Jeepers Creepers 2 Review
by Laura Clifford (laura AT reelingreviews DOT com)August 28th, 2003
JEEPERS CREEPERS 2
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Every 23rd spring for 23 days, it gets to eat. Those 23 days aren't over and the Creeper (Jonathan Breck, "Jeepers Creepers") has a school busload of champion basketball players in his sights for some regenerative snacks in "Jeepers Creepers 2."
Writer/director Victor Salva ("Jeepers Creepers," "Powder") had some effective creep going on in his first film until the mystery was lost and control unraveled. The sequel, while it may be the first flick ever to borrow from "Jaws," "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," is a standard monster flick which never gets its audience invested in the fates of its teen targets.
Towheaded Billy Taggart is whisked out of a cornfield by what he thought was a scarecrow he'd just erected (shot by cinematographer Don E. FauntLeRoy ("Jeepers Creepers") just like the graveyard corpse from "Chainsaw") in front of the uncomprehending eyes of his father Jack (Ray Wise, best known as Laura Palmer's father on "Twin Peaks") and older brother (Luke Edwards, "American Pie 2"). Jack Jr. finds a dagger carved with the Creeper's evil history and Jack Sr. begins to plot a single-minded revenge.
On a remote country road, a winning high school basketball team and their cheerleading squad is headed for home when a tire gives out. The driver (Diane Delano, "A Mighty Wind") nervously shows coaches Charlie (Thom Gossom Jr., "Fight Club") and Dwayne (Tom Tarantini, "Jeepers Creepers") the throwing star made of soldered claws and embedded with a tooth that has shredded their tire. Weird news reports of a church set ablaze yielding mutilated corpses comes in over the radio, but they cannot make contact with anyone and continue to limp along. A cheerleader, Minxie (Nicki Lynn Aycox, "Crime and Punishment in Suburbia") has a hyper real dream where Billy and "Jeepers Creepers'" Jonathan (Justin Long) try to warn her that 'he's in the field.' A second blowout reveals a second throwing star, this one embellished with Jonathan's belly button. As night beings to fall, Charlie and the driver begin to lay flares, but each is swept off by a creature with a huge wingspan. A battle against an unrelenting evil is upon them.
Salva tries to plump up his story by turning a post game racial conflict among the players into a Cold War style survival tale after the Creeper 'marks' his future victims, but it is all so much hokem. The bus proves no bomb shelter and its tin-canned teens are so much fodder. Once Jacks Senior and Junior arrive on the scene to begin a combined fight, logic goes out the window, with numerous kids simply disappearing from the action with no explanation. The film is most effective before the Creeper is really seen, perhaps because its first three victims - Billy, Coach Charlie and the bus driver - are its only sympathetic ones. The Creeper itself is just an oily face with nasty teeth, a "Predator"-like underjaw and rubbery wings. Taggart attacks it with a homemade harpoon until it is eventually in a similar condition to "The Holy Grail's" Black Knight and, like that Sir, he keeps coming anyway, although I'm unsure if the laughs here are intentional.
Special effects aren't, although FauntLeRoy achieves some beautiful photographic effects from Minxie's dreams and the initial golden orange prologue.
"Jeepers Creepers 2" ends with a set up for a third, but please, we're supposed to have another 23 years first.
C-
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