The Creeper, the snarling star of the “Jeepers Creepers” movies, has slimy, gray-green skin, giant, translucent batwings and pointed teeth that he forms into a leering grin whenever he sees a victim he likes. As a demonic ambassador of the horror movie world, he doesn’t have the iconic power of, say, Freddy or Jason, but he certainly holds his own in the horror villain pantheon. As played by Jonathan Breck, the Creeper displays a witty silent menace – he’s Jason Voorhees with more personality.
“Jeepers Creepers 2,” the inevitable sequel to come down the pike, opens with a title card stating that “every 23rd spring … for 23 days … it gets to eat.” And so it does, as the Creeper descends upon a busload of high school jocks and cheerleaders rumbling down a remote Midwestern highway.
The original “Jeepers Creepers” begins on a note of suggestive spookiness. A squabbling brother-and-sister team travels down remote farmland roads when they are stalked by rusted jalopy of a van driven by a cloaked and deranged villain. After the movie’s big reveal, however, the movie descended into a standard issue – if competently made – monster movie freak-out, with a winged demon flying around and climbing up walls in order to rip various body parts from unlucky souls.
In “Jeepers Creepers 2,” there’s no pretension that the movie is anything more than an action-packed creature feature with the various young cast members facing an otherworldly force that fancies them for a snack. In that regard, the movie is a better film than the original, as it wastes no time in getting into the down-and-dirty basics. The bus breaks down, the coaches and driver are picked off and the kids are left to fend for themselves in the lonely, desolate farmland.
The movie opens with a spectacular scene in which the Creeper, in the guise of a scarecrow, carries off a 12-year-old boy in front of the boy’s father (Ray Wise, the Ahab to the Creeper’s Moby Dick). And there is another terrific scene in which the snarling beast goes shopping for his future meals as the teens cower on the bus.
There is also a not-so-terrific scene in which a blonde cheerleader named Minxie (yes, Minxie – and she’s played, blandly, by Nicki Lynn Aycox) has a psychic vision that explains everything to the confused teens. It is the most awkward example of piling on the horror movie exposition since, maybe, “Freddy vs. Jason.”
There’s not much variation on how the Creeper picks off victims (it swoops down form the sky and carries them away), which makes the attacks rather repetitive. But writer/director Victor Salva – who also did the honors for the previous installment – uses the claustrophobic, single setting of the bus and surrounding springtime fields to maximum advantage (Salva certainly knows how to turn open fields into ominous landmarks). And smartly, he plays with audience expectations when it comes to black characters, blonde cheerleaders and horror movies.
The larger cast means the characters – who also include a virulently racist homophobe (played with full iron-eyed sleaze by Eric Nenninger) and a heroic African jock (Garikayi Mutambirwa) – aren’t as fully fleshed out (actually, they are really nothing more than canon fodder) but they effectively establish his ensemble.
Alas, Salva still can’t give the Creeper a proper back-story. He’s crafted an intriguing addition to the pantheon of modern monsters and madmen – it’s just too bad he couldn’t actually give us any idea what the hell it is.
