Hey folks, Harry here.... I'm really curious about JEEPERS CREEPERS 2. You see, I've been getting nothing but negative reviews of the film recently, but both Moriarty and Mr Beaks seemed to like it when I talked to them on the phone, yet due to their laziness, they still haven't written those reviews. I'm not so sure I'll end up agreeing with Pyul here... I thought FINAL DESTINATION 2 was a mixed bag at best, and I really like JEEPERS CREEPERS, the original, for everything except the psychic... who I only hated once she appears on screen... when she was just a mysterious voice on the phone... I liked that. I believe it was Moriarty that told me... this was just a good go for broke Monster movie... I believe he said that... but he might have been under the influence of controlled substances at the time... like Mountain Dew or something. Anyway, here's Pyul's review and it is FILLED WITH SPOILERS so beware!
Hey Harry,
Well, the Suckass Summer of Sequels (I just love alliteration) is drawing to a close this weekend and I Just got back from a screening of Jeepers Creepers 2, the last of this summers sequels, and having heard some positive buzz about it I felt the dire need to help get the word out about this ultimate exercise in mediocrity.
First things first. Victor Salva should never, I repeat, NEVER, make another horror film again. Ever. The man simply has no clue how to tell an effective horror story, nor does he have an inkling as to the rules of horror. As we all know there are rules, but Victor, he has other ideas. In reading his IMDB listing I found his Bio which was either written by him or a close friend. In it his original Jeepers Creepers is described as such: "With that film, Salva re-wrote the rules of the monster film genre, and defied conventions in the days of special effects and irony-laden horror films. The result was a well-directed, critically and commercially successful release that laid the groundwork for a sequel." If by defying conventions this writer means to say that the special effects weren't that special and the irony is force fed to you rather than subtly provided, then yes, he defied the HELL out of those conventions. In fact, with Jeepers Creepers, Victor Salva broke all the rules.
Now, there's a literary axiom which states "Any rule can be broken as long as it's broken well enough." Victor, sadly, manages only to poorly break rules. The first film, hardly considered a classic, failed because Victor blew his load too early. The first 20-30 minutes of Jeepers Creepers are fantastic, really they are. They're creepy, frightening and manages to take tired conventions and breath new life into them. The audience was on the edge of their seats for that brief period of time and Victor had them by the scroats. And what does he do? He shows us the monster. Half an hour in.
Now anyone that knows their rules of monster movies knows that the longer a monster is kept in the shadows, as long as our minds are forging the image in our skulls and not FX artists, we will find the creature infinitely scarier. But Victor just HAD to show us what we were dealing with. And to make matters work, the creature was hardly anything worth looking at. At best, he looked like a souped of version of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer demon with bat wings. that was it, that was his big scary monster. And the minute we see him lit up in those headlights and get to view him in all his glory, well, the film just becomes almost comical. Had he held off showing us the creature until, say, the Police station, when he was ripping the throat out of the guard a mere five minutes before the end of the film, well, it would have been a different movie altogether. We would have forgiven naming the flesh palace beneath the church "The House of Pain". We would have forgiven that every bit of exposition of the monster came from a psychic who just happened to KNOW everything. We would have forgiven the force fed irony of the song that played on the radio each time the monster fed leading to the taking of the final victims eyes (and strangely, the back of his skull, because as all anatomists know, the best way to get the eyes is through the back of the skull, because it allows for cooler CGI, right?)
But Jeepers Creepers had it's good points. There was solid characterization, the first 1/3rd of the movie was genuinely creepy and the cast managed to deliver strong performances, something uncommon for the genre. So it's easy to assume that perhaps Ole Victor learned a thing or two from his first foray into this creatures world and was ready to come back at us with both barrels. Unfortunately, everything he did right in the first film he does wrong with the second. Oh, and he never manages to get the parts he did wrong the first time right either. This film is a mess, a mess of pedestrian mediocrity from which no worthy piece of film can be found.
Now when Renny Harlin set out to make Deep Blue Sea, he did so fully with the knowledge that this film had been done before, and brilliantly so, with Jaws. So his philosophy was that since Jaws didn't show you the shark till the end of the movie, Deep Blue Sea would show the sharks at every possible opportunity. I bring this up because this is exactly what Victor Salva has done with Jeepers Creepers 2. Almost every chance he has to show the Creeper (no really...that's his name), he does so. And unfortunately for Victor, he appears just as comical as he did in the original, and he's never for one moment creepy, let alone scary.
I'd like to bring up another horror sequel from this year: Final Destination 2. Now, when the makers of Final Destination 2 set out to make a sequel, they obviously understood the rules of making a Horror sequel. More bodies, more blood and more mythology. In FD2 there's a much higher body count, the kills are amazing, absolutely heads and shoulders above the kills in the first film and they ultimately managed to make the film without simply making it ANOTHER group of people who cheat death and then die one by one. Instead, they made the sequel a true extension of the first film. These are people who are not just going through the same fate as those that came before, but they were suffering the repercussions, the ripple effect, of the first film. And it made for a damn fine sequel.
