When the fine folks at Taurus Entertainment decided to somehow "acquire" the rights to established movie titles like "Day of the Dead" and "Creepshow," they probably assumed they'd stumbled across a pretty profitable little avenue. Heck, by releasing in-name-only sequels like Day of the Dead 2: Contagium and Creepshow 3, they were pretty much guaranteed some sort of cash infusion, if only because we hardcore horror fans are a very loyal, very optimistic and very curious lot. So what did the Taurus people do with their newfound properties? They produced two of the cheapest, chintziest, stupidest and most shamelessly inept sequels you could possibly imagine. Nice way to invest in a name brand and then demolish it, guys.

Talentless husband-and-wife writing / directing / producing team Ana Clavell and Jim Dudelson are the ones responsible for this wretched dreck, and I'm their worst nightmare: A guy who knows his horror, adores the original Creepshow (and the fantastic opening story of the 1987 sequel), and has access to a pretty well-visited soapbox. I'll get into the specifics in a minute, but here's the bottom line: Do not, under any circumstances, rent, purchase or view this movie. Anything that throws another nickel into the Taurus piggy bank is just another step towards another movie as worthless as Creepshow 3, and if this company's last two productions have proven anything (beyond a shadow of a doubt), it's that Taurus is more interested in stealing your fifteen bucks than they are in producing something the horror fans might actually enjoy. This is a stunningly low-rent and aggressively boring piece of crap, basically, and the thing doesn't even have the decency to be "so bad its good." (And these guys are actually trying to get a Creepshow "remake" off the ground, which makes no freaking sense at all.)

Just like the "real" Creepshow movies, this ungainly pitcher of migraine juice is an anthology. Yep, instead of one long awful movie, you're getting 5 awful little movies -- none of which are even remotely scary, funny, exciting or strange enough to be entertaining. We open with the non-sensical tale of a hateful teenage girl (Stephanie Pettee) whose family changes from white to black to Hispanic whenever someone clicks a button on the TV remote. Oh, and every time that button is pressed, the girl melts a little bit and stomps around in really terrible latex make-up. It's more interesting on the page than it is on the screen, trust me.

Story 2 is about a seedy loner who acquires a magical radio that convinces him to steal money and kill people. This is probably the best of the five stories, mainly because it's got a professional actor in the lead (The Signal's AJ Bowen) and a potentially compelling nugget of a premise, but Clavell and Dudelson ruin the potential at every turn. (Why a fifteen-minute mini-movie needs all this extra padding is beyond me, but it happens more than once in Creepshow 3.)

Chapter 3 is about a hooker who is also a serial killer. (OK, not a bad start.) The violent prostitute is invited to service a teenager whose parents are mysteriously missing, and once you reach that plot point, it's a 12-minute yawn-a-thon until the patently predictable ending rears its dreary head. Fourth to the plate is a one-joke dungpile about two supposedly brilliant grad students who visit an old professor and proceed to chop his wife to bits when they become convinced she's a robot. As a three-minute Saturday Night Live skit (one written by talented and professional comedians), this concept could be an amusingly sloppy good time. In this movie you've figured out the destination long before the movie has, which means the movie's left spinning its chintzy wheels until (again) the painfully obvious finale pops up.

At this point in Creepshow 3, we've been offered four amazingly non-scary stories over the course of 75 merciless minutes. If Dudelson and Clavell possessed one small semblance of mercy, they would have just tacked on their outrageously pointless epilogue and moved on to the end credits. But the punishment just wouldn't be complete, which means you're about to be subjected to one of the most worthless pieces of anthology filler ever conceived.

Pick the worst episode of Tales from the Darkside and I guarantee you it's better than what's offered in the closing chapter of Creepshow 3: It's about an amazing jerk of a doctor who accidentally kills a homeless man with a dirty hot dog and then spends another 20 minutes ... doing ... nothing. If you ever needed a perfect example of filmmakers trying to stretch their movie out, here it is: Actor Kris Allen, as the nasty doctor, throwing a bunch of insults at his sickly patients, wandering into night clubs, and basically acting like a royal ass. Once the directors realize that this is supposed to be a horror story, the ghost of the dead indigent shows up and tries to scare the doctor. It's at about this point that I seriously considered smashing the DVD into a thousand pieces, just so nobody else at the video store would be subjected to the pain. (I had to hit FIVE different DVD stores/rental shops before I could even FIND a copy of this flick -- and now I know why. HBO and WB have some serious explaining to do on this bargain bin pick-up.)

For some insipid reason, the filmmakers opted to toss all their peripheral characters into all of the stories, which I suppose is meant to lend some sort of Pulp Fiction vibe to the proceedings. If that was the plan, then that alone is funnier than anything found in the actual movie. (Or maybe it was just cheaper to re-use the actors rather than hiring extra mouths to spout such worthless dialogue.) Maybe the gimmick would have worked if any of the reappearing actors had talent or their characters actually had something interesting to do. As it stands, Creepshow 3 feels like something that was slapped together over the course of one listless week, the producers keeping a desperate eye on the budget because they wanted to use whatever money was left over to get a nice meal at Applebee's.

The thing is painfully edited, overwhelmingly boring, pathetic when it's trying to be funny and tedious when it's trying to be scary (which, to be fair, isn't often). The acting is almost uniformly atrocious, the gore FX range from passable to childish, and to call the screenplay amateurish would be a kick in the crotch to all the amateur screenwriters of the world. (If you need incontrovertible proof regarding the talents of Dudelson and Clavell, be sure to sit through the 25-minute "making of" featurette.) Frankly I can't even imagine what the Taurus tools were thinking. Why the hell would you buy the rights to an established franchise when you never even PLANNED to make a good movie? It's like buying a classic car just so you can plow it into a brick wall. And plow they did.