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Creepshow 3 (2006)

Usually, anthology films have a standout strong short, one that’s distinctly the worst and then the rest range somewhere in the middle. In Creepshow 3 what you have is a single mediocre story and the rest are awful. I’ll break down each individual tale (which weave into each other but are clearly separated) and then give an overall opinion on the film. Here goes:

The “Wraparound”

There’s no real wraparound story to Creepshow 3, but the film does start with some of the worst animation I’ve seen outside of high school student tryouts. It’s amateurish, the punchline is obvious, and since it doesn’t tie-in with the other segments, is wholly unnecessary. I don’t want to give it a zero because I wasn’t angry or offended, but it’s close.

Alice

Alice (Stephanie Pettee) is a stuck-up, ungrateful teenager. She comes home and finds her father fiddling with a fancy new remote. When he presses its buttons, the universal remote changes the universe, leaving Alice (who was speaking on her cellphone when she walked into the door) unchanged. Reality is altered in numerous ways “Color and Hue Settings” change the family from Caucasian to African-American and “subtitles” transforms the rest of the family into Hispanics. For reasons that aren't clear, every change also begins to mutating Alice.

The punchline of Alice is nonsensical but obvious. It features good practical effects which are undermined by someone’s brain-dead decision to cover with bad CGI. When you do less with your premise than Adam Sandler, you’re in trouble.

The Radio

Jerry (A. J. Bown) buys a radio from a homeless man. It begins talking to him and lets him in on a secret stash of cash, his ticket out of the grimy neighborhood.

This is the most inspired Creepshow 3 gets. The story is decent, but there are questionable plot points, like Jerry successfully framing someone else for a murder he committed in his own living room. There’s a romantic subplot that comes out of nowhere but is easy to see coming, meaning it’s badly written and predictable. Decent twists though. If any of the shorts were expanded into a full-length movie, this would be the one.

Call Girl

Rachel (Camille Lacey) is a call girl that kills her clients, Basic Instinct style. When she gets a call from a shy man named Victor (Ryan Carty) she expects just another victim, but there’s more to this guy than just that.

At this point, you’ve realized that every story will have a twist, so this one's ending is obvious. That’s not terrible, but I have two major gripes with this story. First of all, Vincent’s actions are ridiculous and don’t make sense, particularly at the very end Second, this short is about a call girl who has (presumably) sex with her clients so she can get close to them, murder them brutally and steal their stuff... and there are no nude/sex scenes? That's inexcusable in an R-Rated film like this. At least Creepshow 3 could deliver on some cheap titillation, as NOTHING has been scary or all that amusing up to now. Ok overall, but missed opportunities.

The Professor’s Wife

Two former students visit Professor Dayton (Emmet McGuire), their scatterbrained inventor of a teacher from years ago who has just announced his upcoming wedding! The bride-to-be is a sexy woman named Kathy (Bo Kresic) who must be at least 20 years younger than he is. She loves to cook, doesn’t talk much, and is head-over-heels in love. The students suspect something is amiss.

My synopsis makes The Professor’s Wife sound more interesting and twisty than it actually is. If you can’t see the ending of this segment coming, I don’t know what to tell you. The story is incredibly contrived and not particularly funny or scary. Good special effects though.

Haunted Dog

Cruel, slacker Doctor Farwell (Kris Allen) is sentenced by a judge (for unknown misdemeanors) to work in a free clinic. When a homeless man he gave a discarded hotdog to chokes and dies, his ghost begins haunting the doctor.

Apparently, the people behind Creepshow 3 didn’t even bother to watch Creepshow 2. This is just a knockoff of the “Thanks for the Ride Lady” short, The Hitch-Hiker. It’s the funniest of any of this anthology’s stories, but the special effects are all over the place. By being actually funny, this one redeems itself a bit.

Creepshow 3 concludes by following up on the events of The Professor’s Wife - poorly. With that, how did the movie score overall? Adding up the totals and dividing them by the amount of shorts, we get a 2/5. I must then deduct an additional half a point for the horrendous intro credits. The movie begins with a fortune teller ominously predicting a grim future. Besides the fact that the image has absolutely nothing to do with any of the stories, these credits are horrible. As the camera zooms in and out and pans around the image, you can see the edges where the illustration stops and it feels like a desperate attempt to give the movie some style.

This movie is abysmal. The special effects are bad, the acting isn’t particularly good, the stories are predictable and uninspired when they’re not ripped from better movies. It’s embarrassing to watch. There are some funny moments here and there, but there is no reason to watch this film, it’s worse than the worse episode of Tales From the Crypt. Yes, even those lame ones were the twist is that the would-be victim is actually a werewolf that EATS vampires, or the reverse. My advice is to simply pretend that Creepshow 2 and Creepshow 3 didn’t happen. (On DVD, June 14, 2014)