Jeepers Creepers (2001)
Grade: B-
Cast: Justin Long, Gina Philips, Jonathon Breck, Patricia Belcher, Eileen Brennan
Director: Victor Salva
Rated R for terror violence/gore, language, some nudity.


"Jeepers Creepers" is the ultimate exhibit for uneven horror. It is a film that has a marvelous first act, a perfect string of terrifying scenes so subtle in their horror that it’s hard to believe something so scary was produced in 2001. But it all eventually falls apart. "Jeepers Creepers" is magnificent at first, but soon becomes run-of-the-mill stuff, with a quality that is really quite passive. You can tell exactly where the movie stopped being a great horror film and started being a Hollywood exercise in mindless monsters and gore.

Trish (Gina Philips) and Darry Jenner (Justin Long) play a brother and sister driving home from college together. They have an enjoyable, funny relationship improved by the stars’ chemistry. Things start getting weird when a man in a truck tries running them off the road. Later, they spot the same man, in a coat and hat, dumping some large sacks down a pipe. The two, of course, investigate (some of that increasingly annoying post-"Scream" irony is present, and it’s done better than it has been lately—thankfully), and Darry falls down the pipe, discovering a whole lot of dead bodies. We then learn that the man is called the Creeper, and is some sort of cannibalistic demon who comes out of—well, I guess hibernation is the word—to get some human parts to regenerate himself. Apparently, according to a psychic (Patricia Belcher, who is pretty good), he wants something from one of the Jenners. Help also comes from a weird lady with lots of cats (Eileen Brennan).

All of this is really, really, scary—until we know all about the Creeper. Nothing is scarier than a real person that can hurt you, but a lot of stuff is scarier than a Hollywood monster that will not die, does not exist in real life, and therefore cannot hurt you. If the Creeper were a person, perhaps "Jeepers Creepers" would have been able to retain some of its subtlety. But somehow when we see the Creeper, who looks like Freddy Krueger after a bath in the sewer in which he lost his hat, it lets the air out of the movie. Most of the intensity (though not all) is lost after this, and that severely disappointed me. The last shot redeems a lot though—it’s a perfectly done, abruptly unconventional surprise.

After the Creeper appears, the film still manages to not be bad and retain at least passing decency—it’s scarier than, say, "Urban Legends: Final Cut"—but the reason I am bashing it so much is because it erases the potential the first 45 minutes or so possess. I like my horror subtle and scary, rather than showy and gory. In the last half of "Jeepers Creepers", we see the silhouette of the Creeper eating a guy’s tongue. In this ideal horror I speak of, I only want to see tongues if it’s a sex scene.

There are exceptions to the rule of subdued horror, including "Hannibal". But I still think "Jeepers Creepers" is sloppier in its transition to monster movie than it should have been. And it shouldn’t have teased us with the possibility of being terrifyingly discreet in what it shows and tells us. As horror goes, it’s about on par with "Joy Ride", which makes a similar mistake. In that one, the villain was a person, yes (voiced with a spooky brilliance by Ted Levine), and a person we never saw—he was tormenting our heroes over a CB radio. That film eventually lent itself to elaborate, noisy showdowns, and while its mistakes are worse than "Jeepers Creepers," it proves the same thing: less is more. Whether it’s a truck chase through a cornfield or a car continually running over an undying…*thing*, the kind of material in these two films is almost guaranteed to pale in comparison to a scene that uses "The Blair Witch Project"’s method.


-Alex, July 2002