In Jeepers Creepers 2, Victor manages to kill about the same amount of people, if maybe a few more. The kills mostly amount to the Creeper swooping down then disappearing into the night with the victim. In fact, if I remember correctly, we actually only see one person die, maybe two. the rest are all implied deaths. And it's not a budget thing either. Almost every cent spent on this film was put towards the CGI of the Creeper flying. Money that would have been better spent on gory effects to impress or revolt the audience. And mythology? Hell, Victor all but threw that out. The creepy Jeepers Creepers song coming on the radio before each kill? Gone. The trophy keeping? Gone. It could still be there, the Creeper having set up a new lair, but Victor never bothers to revisit that. New backstory into the origins, tastes or habits of the Creeper? Nope. Nothing. What's left? Well, he still feeds for only 23 days of the 23rd spring, a news report hints that he's been around a while and Minxie the Cheerleader (no really...that's her name) manifests spontaneous psychic powers to once again reveal what little backstory there is to the Creeper in an amazingly-short-psychic-sequence-for-the-amount-of-information-gleaned. That's it. Nothing new. Oh, there is one small thing, but it's a spoiler I'll tear asunder later.
Now the Creeper has zero personality. nada. He is nothing but an ass sniffing eating machine. He has no desire to toy with his prey, no vocal chords to taunt them with and no real backstory to give us anything to play with. Jason Voorhees, another mindless killing machine, had backstory and motivation. Even by the second of the Friday the 13ths he was a developed killer. Michael Meyers, same thing. The second movies actually furthered the stories of silent, mindless butchers and made them believable, frightening. And all the while, they remained scary (at least through those first 2 films.)
Jeepers Creepers 2 never attempts to further the story of it's killer, never expands his universe. It instead grows smaller, more rigid, and sadly, more boring.
Purists note: This film blows goats and the spoilers begin here. They have no end.
Jeepers Creepers 2 picks up a scant 3 days after the climax of the last film. A young boy tends to some scarecrows while his father does farm work. If you've seen the trailer, you pretty much know what happens next. The Creeper nabs the boy in front of his father and brother in broad daylight. The Father sets his mind to revenge, building himself a homemade harpoon gun and rigging it to his truck. You just gotta love redneck ingenuity. He and his remaining son then set out for some southern justice.
Meanwhile, a basketball team returns from winning a state championship (without a single family member or well wisher in tow on the ride home, something I would like to point out as Failure to Achieve Realistic Consistency Exhibit (or FARCE) 1. Anyone who knows anything about high school athletics knows that no parent or fan of the team would ever miss the STATE FUCKING CHAMPIONSHIP. And does the game having been the State championship serve the plot at all? No. It could have been any road game. But it's not.) The tire on the bus has a blowout and the bus is stopped. As it turns out The Creeper uses what appears to be Bio-weapons, something just 4 days earlier he neglected to use during numerous kills, something I like to call FARCE 2. Now mysteriously the both the radio and cell phones do not work where they are (until needed to serve the plot) when only one person, our beloved revenge inspired redneck, manages to hear there call, despite his distance from the bus (something I affectionately refer to as FARCE 3).
Anyhow, this sets us up with a group of kids and their adult coaches and bus driver to be trapped on the bus, isolated in the middle of nowhere, having to fend off the ravages of The Creeper. Of course, the Creeper, ever the picky eater, only kills what he really thinks smells scrum-diddly-icious, which apparently is first and foremost all of the adult supervision (FARCE 4). So now we have all these kids alone on the bus and we can get down to some serious Assault on Precinct 13 action, right?
No. This is where the film gets decidedly worse. In the first film, there are only two characters and we get to know them quite well. They're brother and sister and they have a very interesting dynamic. Here we have something close to 10 characters on the bus and we never really get to know any of them. Their peril never bothers us, their motivations make absolutely no sense (except their will to live) and their relationships are about as thin and developed as an anorexic 12 year old girl.
Minxie the Cheerleader goes into epileptic fits, has her epiphany, spills the beans to everyone else and well, then it's about 45 minutes of them doing nothing but shifting from one end of the bus to the other trying not to get killed. Finally, the radios work and they manage to contact the revenge ready redneck (more of that Alliteration I love so much) who high tails it to kick some Creeper ass.
Now here's just a personal thing, something that may not bother others. I dig the whole revenge concept, really I do. But why did it have to be a new character? Why couldn't it have been Patricia Jenner, the sister from the first film? Why couldn't it have even been both? Why couldn't the farmer have gone to the police, a local sheriff perhaps, who pointed him in the direction of Patricia to get answers? Why couldn't they both set out to kill this picky eating son of a bitch before sunset of the 23rd day to ensure he never manages to eat anyone again? Why couldn't the kids on the bus be a side story, a group the two manage to save in the last few minutes of their revenge inspired hunt? Why couldn't the farmer bring along some of his M-16 packing militia buddies for the ride. I mean, it worked for Aliens. The first movie was about the Alien stalking man. But the second. Hoo-Wee the second, it was about man stalking the alien. And it was bloody, and while an action film, it was still scary. Why couldn't this be that kind of revenge movie? Or why couldn't a team of occult researchers have shown up after the news broke with painstakingly researched documentation into bizarre rituals that speak not only of the origins of the Creeper, but just why no one in the region ever speaks of such things, despite the long history of killings?
