On the heels of the fact that I had unexplainable dreams last night, probably thanks to my bazaar choice of A Snake in June as part of 31 Nights of Terror, I thought that it might be better to bring things down one notch and rent a more commonplace ‘scary’ movie, which brought me to the 2001 film Jeepers Creepers. I wasn’t expecting a great deal from the movie, I just assumed it was another teenage fright film and if you are looking for a logical reason why I chose this one over another I hate to disappoint, but I don’t have one: I rather just listened to a little voice inside of me which seemed to feel that this film wanted to be watched which is proof that that little voice is a sadist and wants to see me suffer.
Watching the first scene of Jeepers Creepers reminded me a lot of Hitchcock with a wide shot full of mystery lost somewhere in what looked like the southeastern United States and for a moment I thought I was going to be in for a pleasant surprise until the 1200th frame flickered before my eyes and I realized that I was doomed. In lieu of living my fifty four second experience of hope and despair, you can watch the first five seconds of the trailer, which is taken from the opening scene and I think sums my experience up fairly well.
There needs to be a new category of dialogue created because to call it childish here would be inaccurate- I’ve worked with enough teenagers in my time to know that they don’t speak anything like that. The attempt to bond our characters is worse than horrible: the dialogue between Darry Jenner and his sister Patricia is painful and I was tempted to change the soundtrack over to Spanish so that I wouldn’t have to suffer the pain of knowing what half-baked sentence fragments they were spouting.
Which brings us to the plot, which you might not think there is much to be said about because it is a horror film and I thought we could all agree on some solid fundamentals: a bunch of people, probably mindless teenagers, find themselves somewhere they shouldn’t be and disturb an evil they shouldn’t have found and get picked off in lottery format until only one survives. Amazingly, Jeepers Creepers even managed to screw this up: the film begins with our two protagonists, the aforementioned Jenner siblings who, honestly, because of their being all alone in the middle of nowhere and paper-thin personalities I thought were going to be killed off in the first five minutes- sort of the first scare meant to draw you in, but alas, they are our heroes.
Since when does a horror movie have only two heroes? That’s ridiculous! You know they’re going to survive at least a while because someone has to keep the story going. Which brings me to another point: the pace of this movie is like trying to race wheelchairs down cobblestone- scenes are glued together uneventfully in such a manner that the word ‘filler’ kept appearing over and over again in my mind. Horror movies are perhaps permitted a few obvious plot devices because the evil part of us wants the front door to be locked or the boozing police officer to have fallen asleep because it endanger our hero but there are limits and there is nothing interesting let alone scary about the same car stalling, working at the last moment, stalling and then working again ad nauseum.
Character choices are illogical and horribly annoying to the point that it actually takes you out of the film, if you were ever getting into it to begin with, because you are reminded it must be fiction or the human race is doomed because people of such intelligence levels would most likely drown trying to drink a glass of water.
I suppose the problem is that the powers that be don’t believe there is an older demographic that would be interested in a solid horror film and so they feel obliged to aim towards a younger audience, an audience which, for all of their millions of dollars of research they seem to know nothing about. But wait a minute, actress Gina Philips was thirty years old when she made this movie. I’ve heard of older actresses taking on younger parts but this is bordering on comical, which may or may not have anything to do with her age and rather the fact that she is the cherry on the top of this bad-acting cake.
The direction in this film is all over the place: cut scenes, fading and slow ‘window cam’ angles are creepy and set a mood which could very well have drawn me in but they are broken up by comically bad moments like the opening chase scene which is shot, cut and scored like it belongs to a Loony Tunes clip.
I couldn’t help but wonder what the film would have looked like if it had been more Hitchcock in nature, with logical dialogue and character development that would lead to understandable actions and reactions as opposed to ‘I’m too young to have a brain.’ What is really strange is that by trying to imagine these scenes in their new ‘improved’ Hitchcock-like way, I almost scared myself but unfortunately the film was quite successful in bothering me while I was pondering ways to make it better.
Every now and then there is a glimmer of decent film making and I was going to make a long and drawn out comment about director Victor Salva and how he probably did his best with a script that was most likely forced down his throat against his will until I looked it up to discover to my biggest moment of horror for the entire evening that HE WROTE THE TRIPE HIMSELF.
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