Beecroft. But all told, “Creepshow 2” (rated R for the usual Grand Guignolish horror picture special effects) adds up to very small change.