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George Romero and Stephen King collaborate on this sprawling love letter to the EC Comics of the fifties. Romero and King are clearly having fun with the material and the director loads the movie with shots that seem to be drawn from the panels of comic books, replete with crazy dutch tilts and splashes of bright primary colors. By necessity an anthology, this is only a conditional success, rising and falling with the quality of the individual stories.

Fortunately, the best stories are at the end, so the film can claim to get better as it goes. The first two stories, both variations on the revenge from beyond the grave motif so common in the source material, are pretty much redundant (although the second is better than the first). These would be the sorts of stories that Jack Kamen or Johnny Craig drew (Kamen did the art for the comic-within-the-movie, interestingly enough), when the material demands the baroque flair of "Ghastly" Graham Ingels.

The third story, in which author King himself plays a moronic farmer who finds a meteor bearing in it the seeds of a weed that grows everywhere demonstrates that some writers are best kept behind the camera, but the story is fun anyway. This is the Weird Science entry in the anthology--I imagine this story being drawn by Al Williamson or Wally Wood.

The fourth story is where the film begins to shine, in which a crate containing a monster is found in the basement of a university. Henpecked university professor Hal Holbrook conives to use the monster to do in his shrewish wife in high style. And the fifth, a cockroach story to end all cockroach stories featuring E. G. Marshall as a Howard Hughes-ish millionaire who views people as little more than bugs, is unforgettably icky. I like to think of these as the Jack Davis stories, which to my mind were always the highlights of those old comics. The entire enterprise made it back to the comics eventually, with a cover drawn by Jack Kamen and interior art drawn by E.C.'s most famous inheritor, Berni Wrightson. Personally, I prefer the comic book adaptation, which is the natural habitat of these stories...