For the answer to these questions and more I refer only to my opening statements: Because Victor Salva should never, I repeat, NEVER, make another horror film again. Ever. He doesn't understand the genre.
Now this leads me to another point. This movie not only fails to build upon the mythology of the first (as I mentioned earlier), but rather, begins to unravel the the very threads that hold the first film together. In Jeepers Creepers, the fact that no one really knew or talked about the Creatures killings as being a connected series of events was believable. There were the tales of missing teens, creepy stories that had gone from being news to local legend. And, as we saw in the film, the bodies vanished and the Creeper chose his victims very carefully. They were unseen disappearances. Travelers, transients, drifters. But then the body count got high, as the Creeper desperately tried to get one of the main characters. Understandable. But here, as the creature draws closer to it's hibernation, it's hunger has grown. It's kills are more blatent, risky and, for the love of God, out in the open. As the Creeper clearly is an eating machine and only an eating machine and at best a cunning predator, it makes you wonder: Why are there so many deaths like this and if this is the norm, why isn't there at the very least a local legend about the beast that absconds in the night? And if it isn't the norm then WHY isn't it the norm? Everything the first movie set up becomes ripped open to leave big gaping holes in the mythos of the Creeper, proving that Salva actually has no mythos at all for the creature outside of the 23rd spring for 23 days thing.
Eventually the kids make a run for it and the Good ole Boy with his 'poon truck shows up for a final showdown. Unfortunately, the showdown is far from exciting. Salva and his cinematographer Don E. FauntLeRoy (whose career highlights include Munchie, Munchie Strikes Back, The Perfect Wife, The Perfect Nanny, and Legion of Fire: Killer Ants!...I can't make shit this good up) manage to frame everything so impossibly tight at times during the action to ensure we never quite see what's going on during the few precious moments that we SHOULD see what's going on.
Extra heavy spoiler warning. I'm about to spoil the film for those of you left that still care.
The truck gets totaled. I mean totaled. The wheels fucking fall off the god damned thing. It's flipped over and completely trashed. I mention this so concretely, because the truck shows up again, on all four wheels and pretty much intact to send yet another 'poon into the Creeper. At a climactic, quiet moment in which we'd have heard that truck coming when it was in it's best shape from a mile off. Let's call this FARCE 5. But, and here's the real kicker, earlier in the film the Creeper rips off his own head only to replace it with the head he's consumed of one of the kids. Which rises as the kids head to replace his old, damaged one. Now, does Victor let the Creeper retain this lifeless head as his new head to creep out the audience and freak out his friends? Fuck no! A scant second later the Creeper turns to the camera, flashes a smile and his head looks just as it did before. It really doesn't work, but it's not quite bad enough to be FARCE 6. Instead, FARCE 6 pertains to the fact that by ripping off his head, he proves that he's an autonomous being, capable of surviving without vital organs (like a fucking head!). Is this FARCE worthy? No, it's kind of a cool concept. He's like an amoeba that happens to regenerate by replacing the organs he's missing. But what's important to note is that he is never once hindered by severe damage. He takes a pole through the eye and out the back of his head and we're treated to a mildly comical scene of the Creeper trying to pull it out. But he isn't for one moment really hindered. What makes this FARCE 6 is that when the Redneck father finally downs the Creeper, he stabs him, nearly to death. There's a truck in flames not 20 feet away to burn the wounded, crippled body to ash and instead...he stabs it repeatedly, through the heart. But that's not all. Once brought down and almost dead, guess what, it's hibernation time again. Yeah, after all that, the characters are robbed of their revenge and the audience is robbed of a halfway satisfying ending. But is it midnight? Sunrise? What is it about the time the puts the Creeper back into hibernation? It was simply his time. At some indeterminate hour in the middle of the night, with a bitter redneck stabbing him in the heart repeatedly, it's just his time. Robbery. Pure and simple. The cheap and easy way out. Way to go Victor.
END HEAVY SPOILERS
So that's it, that's the breadth and depth of Victor Salva's crap ass sequel to a heavily flawed horror film. There's a mildly interesting epilogue, something that would have been much cooler if the film hadn't ended on such a lame note. By that point, though, you don't really care. With Jeepers Creepers at least it seemed like he was trying. Here, Victor barely seems conscious. Plagued by it's lack of imagination and crippled by it's inconsistancies, this movie, despite what I'd heard, is far from fun, entertaining or better than the original. It is, instead, the epitome of the crap ass, mediocre sequel. No thrills, no chills. Just Bills, wasted. The audiences and MGM's.
And I pray now that the name Victor Salva never has to cross my lips again.
Pyul Mactackle
