It’s hard to blame the hitch-hiker for wanting a little revenge. She’s having an affair with a gigolo, she accidentally runs someone down in her car, and runs away from the scene concluding that it’s totally fine because no one caught her in the act. The Hitch-hiker suffers a little from having a protagonist who isn’t very sympathetic. Never has a sentient oil slick felt so threatening. It helps that the four performers establish their roles swiftly, particularly Paul Satterfield’s dumb jock, Deke, so that we can move to the scares fast. The simplicity of the tale allows Gornick to build up some great tension in a short space of time and the kills are genuinely disturbing in an environment that never feels safe. The Raft is the strongest story, a compressed teen horror movie with all the hallmarks: remote location, character archetypes, and a mindless antagonist (in this case, some black sludge) that picks them off one by one.

And, like a lot of films discussed so far, Creepshow 2 falls into that decidedly middling area with plenty of great ideas, but also a few not-so-great ones. Originally intended to feature five stories like Creepshow, budget cuts unfortunately left us with just three tales of terror. Michael Gornick takes on directorial duties here as Romero moves to screenwriter, adapting three of King’s short stories for the new anthology. We’ve arrived at Creepshow 2, the sequel to the earlier collaborative effort of King and George A. Welcome back to our ongoing journey through the adaptations of Stephen King. Finally, a married woman travelling home from a meeting with her lover loses control of her car and runs down a hitch-hiker, but flees from the scene to keep her life in order.

Next, The Raft, in which four college students take trip to a lake to go swimming, only to find out there’s something in the water. He reads the tale of Old Chief Wood’nhead first, in which an elderly couple find themselves victimised by an armed robbery in their general store. The film: The Creep arrives in town with a fresh batch of stories for another boy named Billy, who delights in grabbing a copy of the Creepshow comic.

Stephen king creepshow 2