Woah, okay. It was like a Star Wars release for me. I've been a huge fan of the first two movies since I was in Jr. High school. (Not a long time ago, you old timers). Jeepers Creepers is up there as one of my favorite horror/monster movies of all time. It's not even because it's scary or anything like that, but because it's creepy, and I mean creeeepy. It's one of the creepiest movies you'll ever watch. It does what smart horror movies do and make you think rather than just trying to startle you. Jeepers Creepers 2 is where it became less like a horror movie and more like a monster movie. Just a cool popcorn flick that's a cool way to spend your Saturday night in. Perhaps I'll do full, in-depth reviews of the first two movies for Halloween this year.
Let's get to the main event: Jeepers Creepers 3. A movie that was announced four times and finally saw the light of day in 2017, twelve years after its first announcement. This movie saw star problems, script problems, and even protest problems due to writer/director Victor Salva's shady past. (Look up behind-the-scenes stuff on Clownhouse, I won't go into it here). So, being a sequel to one of my favorite monster movies of all time and being "on hold" for this long, there was a lot of anticipation. I can remember for the past couple of years, I've been intermittently Googling "Jeepers Creepers 3" trying to get some intel on any release updates, news, or rumors. Finally, by about spring of 2017, cameras were finally rolling and the movie was out about 3-4 months later. So, was the twelve year wait worth it? Did this long wait that saw me go from junior high to high school, graduate, do five years combined of a bachleor's degree program and graduate from that, and put in a year at my current job build up enough height that it was insurmountable? Well...
So, I'm not gonna pull punches here and I'm not going to beat around the bush. The movie could have been better, but that's not to say what we got wasn't bad. It was very entertaining and had some over-the-top badass moments, mainly just from the Creeper himself. SPOILERS: The movie isn't due out on Blu-ray/DVD until Christmas, so if you want to wait and watch it yourself, stop here.
To start off, I didn't really care for making the Creeper this mystical being from ancient times. I mean, I know it was the only logical explanation to his origins, considering he's a fucking humanoid bat who makes weapons and eats people, but I digress. His full and unbridled backstory is still left a mystery to the viewer. For the people coming into the theater desperately wanting to know what the Creeper is or how to kill, it's going to be vastly disappointing. Vastly. Stan Shaw sees it, and Meg Foster does too, and neither make any effort to make what they saw known. How do they see it? By holding hands with a dismembered hand the Creeper lost 23 years prior to the movie that Meg Foster just...digs up. I mean...that makes sense to me! (laughter).
The beginning of the movie sees Stan Shaw approach Sgt. Tubbs when Tubbs and his men find the Creeper's truck parked right outside the police station. That's right, the movie starts off directly following the ending to the first one, just after the Creeper took Darry. Tubbs even references Trish as "the sister" who's "inside, a wreck". They find that the truck is booby-trapped and mystical in an of itself. It can drive itself and trigger its own kills. Some goofy shit, but I had to remember that if I had watched Jeepers Creepers 2, its hinted in that one that the Creeper can "charm" his possessions to fly through the air on their own accord or do his bidding without his operation. So, while it's not a totally lame idea, it's still makes the movie feel like some kind of Syfy original movie...and that just makes it feel cheap.
Speaking of cheap, being the low-budget movie that it is sees it using a lot of really obviously fake special effects. There's the infamous chase scene that sees three trucks shoot guns at the Creeper's truck, with bullets ricocheting and bouncing off of it, and the sparks it makes even look fake-as-shit. The glass doesn't even break when bullets hit it. That's some voodoo shit right there. During this scene too, the truck also drops these self-propelled land mine-type spike balls that roll and explode that are clearly all CGi, rubbery and don't react to the terrain very well. It just makes me wonder if Victor Salva was out of ideas on how the Creeper can remain mysterious so he was like "You know what? Rolling land mines! Made out of human stuff!" I did like that the "Creeper task force", so to speak, carried homemade license plates that say "BKllngU" as a play on the Creeper's infamous plate "BEatngU".
Jonathan Breck returns for his third go as the "Bat out of Hell", the Creeper, and does his usual job. What landed him the part for the first one was his eyes and his way of stealing the scene with his presence and his quick, snap-like movements. He carries himself in a way that's foreboding, and with the Creeper make-up on, he looks badass, as usual. Still though, when you compare the Creeper the way he is now to the way he was in the first movie, they don't even feel like the same character. In the first movie, the Creeper lurks in the shadows, whistles 1920's songs as he eats tongues out of severed heads, flies around off screen which leaves you guessing when he's going to strike next, and can sneak in and out of places undetected. This Creeper just flies around in broad daylight, believes a girl who is alive to be dead despite having a sense of smell, goes after someone in vengeance just for peeing on the front of his truck (I'm not making that up) and even falls for one of his own booby-traps in the truck. It's like Salva made him too good and needed ways for the protagonists. He did use his bone-made shurikens and even had a javelin too, which was pretty sweet.
