Jolly Contempt

By RICHARD CORLISS

CREEPSHOW

Directed by George A. Romero

Screenplay by Stephen King

IT CAME FROM HOLLYWOOD Directed by Malcolm Leo and Andrew Solt Produced by Susan Strausberg and Jeff Stein

On TV, movie critics pick their dog or skunk of the week. Repertory cinemas devote seasons to World's Worst Movie festivals, based on a hot-selling book called The Golden Turkey Awards.

Trash is chic, and connoisseurs of bad films proliferate like maggots on the corpse of culture. Some of them make new movies as homages to the seminal schlock of the 1950s. Others compile scenes from old B movies for the derisive pleasure of the hip. And a few review these movies, turning Saturday-matinee giggles into an aesthetic of pop-trash criticism.

In the past, Novelist Stephen King (Carrie, Cujo) and Director George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead) have scared people through the poetry of pulp--the primal or banal image that can raise millions of hackles. In Creepshow they have aimed lower, and hit the mark.

The film is an elaborate tribute to Tales from the Crypt and other horror comic books of the early '50s. Five tales play with the theme of moral revenge taken on corrupt humankind by nature, alien forces or the Undead. But the treatment manages to be both perfunctory and languid; the jolts can be predicted by any ten-year-old with a stop watch. Only the story in which Evil Plutocrat E.G. Marshall is eaten alive by cockroaches mixes giggles and grue in the right measure.

In B movies or bad movies, the guilty pleasure comes from exposure to the longueurs of exposition, inane dialogue, actors lumbering across the screen to their designated mark. Context is all. To use only snippets from these movies, as It Came from Hollywood does, is to deprive them of their paper-thin texture. In an attempt at the That's Entertainment of bad films, five comic actors--Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, and Cheech and Chong--introduce segments about gorillas, musicals, reefers, mixed-up teens and the mesmerizing oeuvre of the Poverty Row Stroheim, Edward D. Wood Jr.

The tone throughout It Came from Hollywood is one of jolly contempt--an attitude that might better be reserved for such recent films as Hanky Panky, Neighbors, Stripes or any Cheech and Chong picture. The detritus of movie history deserves better; one man's junk is another's priceless antique.

--By Richard Corliss

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