This is a very cool movie! I am not prejudiced in favor of it just because the bulk of it was filmed in my hometown of Pittsburgh. Not even because I dated one of the featured actresses (I won't say who, but it wasn't Adrienne Barbeau. She was still married to John Carpenter at the time!). The only prejudice I brought to my viewing of this film is that I have almost always enjoyed the work of nearly everyone involved. Written by Stephen King ( The Shining , Carrie , Christine ), and directed by George A. Romero ( Night Of The Living Dead , Dawn Of The Dead , Day Of The Dead ), Creepshow is a scary, funny and stylish tribute to the horror comics of the '50's. King, long an admirer of Romero's groundbreaking zombie trilogy, contacted him around 1980 with the idea of working together on a project. Various stories and approaches were discussed including, according to King, the idea of a feature comprised of an hour and a half's worth of blackout sketches so relentlessly terrifying that the viewer would have to crawl out of the theater. In the end, it was decided that the best idea would be to film a set of stories approximating the style of the comic books both men had grown up with and which had influenced their work. Creepshow , released in the fall of 1982, is the end result of this partnership. It is a worthy achievement. The movie consists of five unrelated stories, filmed in garish comic book style. The stories are framed by a wraparound plot involving a young boy named Billy (Joe King, Stephen's real life son)whose bad tempered father (Tom Atkins)throw's the boy's comic book into the trashcan. Not to worry-- in the end, Billy takes his revenge in true horror comic style! A spooky, yet somehow benign apparition outside Billy's bedroom window beckons both him and us into the world of the comic book as the wind blows the lid off the garbage can into which the magazine has been thrown and the pages flip in the wind. The first story, Father's Day concerns a nasty old man (Jon Lormer), murdered by his spinster daughter (Viveca Lindfors) who returns from the grave seven years later on...father's day!!...to exact his revenge on his entire equally nasty family. This story, simple enough, is truly creepy and the walking corpse is great! The next story is The Lonesome Death Of Jordy Verrill , in which Stephen King himself, in a performance I think only Stephen King could have managed, plays Jordy--a hick who is stupid enough to mess around with a meteor that lands on his property. It cracks open and begins to ooze a substance that Jordy, in a rather hilarious moment, refers to as Meteor sh*t! after he accidentally gets some on himself. Within hours he begins to turn into a large, fuzzy green plant! This segment has some funny moments, but it is the weakest overall of the five and starts to get tiresome before it's over. Things pick up with Something To Tide You Over . Richard (Leslie Neilsen), an arrogant film producer with an very nice seaside house (One of the few exteriors not filmed in Pittsburgh, for obvious reasons.)and an unhealthy interest in home video (In 1982 very few people had video tape recorders or cameras, and they were expensive.), videotapes the uniquely devised murder of his unfaithful wife Rebecca (Gaylen Ross) and her lover Harry (Ted Danson)--he buries them up to their necks below the high tide line on his private beach. But when he returns after the tide goes back out to deal with the bodies, they're gone. Out with the tide? Hmmmm... In The Crate , a janitor at Horlick's University finds a long forgotten wooden crate under a stairwell. According to the markings on the side, it contains specimens from an Arctic expedition in the last century. Well, one of the specimens in question is quite hungry, having not had anything to eat for the last hundred or so years, and it just so happens that one of the school's professors has a wife (Adrienne Barbeau) he'd like to be rid of. This segment contains a good balance of suspense and humor, and very likeable performances by Hal Holbrook as the henpecked Henry and Fritz Weaver as the progressively hysterical (he keeps seeing people mangled by the thing inside the crate)professor Stanley. Finally, EG Marshall gives essentially a one-man performance opposite some huge, nasty cockroaches in They're creeping Up on You! He plays evil, foulmouthed tycoon Upson Pratt who lives alone with his own neuroses in a sterile, electronically controlled penthouse apartment. Alone, that is, except for the bugs that keep coming out of nowhere in ever increasing numbers in the midst of a huge thunderstorm. When the power fails, Pratt is sealed inside the apartment with the very thing he fears most. This film is guaranteed fun for horror fans. Its tense and somewhat violent at times, but it's comic book style keeps you from taking it too seriously, so that even those who are usually put off by horror movies can sit back and enjoy it. The original poster for the film said that it is: The most fun you'll ever have being scared! and I think that's probably true. 