I liked the inclusion of the Kenny & Darla backstory as a cornerstone for this movie's story, as it opens with Kenny's murder in '78, but they fucked it all up. In Jeepers Creepers, Darry sees Kenny & Darla on the wall of the Creeper's House of Pain, and Kenny is black. In this movie, Kenny is white...so they just decided to fuck that right up. Plus, the ghost of Kenny knew tons about the Creeper and informed his still-alive mother (Meg Foster) through hallucinations she's having. This is where the movie wouldn't stop being weird and confusing.
The best part is the over-inclusion of the Creeper's truck. One thing sorely lacking from Jeepers Creepers 2 was the Creeper's truck, which I think would've been cool to have it tangle with the bus. This movie included the truck very prominently and I was extremely pleased. It even had that scary-badass horn. The truck, as I said, is wired like a motherfucker with traps, weapons and even some material or even a mystical "charm" that causes it to be impervious to damage of any kind. A harpoon fires out of a gun mounted on the undercarriage, spikes disembowel anyone who tries to get in the back of the truck who's not the Creeper, another spike impales anyone's head who's near the front seat; it's just a funhouse of death on wheels. The back of the van carries all the Creeper's bodies, tools, maps, weapons, and other treats. We even found out the Creeper keeps a police scanner in the front with him so he can listen to police chatter, which I thought was a neat little twist. There's a scene near the beginning where the Creeper steals his truck back from the impound tow-truck, and rides away on the top of it while it drives down the road which is just a tad silly. The truck can drive itself...fun. It's an odd and unnecessary choice that stretches the limits of the audience's ability to suspend its disbelief. A winged immortal serial killer is incredible enough without making him some kind of automotive enchanter to boot.
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| Tubbs, as he appears in Jeepers Creepers |
So let's wrap up by talking about this movie's double-ending. The ending to the movie was fantastic, and it leaves the door open for another movie. So the Creeper returns to the mound where he buries his fortune-telling hand (just go with it) and finds nothing but a piece of cardboard that says "We Know What You Are" with his old hand pinned to it. He reacts in a fit of rage and tears his treacherous hand apart before summoning birds as he screams into the sky, expanding his facial hood for the first time. The next scene sees the lead guy character, who's name I can't even remember, he was so forgetful, gets on the fabled bus from 2 and "goes to state", meaning that the events of Jeepers Creepers 2 haven't happened yet. So 3 is an "in-between-quel", that starts immediately after 1 and ends just before 2. Fuck me. That would be cool, except you never see this kid in 2, nor is he even reference in 2, so it's a clumsy way to transition the audience into the events of 2. I guess it's the only way you could do it, the actors who played the kids trapped on the bus in 2 have aged fourteen years and probably don't look like high schoolers anymore. The final ending sees a huge shocker as Gina Philips returns as Trish Jenner, giving some sort of podcast as she vows to kill the Creeper once and for all when he awakens again, which would lead us to believe this takes place immediately after 2. That's it. The movie's over. Gina Philips has stated that Jeepers Creepers 4 is already in the works, so at least (hopefully *knock on wood*) we won't have too much more downtime until that comes out and (again, hopefully) ties up some of these horribly loose ends.
To conclude, the movie's pretty weak. I mean, it couldn't surmount twelve years of hype if its life depended on it, so I don't blame it for trying. The Creeper's cool, the truck's awesome, Tubbs is the great as the comedic relief, Stan Shaw steals the show, Meg Foster's weird, and the younger characters are all forgettable, just like in 2. The special effects are cheap and on par with a Syfy original movie, the story has a bunch of holes in it that aren't explained at all as the movie was marketed as revealing or hinting at the Creeper's origins and managed to do neither. I'm disappointed basically, but I mean, when I saw the teaser trailer and the two clips online my expectations went way down. It is what it is, and it's definitely cool enough to be rewatchable. A lot of it either intentionally or unintentionally laughable, but the Creeper more than makes up for it...in the scenes where he doesn't act like a dumb fucking idiot. 1 out of 5.
SIDE NOTE: To the loud, chunky lady who wouldn't stop shouting "Daaaaamn" anytime anything happened or trying to crack sassy one-liners, I hope to never have you ruin another movie experience for me.
