Jeepers Creepers Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)September 4th, 2001
JEEPERS CREEPERS
Rated R, 90 minutes
Directed by Victor Salva
WHEN, WHERE: Now playing at the UA South
Jeepers, creepers…where’d you get that plot?
Derivative though it is, writer-director Victor Salva’s teen horror flick manages at least to manufacture some legitimate scariness in its opening sequence. Or perhaps the word is borrow -- the scariness comes courtesy of Steven Spielberg’s early effort, "Duel" (1971), in which a business commuter (Dennis Weaver) is pursued and attacked along a remote stretch of highway by a malevolent, blank-windowed truck. In Salva’s version, Trish (Gina Philips) and Darry (Justin Long), a particularly unlovable pair of bickering siblings driving home from college, are pursued and attacked along a remote stretch of highway by a malevolent, blank-windowed truck.
That’s the good part. But where Spielberg orchestrated a whole movie out of this situation, Salva loses his nerve fairly early, and starts grabbing for plot elements that quickly detour his picture into a messy quagmire of the unpleasant, the unconvincing, and the unwatchable.
Those more familiar than I with the genre may well recognize more of its sources, but Salva does want us to know we're watching a genre movie. "You know the part in scary movies where somebody does something really stupid and everybody hates them for it? Well, this is it," Trish announces at just that part of this movie. And then Salva really loses control, and his movie degenerates into an urban legend scenario about decapitated teenagers and flesh-eating monsters.
All too soon he introduces an evil supernatural being (Jonathan Breck) who looks something like Dolph Lundgren with wings. We’re not sure who this creature is (the press notes call him "the Creeper"), but we get a little information about what makes him tick. He eats various parts of the human anatomy to recharge their functions in himself (tongues for taste and talking, lungs for breathing, brains, stomachs….you get the drift), he uses fear (and the smell of dirty laundry) to select his victims, and he does this, for reasons that are not deemed worthy of explanation, every twenty-third spring, for a period of twenty-three days.
The only real excuse for this movie is that it provides employment for Eileen Brennan, who turns up as a crazy old woman with a lot of cats. She's mostly backlit and unrecognizable, but she does a nicely demented scene that may owe a little to Helen Hayes in "Night of the Hunter" as she stalks out on her porch in her nightgown with frizzy white hair and a shotgun, overcoming some poorly-written dialogue en route to picking up her check. Patricia Belcher fares less well in the role of the psychic who psychically divines not only what is going to happen to our two hapless protagonists, but also where to reach them by pay phone as they stand in a diner full of stolid, forbidding Midwestern types who regard them unresponsively as they plead for a little help. "When you hear this song, run!" she tells Darry, and then plays a few bars of the old Johnny Mercer/Harry Warren title tune into the phone. As 21st century teenagers, they probably would have done that anyway.
The movie keeps bleeding itself by departing from Trish and Darry’s point of view. Obnoxious though they are, they're our only connection with what's happening on the screen, and when we digress for gratuitous scenes that don't involve them, what little interest the movie still has disappears. By jettisoning the human relevance of his story so early when he literalizes the supernatural weirdo, Salva surrenders his claim on our legitimate fears. From then on, it's really nothing but schlock shock. With his rubbery Halloween mask features and his pterodactyl wings, the Creeper is not so much scary as campy and vaguely laughable.
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
