Siblings Darry and Trish Jenner (Justin Long, Gina Phillips) are run off the road by a weird armored truck on their way home from college. Later, they spot the truck by an abandoned church as well as a man in a long coat throwing body-sized packages down a pipe. Suspecting that the man might be a murderer or kidnapper, they investigate, and Darry finds things are far worse than he believed, and the man is much more than he could have imagined.
An effective monster movie, the poorly titled Jeepers Creepers has some real chills and a constant mood of dread. There’s no point—no message or theme. It’s about a monster after some college students, and that’s all.
For the first half, it’s as scary as anything made in recent years. The tailgating truck is unnerving. It feels like something that could happen, particularly if you drive down out-of-the-way highways. Once Darry gets into the church, this is one of those movies that has viewers yelling, “Get out of there!”
The tension lets up in the second half, once there are more people around and you see the monster. But it’s a pretty nicely designed creature, and his modus operandi keeps him ghastly, even after his appearance becomes familiar. Plus, it gets big points from me for the ending, which you’ll have to watch yourself.
Unfortunately, the writing gets lazy. A psychic exposition-lady pops in for the sole purpose of explaining what’s going on. How does she know all about the monster? Because she’s psychic. Does she see everything else going on the world or do her visions (which are incredibly precise) focus on the monster? If she knew about the monster, why didn’t she tell someone? No one working on this film cared about answering those questions. Either they should have had our heroes discover what the monster was up to, or just left it a mystery.
However, I was more annoyed by the exclamation points that end every sentence. Whatever the situation, Darry and Trish are ready to yell about it. Whenever they have to restart their old car (which is often), we are treated to a minute of “Put it in drive! In Drive! Shift the geers!! Shift!! Shift and put the car in drive!!! Go!!! Drive!!! SHIFT AND DRIVE!!!! GO!!!!” Perhaps stressed-out monster victims would shout constantly, but it’s not enjoyable to listen to and I was hoping one of them would get eaten just so they’d shut up.
Writer/director Victor Salva is impressive in the second part of his job, but needed another draft or two on the screenplay. Jeepers Creepers is much better than expected, but not as good as it should have been.
Followed by Jeepers Creepers II.