After myriad negative reviews and a direct to video release, I decided to relinquish the last, lingering vestiges of my sense of shame and invest 104 minutes of my life into Creepshow III.

This film is neither the best or worst horror anthology I have ever seen. Nor is it by any known definition of the term the worst sequel I have ever seen (still gotta give that up to Howling II.) What we have here is a mediocre film with one or two bright spots.

As in the original classic, this Creepshow gives us five macabre tales. This time all of the stories unfold within a single suburban neighborhood and each one in some fashion is centered around a crackpot scientist by the name of Professor Dayton.

The first tale, “Alice,” allows us to watch a strange universal remote wreak havoc on the life of the obnoxious titular teen. The main problem with this story is that Alice does nothing to warrant a fateful revenge. Okay, she’s arrogant and mean. So? Roughly 80% of the teenagers I hung out with when I was that age were arrogant and mean. That doesn’t mean they deserve some hideous fate. Also, this story apparently equates changed ethnicity with a horrifying experience, a surprisingly brazen racist statement if you stop to consider it.

The next tale is the most thematically solid. In “The Radio” a down on his luck loser named Jerry buys a cheap radio from a peddler and finds that it is capable of conversing with him, guiding him to money, power and murder. I liked the ending of this one and the radio itself has this creepy feminine laugh that gave me the willies.

“Call Girl” follows one night in the life of a murderous hooker as she meets up with a john who is more trick than treat. Decent effects in this one, but the ending is telegraphed from the first minute or so and overall the tale is perfunctory at best.

Then we come to my personal favorite, “Professor Dayton’s Wife.” This is a gory little bit of black humor in which two former students come to the scientists’ house to congratulate him on his recent engagement. There they make the acquaintance of the bride-to-be and become convinced that she is an android, set up as yet another of the professor’s infamous practical jokes. So in true collegiate style, these two guys decided to dismantle the woman to prove their point. The utter absurdity and over the top gore in this story actually made me grin.

Finally, witness “Haunted Dog”, centered on a total rat-bastard of a physician who finds himself haunted by the specter of a homeless man, said transient having died after devouring a rancid hot dog the doctor had supplied.

None of these stories are particularly well performed or well produced, but there’s a fair amount of energy in the film and I thought the doctor in the final story was extremely funny (yes, intentionally). Also, FX guru Greg McDougall is the unsung hero here, providing a nice, splattery sheen reminiscent of the hallowed prosthetic and latex days of 80’s horror cinema.

The primary flaw with this film isn’t the film itself, it’s the title. This isn’t Creepshow. This is just another horror anthology. If I had to define in broad terms the feel of this movie, I’d say it was as if someone had found several extremely graphic episodes of the late television series Monsters and strung them together, interconnecting them with recurring characters and locations.

Creepshow and it’s first sequel were designed not only as omnibus films, but to evoke memories of the classic E. C. comics. The stories they contained were wrapped with artwork or animation designed in homage to classic titles such as Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror. The films even gave us a modern day Cryptkeeper by way of The Creep.

There is none of that in this film. In fact , the opening animated sequence is so laughably bad that I found myself thinking (read as “hoping”) that it was a trailer for another movie. The Creep himself only appears for all of two second at the very end of the film, and that cameo is marred by the incorporation of the single worst CGI effect ever put to film.

Here’s what James “I keep screwing over horror fans by bastardizing the revered name of classic franchises with unrelated sequels, quite possibly to my eventual physical detriment” Dudelson needs to do. He needs to issue an edict that all remaining copies of this film be recalled and then re-title the film. Some names I might suggest would be “Professor Dayton’s Neighborhood” or “The Macabre World of Professor Dayton” since everything seems to eventually come back to that character anyway.

Is Creepshow III a good movie? No, not really. But plenty of bad movies have eventually earned revered cult status (including, in the eyes of many fans, Creepshow II) and this isn’t the worst film ever released straight to DVD. It has the occasional moment that works and there are some decent gore effects.

The real reason this film has provoked such (justifiable) ire is that the title erroneously promises that the finished product will be everything it is not. Dudelson and his partner in crime Ana Clavell should be ashamed of themselves for once again misleading horror fans. As penance they should be forced to watch a double feature of Day of the Dead: Contagium and House of the Dead. That first title to see what they are responsible for and the latter to remind them of how it feels when someone else does the same thing to them.

Creepshow III rates:
As an installment of the franchise: Zero out of Ten Moments of Ironic Justice. This simply isn’t Creepshow.

As a standard horror anthology: Four out of Ten for some acceptable gore and one extremely funny asshole of a doctor.