Creepshow

'I waanntt myy caaakkkeee!' gurgles the decaying birthday revenant of the first segment of this well-dressed and frequently beautifully framed tribute to the graveyard hoots of Bill Gaines's EC horror comics, complete with links in the original cartoon style. Sadly, the combined talents of King and Romero fail to sustain the opener's deft mesh of blood-letting and black humour. King himself is excellent as a bumpkin with fungus-from-space problems, but the other stories - a watery re-run of Cask of Amontillado, EG Marshall as a Howard Hughes type overrun by cockroaches during a power failure, etc - are simply too long for anybody's comfort. The old Amicus movies used EC originals to better effect and with more brevity, for all their cardboard sets.