Well, it’s fun to see Ray Wise in a role that allows him to make faces as goofy as he did in the great Twin Peaks television series. I can say that much positive about Jeepers Creepers 2. But I’m struggling to come up with much more.
I’ll avoid jumping on my sequels-of-forgettable-movies hobby-horse, except to point out that it tells you something when a sequel returns only the monster who never utters a word and a few vague references to the first movie. That’s all you get here, in what can only be described as horror minimalism – a movie composed of scary monster attacks and virtually nothing more. Whereas the first movie had a horrifying and at least mildly diverting story to it, this time we get but a one-trick monster – flying in and out of the lives of a terrified high school basketball team that’s stranded as a result of a couple of monster dart-assisted tire blow-outs on their way home from winning a big tournament.
The movie starts by telling us that ‘it’ gets to eat for 23 days, just once every 23 years. Soon, we see what ‘it’ is – an over-dressed winged, sharp-toothed beast that makes its first appearance incognito, pretending to be a scarecrow. This is odd countryside, where springtime features parched fields that look decidedly like late summer, and where folks whose kids get snatched by the monster don’t call for help, but instead rig up a Moby Dick-style harpoon contraption on the back of their pick-up and head off in search of revenge.
The vast majority of the movie’s 103-minutes is spent aboard the basketball team’s bus, and this is unfortunate, as there isn’t an interesting and likeable character to be found here. The movie might have explored how people react – turning on each other and such – when they’re confined to close quarters during a crisis, but we learn even before the beast arrives on the scene that there’s resentment, racism and homophobia onboard, so its emergence during the monster confrontation really doesn’t tell us anything. All that leaves is the frights, and there are plenty of those. But they’re virtually all the same – monster flies onto the roof of the bus, finds a way to snatch away one of its occupants, and then leaves the kids cowering and bitching at each other until he returns for another snack. Pretty boring stuff after a while.
The special effects are competent, but unspectacular; we’ve all scene movie monsters before that can fly, rip people to shreds, and yes, even pop off their own damaged heads and replace them with a fresh one form a recent victim. And God knows we’ve seen plenty of monsters that appear to be indestructible. I continue to believe that a horror movie with an monster you can’t destroy just plain isn’t fun; it might guarantee more sequels, but it’s hardly a fair fight.
Presumably, writer/ director Victor Salva was convinced that the monster (known as ‘The Creeper’) was so spooky in the first movie that he didn’t need to bother this time around with protagonists we care about, a grotesque Hannibal the Cannibal-like storyline, or much in the way of dialogue. The original wasn’t exactly David Mamet, but it seems that way in comparison with this all-screams-no-talk monster movie retread.
