Somewhere on a desolate Florida highway, two siblings Darry and Trish Jenner are driving home on Spring break when they come across a maniac in a beat-up 1940s truck. The truck blasts its horn behind them, but ultimately leaves them alone and continues past. Later, the two come across the same truck parked at a church. The driver appears to be dumping bodies out of the back down a sewer pipe that leads to the church's basement. Darry and Trish witness the driver doing this, but he catches them looking. He takes off in his truck and chases them. He rams their car repeatedly, but again, ultimately speeds by as they veer off the road. Darry and Trish return to the church while the driver is away and Darry investigates the sewer pipe. Rats cause Trish to mess up and let him slip. Darry winds up in the basement of the church and finds bodies upon bodies sewn together and decorating the ceiling of the basement. Darry, traumatized, returns to the surface and he and Trish flee to a nearby diner. As they exit the car, they witness the driver of the beat-up truck speeding back toward the church and duck inside...
What follows is one of the spookiest and, dare I say, creepiest races with the devil that I've ever seen...
SPOILER WARNING: I strongly recommend watching this movie before reading this review to experience it firsthand. Anything beyond this point is SPOILER material.
Originally titled Here Comes the Boogeyman, Jeepers Creepers is an independent horror movie released in 2001 starring Justin Long as Darry and Gina Philips as his sister, Trish. They play the brother/sister thing very well. You'd think it'd be a couple who goes through all this, as in other horror movies, but director Victor Salva didn't want any sexual tension in the movie. Just a straight up run from the devil. Together, the two of them commit themselves to this journey as they come across something that is most hellish in nature. They come across a violent killing machine dressed as a man, called "The Creeper". The Creeper is a demonic beast with green scaly skin, a tuft of white hair growing out of its neck, sharp teeth, claws and talons and large, leathery bat-like wings. To cover its monster features, it wears tattered clothes, including a long duster and a stetson hat. The Creeper travels by day in its custom built, suped up 1940s truck with rustic color and a cow-catcher in front for ramming purposes. At night, it flies with its wings and stalks people the animalistic way.
The Creeper is said to smell fear and uses the scent of fear to choose its victims, and to only be alive for twenty-three days of every twenty-three years. It is said that its lived for thousands of years and that it replenishes its body parts and failing health by eating the same body parts off of humans. If its leg is mauled, it eats a human leg to replace it. As Jezelle Gay Hartman, the psychic who ends up helping the kids, says: "Whatever it eats becomes a part of it."
The chase intensifies as the movie progresses. After the diner scene in which Jezelle calls Darry on the phone and correctly describes Darry's clothes and wounds, the two kids are escorted home by two Pertwilla County police officers. However, in a truly BADASS scene, the Creeper arrives by landing the cops roofs, throwing one out and decapitating the other after pulling his head through the roof. In another iconic scene, the Creeper eats the tongue out of the severed head and then chases the kids to the house of the spooky cat lady that Jezelle described on the phone. There, the Creeper intervenes, kills the cat lady and the two kids run away again. On the road just outside the cat lady's house, the Creeper taunts them but the kids eventually psyche him out and hit him with their car over and over again, eventually driving off into the night.
The final confrontation takes place at the Poho County Police Station. There, the injured Creeper breaks into the jail, mauls two cellmates to repair his body and stalks the kids through the jail. This is also the introduction of Sgt. Davis Tubbs, played by Brandon Smith. A minor character in this movie but he goes on to star in the third movie, which I reviewed back in September and that can be found here. In this final chase, there's another truly haunting scene where the Creeper toys but avoids cops on a stairwell, eventually ripping a cop's heart out of his back with his teeth. The kids find themselves cornered in an observation room with Creeper hot on their trails. He grabs them and smells their fear, deciding on Darry and letting Trish go. Trish and the police officers corner the Creeper, Trish even trying to beg for it to take her instead of Darry, but it squeals and flies off into the night with Darry, disappearing from Trish's sight. The movie ends with a chilling reveal of Darry's fate in the Creeper's later. His eyes have been torn out and eaten by the Creeper as he gazes through Darry's eye holes at the camera with Darry's own eyes...
The entire movie is shot in a weird filter on the camera, but it serves the movie well. It's night scenes are chillingly shot and the haunting atmosphere of rural Florida at night isolates us as the viewer as we follow these two college students on a whirlwind chase from hell with the thing that will never die. Jezelle, the psychic, warns the kids about the creature and its love of the song old timey jazz song "Jeepers Creepers", which seems to precede any sort of appearance the Creeper is about to make. Again, as Jezelle puts it: "If you hear that song, you run and I mean run, because that song means something terrible for you." Again, in arguably the best scene of the movie, a similar song "Peekaboo" plays on the radio says the line "Jeepers, where'd you get those peepers?" right before the Creeper attacks the cops. I highly recommend watching the police attack scene on the highway at least if you're not sure about watching the movie.
Jeepers Creepers is very similar in tone to the movie Race With the Devil, which is also one I want to talk about one day. In that movie, two couples witness a girl being sacrificed by a Satanic cult and the cult chases them, popping up at every stop they make. It's what the Creeper does some how. It's a nightmarish chase that won't end with the Creeper appearing at every stop the kids make. Nothing anywhere is safe from it and it absolutely doesn't stop until it gets what it wants. It even includes kick-ass but tense car chases, two of them. First where the Creeper struggles to get around the kids but Darry eventually lets him past. The second, of course, after the Creeper sees them witness him throwing bodies into the church's basement, this time by ramming them and trying to gauge their fear to see if there's either of them it wants.
Jeepers Creepers is either my favorite or my second-favorite horror movie of all time. It's on a constant battle for top spot with Halloween 1978, but I'll watch Jeepers Creepers any day of the week. It's got action, suspense, horror, and thrills. The thing I like the best is just how creepy it is. It's sort of a horror movie, but it's moreso a monster movie. The thing that Jeepers Creepers does best is that it doesn't scare you by showing you what to be afraid of, it scares you by telling you what to be afraid of. The Creeper himself is terrifying to look at, but the dialogue is chilling, the mood is terrifying and the fear that wells up inside you as you wonder what the Creeper is going to do next. Jeepers Creepers is one hell of a spooky thrill-ride, and it leaves you with that unsettling feeling in your spine when you're done watching it of something not feeling right. It makes you double check your surroundings when you're done and wonder if he's really out there somewhere, stalking isolated drivers on a lonely highway...
Give it a watch. You won't regret it.
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