Jeepers Creepers

I caught this flick on TV a few days ago. It'd gotten the prime time hotspot known as 4am, so it had to contend with constant erectile dysfunction pill advertisements over it's entire 2 hour slot. I had actually never seen it before even though it came out in 2001, so I decided sit through it.

Much to my surprise, Justin Long, y'know, that dude from Accepted, was the lead role. I actually like Justin Long, I think he's funny and all but to see him in a horror movie was interesting. He played his part well though so, no complaints there.

Besides him, the rest of the cast is pretty weak or otherwise unremarkable. But it's horror so quality acting isn't something anyone would likely bet on, so as long as their above horrible, it's alright.

The movie starts and we have our two characters, Long, whose name is Darry, and his sister, Trish, driving down a road in the middle of fucking nowhere, naturally. Pretty soon, some jerkoff in the sketchiest truck of all time decides he doesn't like them and tries to run the siblings off of the road. Seriously, he does this for no reason whatsoever.

If you can manage to put yourself in that situation, it's a pretty freaky scene. The thought of that happening is a nightmare of it's own.

They let the guy pass them and he drives off. Not too long after they see the same truck parked by an old church where a guy in dark clothing is throwing a bloody body into a big rusty pipe. The guy sees the shit out of them, jumps in his truck, runs them off of the road again and then drives off because apparently that's good enough.

Darry decides that they have to go and check out whatever that dude was up to so they drive on back to the church and start peering down the pipe. He hollers down and all but he can't see anything so he has Trish hold onto his feet as he crawls partway down. It's all fun and games until he sees rats and starts flailing around like an asshole. Naturally, Trish drops him and he falls into the evil lair which is more of a basement, only with stitched-up, dead bodies everywhere.

I'll admit, it's a pretty scary scene because the whole time, you're worried that the bad guy is going to come back and turn intestines into streamers.

Well, Trish and Darry realize they're in danger and flee the scene. They arrive at a diner and receive a phone-call where some woman tells them a bundle of bewildering warnings, including that if they hear the song Jeepers Creepers, bad things are going to happen.

So, the two get a police escort. All of the sudden, Jeepers Creepers comes on the radio.

And this is where the movie starts going downhill.

The creepy guy jumps on top of the cop car and pulls one of them out through the window and decapitates the other with a battle axe.

Where the shit did that come from?

Up until here, the movie had been pretty subtle, relying on suspense and it was working, I was into it. But no, the rest of the movie just gets dumber and dumber, failing to be suspenseful or scary in any way. It's just a cliche monster movie. By the way, the monster looks like he belongs in a fucking X-Men comic.

Anyway, from there on out the monster just chases them around and it gets more and more absurd... and I mean absurd in a bad way.

It turns out that the monster can never die because it eats people's body parts and replaces them with his own, which is an interesting idea but it doesn't really add anything to the movie, it's just a backstory. If you missed that tidbit of information, you'd just see the monster eating people, you wouldn't be confused. Also an interesting plot point that doesn't really matter, the whole Jeepers Creepers song being a bad omen. There's really no reason for it to even be there, it's hardly even used, much less explained.

Surprisingly, as much as I disliked this movie, I came to find out that it's insanely popular. It garnered largely positive reviews and broke the record for highest grossing Labor-Day weekend films. It now sits at the number 5 spot just behind none other than Jeepers Creepers 2.

So that's Jeepers Creepers. A movie that started off great and then got dumb as shit and kept me up until 6am. It's not scary, it's just cliche. Oh, and don't expect an ending because it doesn't have one.

Run in terror.

4.5/10 - Some redeeming qualities but lame overall.