Creepshow 2 - Creepshow 2(VOD) [Arrow Player - 2025]As someone who grew up watching the original Creepshow on repeat, seeing Creepshow 2 return in glorious 4K nearly forty years later feels like a twisted little gift. When Arrow Video announced this release, I wondered, would the remaster preserve the campy magic or strip away the grainy charm that made it so good in the first place? Within minutes, I was relieved. That same eerie atmosphere is intact, only sharper, cleaner, and even more fun to revisit. Written by George Romero and still based on Stephen King stories, Creepshow 2, released in 1987, is directed by Michael Gornick, who also served as the cinematographer on the original. This continuity shows immediately. It has the same feel, like looking through the same lens with all those familiar feelings of watching the first one all those years ago.
The anthology opens with "Old Chief Wood'nhead." A struggling hardware store owner, who gets repaid in kind by the Native American tribe for monies owed. George and Dorothy think all their troubles are over until the nephew of a tribal leader turns up with his friends to cause havoc. What the boys don't rely on is the power of that wooden guardian, which protects the elderly couple and takes brutal revenge in their name. It's classic Creepshow; justice served with supernatural bite.
"The Raft" delivers peak '80s horror nostalgia. A group of high school-aged students do the typical things of their era - driving, smoking pot, and going on adventures. We get the exact clichéd characters we were used to in the 80s: the quiet, sensible one, the easily led one, the nice one, and the crazy, carefree driver who thinks he's invincible. The fun begins when they turn up at the lake to swim out to a raft. The score remains deceptively merry, suggesting that danger is imminent in true 80s movie fashion. The kids get trapped and surrounded by a mysterious blob, and as tension builds, so does all that terrible 80s acting that only true fans love. It ends the only way a proper Creepshow story should.
The final segment, "The Hitchhiker," follows a woman leaving her lover to return home to her husband. While practising her lies in the car, she hits a hitchhiker on a dark road. When she makes that crucial decision not to stay and help, she gets totally Creepshowed in the most relentless way possible.
Creepshow 2 has stayed entirely true to form. There's never a happy ending, and we never expect one. The cartoon effects remain faithful to the comic book aesthetic, and the creepy narrator's voice is exactly as it should be. The characters all blend in perfectly, and it's filled with wonderfully bad 80s acting, predictable yet satisfying camp, crappy characters, and brutal revenge served 80s style.
Overall, the remaster didn't disappoint; pure, nostalgic perfection.   Joanne West
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