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. 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. 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. 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.

Welcome back to our ongoing journey through the adaptations of Stephen King. We’ve arrived at Creepshow 2, the sequel to the earlier collaborative effort of King and George A. Romero. Michael Gornick takes on directorial duties here as Romero moves to screenwriter, adapting three of King’s short stories for the new anthology. Originally intended to feature five stories like Creepshow, budget cuts unfortunately left us with just three tales of terror. 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.

The first part of Old Chief Wood’nhead has a lovely, elegiac quality to it as married shopkeepers the Spruces mourn their dying town and the Native American tribe that rely on them for supplies without the money to pay for them. George Kennedy, Dorothy Lamour, and Frank Salsedo give dignified performances, and the gentle scene they share sets up the tonal shift into the armed robbery’s violence at the hands of Sam (Holt McCallany in a rather unconvincing long black wig), perfectly. McCallany plays his bad guy a bit too broadly for him to be really scary and the Chief’s slow, creaky movements lessen his impact somewhat, but the animation is good, particularly in his facial expressions.