Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003)

Victor Salva has managed to keep his controversial status surprisingly quiet. Many years after having seen, fallen in love with, and watched hundreds of times, his modern horror classic Jeepers Creepers, I did some reading about him, and found out that he had been convicted and incarcerated for raping a young male actor on his debut movie Clownhouse. By the millennium, he was out, back to directing and doing a darn good job of it. Now I maintain that the personal lives of artists should bear no consequence on our freedom to enjoy their material, and Victor Salva has a lot of talent, regardless of his poor choices and criminal record. So here comes a positive critique for his production Jeepers Creepers 2. 

The sequel picks up the day after the ordeal of Trish and Darry, and centres on two separate parties whose paths eventually cross: one is an old farmer and his teenage son, whose youngest boy has been dragged to his doom by the Creeper; and a high school football team and their girlfriends and coaches, on their way home from a victorious game. It is Day 23 of the Creeper’s season, making it his last day of human smorgasbord before he gotta sleep it off for another twenty-three years. And hey, this is like the day before the diet begins, so he’s gonna binge the fuck out, right?!

The Creeper on the bus goes...

The original Jeepers Creepers drew the perfect balance of visibility of our antagonist. The Creeper, a dark Reaper-type figure, was almost always cast in deep shadow and we saw fractions of his features, or simply his silhouette. The sequel takes the opportunity to get us better acquainted to that fabulous villain, and he is serving up demonic realness hun-ty! A standout sequence from within the bus sees the Creeper stalk the vehicle, before hanging upside down and staring straight into the camera, into the eyes of each dumb teenager on board. The first hour of the movie is a hardcore suspensefest that kept me absolutely hooked.

Consider the sequence in which the busload of kids realise they are up against a malevolent unseen force. The bus tyres have been shredded by unusual throwing stars decorated with human remains, and their coach sets about setting a string of flares up the road to warn any oncoming vehicles of their predicament. Despite the entire ensemble of no less than twenty five people standing right there when it happens, not a single person is looking at the split second in which coach suddenly disappears into the sky. Most of them notice the flare that inexplicably falls from mid-air moments later. The ways in which the characters baffle over, and try to make sense of, what has just happened are golden realism, and even when the same fate befalls the bus driver minutes later, they are in no hurry to ascribe the events to the paranormal. But they are understandably scared.

The action implores the audience to sit right within that bus, and engage in the frustration. Although we know more than the characters on-board about the fates of their coach and bus driver, the plausibility they try to address the situation with is so very believable, and makes their ordeal the more terrifying. They could move beyond this point had their missing disappeared in more mortal ways, but every sign indicates they flew away, as the only witness of the driver’s demise insists. They are clearly dealing with more than a mad hillbilly, but they are living in the real world, and how else could these events be explained?

Creepiest figure on a cross since Carrie

The thread of the farmer and his son is not so tangible, especially when it comes to the movie’s penultimate sequence that involves the farmer bringing out some OTT harpoon contraption mounted on the back of his battered pick-up truck. The anticlimactic battle that ensues adds unnecessary length and dilution to the picture, and weakens it overall. I mean, had the farmer shown this kind of proficiency in the drawn-out chase of the creature snatching his kid – instead of repeatedly screaming the boy’s name, running and doing nothing with the rifle in his hand – he could have saved himself one stressful retirement. Just sayin’.

However, this is somewhat compensated for by the closing scene, set another twenty-three years later, in which some local kids stop by the farm to see the attraction they have heard so much about. In response to the inevitability of the Creeper’s return – which he expects ‘any day now’ – the farmer mounted the thing’s body on the wall of the barn years before, and sits in front of it night and day, armed and ready for round two. The ending makes me all the more surprised that the third Jeepers instalment took so long to materialise, despite years of rumours, plans and Development Hell, and ended up being so unbearably dreadful.

The movie is not only well conceived, well directed and made with fabulous visual style, but is acted exceedingly well for what is more or less a dead teenager movie. Standouts come from Garikayi Mutambirwa and Ray Wise, an entertainment veteran whose work I really enjoyed in the short-lived series Reaper, delivers the maddened, grieving father almost better than the movie requires of him. He is a real treat. And Jonathan Breck reprising the Creeper is even better than before, going to town on opportunities to get up close and personal with the camera and scare us silly.

Hey Creeper, how's your head?

Jeepers Creepers 2 is solidly entertaining. It is absolutely absorbing, and the kind of movie that you have to commentate: “Stop yelling ‘Bobby’ and just shoot the fucker!”, “Oh my God, no, don’t stick your head out through the roof, no no NO!” It is, by far, one of the strongest horror sequels I have ever seen, in terms of action, quality and scariness. It is a rare thing for me to get the feels from a horror movie these days, and the unflinching tension that Salva and his actors create – particularly in the first hour or so – is contagious. I scold myself for waiting so long to finally watch this movie – it is a right treasure.