Jeepers Creepers

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Jeepers Creepers

"Like, zoiks! This movie sucks."

I could count the number of horror movies made in the last ten years that have actually scared me on the fingers of one hand...if that hand only had three fingers. Jeepers Creepers was one I thought would actually pull it off at first...director Victor Silva managed to pull off a great deal of suspense when spinning his tale of two hapless college students being attacked by a mysterious stranger swaddled in rags driving a menacing-looking truck. But it doesn't take long for the suspense to trickle off, resulting in a gore- and guts-driven semi-slasher production that had much more potential than its eventual output.

Patricia and Darius (Long, Phillips) are driving home to see their mom when they are nearly forced off the side of the road by a monster ZZ Top-looking truck with a loud, scary horn. Yikes! Later, as they overtake the Mysterious Stranger, brave brother Darius thinks he sees the weird driver of the truck stuff a body down a drain pipe in front of an old church. Uh-oh! Darry wants to be a real man and go in after it. He reaches the basement of the church and finds a barely-alive guy who just had his heart cut out. Uck. Then he looks at the ceiling and sees a montage of dead people somehow sewed to the ceiling. Gross! Darius and Patty go to the cops, and that's when things go from suspenseful to downright goofy.

Mysterious Strangers who stalk young people and try to kill them can be downright terrifying, but monsters who climb walls, fly on bat wings and french-kiss decapitated heads are anything but. Neither am I frightened, or even interested, in overweight psychics with bad singing voices (Patricia Belcher) or oily-voiced old women with lots of pet cats (Eileen Brennan). Jeepers Creepers has all of these things and more, and I can only assume that Silva, faced with an age-old problem shared by every horror writer and director history has ever graced us with, simply couldn't deliver what he himself set us up to expect: a killer that is downright terrifying. All too often, horror writers realize that what we imagine is behind the bulging door (a demon from hell? a mad slasher?) is far more terrifying than what's actually behind the door (a guy in a rubber suit and fake fangs), but remarkably few writers and directors actually use this to their advantage. Only The Blair Witch Project has successfully pulled this off. Jeepers Creepers' monster is just as silly as the phrase that makes the movie's title, though hopefully it won't be remembered for as long..

Watching this movie won't scare you. Learning that there's a sequel out this year, however, might just have you locking your door and peeing your pants, so try to avoid paying attention to reports of Jeepers Creepers 2: Like a Bat Out of Hell. Hopefully, there will be no Bat Lady mumbling imprecations in this one, though I imagine the rubber suit will pop up once again.

-Long