This past weekend was one of those glorious winter weekends where you end up doing virtually nothing and loving every minute of it. Nick and I planted ourselves in front of the television Friday night, all warm and cozy (the hot chocolate IV helped a lot), and just knitted until we couldn't knit anymore. It was beautiful. There was a parade of B-movies on the SciFi Channel, and we didn't change the station once the entire time, which was how we ended up seeing the Jeepers Creepers movies. (Pointless Aside: There is an episode of Loony Toons from 1939 with this same title. It features Porky Pig as a bumbling police officer who is called upon to investigate a haunted house. Funny stuff, but not the same premise at all.)

So anyway, I'd never had much interest in seeing either of the Jeepers Creepers films, but there they were and there WE were, and inertia got the better of us. So we watched them, and I'm sorry to say it, but Jeepers Creepers 2 was but a pale shadow of the original. You all know that I believe in the B-movie as an art form all its own, and these movies were on extreme opposite ends of the artistic spectrum. Let's pretend for a moment that the original was a Monet (quite a stretch, I know). This would mean that the sequel was somewhere in the quality range of that watercolor picture I made for my teacher in first grade. (Not only was it the crappiest unicorn you've ever seen, it also leaked all over Melissa's new white jacket when I was carrying it to the front. She was a snotty girl, but I still felt kind of bad about it.)

The original Jeepers Creepers aired first. As I said, I didn't expect much, but it actually turned out to be cool and dark and competently creepy. Here's a synopsis. A brother (played by the Macintosh guy from those Apple commercials) and sister are driving cross-country to see their parents over spring break, when an antediluvian truck comes up on them from behind and tries to run them off the road. When it succeeds, it sails on by them and they think they're safe. But a few miles later they pass this little residence partly hidden by trees, and they see the truck parked there. The driver is tossing bodies into a huge pipe in the ground. Once the driver takes off in his truck again, the brother and sister go investigate because Macintosh thinks maybe someone is still alive and in need of help. Clumsiness ensues, and he ends up tumbling down the pipe himself, where he gets to see firsthand what the driver of the truck was up to. There are bodies everywhere, all stitched together across the wall and ceiling. "Like a psycho Sistine Chapel," he says. But you don't really see it clearly. You don't see much of anything clearly in this movie, which is one of the reasons why it's cool. Rare glimpses of the creature and his handiwork are enough to amp up the suspense, and the camera never lingers on these gruesome sights long enough for us to get used to them. I wish I could say the same for the second movie, but I can't. Forget about all those lessons Hitchcock taught us, about how what you don't see is scarier than what you do. In the sequel, we practically get the full audition portfolio of the villain (who we learn is called The Creeper), complete with headshots. Here's The Creeper cavorting in a field of daisies. Here's The Creeper lounging seductively with a sheet wrapped around his waist. Here's The Creeper in a gabardine suit with a briefcase, looking all official and tycoonish. Look at his range! This boy can do any role you can throw at him. So yeah, basically we see far too much of him in the sequel, and he ceases to be scary in any way. He's more like that annoying neighbor who keeps dropping by and drinking all your beer.

But back to the synopsis. Every 23 years, The Creeper—who is a waxy humanoid monster with giant, bat-like wings—gets to come out and feed for 23 days, after which he has to go into hibernation for another 23 years. Sort of like Brigadoon. When he's out and about, he frightens people so that he can smell them to see if there's a part of their body he wants. (I don't exactly understand the mechanism for this, but it sounds like people give off some kind of 'scared' pheromone that The Creeper can detect.) When he's selected a person whose smell he likes, they become unwilling organ donors. In the first movie, The Creeper chooses one of the siblings (we aren't told which one) and then spends the whole movie chasing them. It's a simple premise, but an effective one.

So flash forward to the sequel. There's a rugged farmer fellow (Ray Wise, who will always be Leland Palmer to me) doing vaguely farm-y things out in a corn field. The camera reveals a dark scarecrow-looking figure in the field, and before long the figure comes to life and absconds with the farmer's younger son. The farmer chases them for awhile, and then the intruder zips up into the sky and disappears. Leland Palmer is pretty pissed about this, as it turns out. He starts making weapons and pounding on an anvil in a menacing way, and we're thinking this movie is going to be all about him getting revenge. Which would have been great.

But then we leap from the farmer family to a bus full of teenagers driving home in a school bus after a big football game, and we realize we're in for an entirely different kind of story. The first guy we meet is a brooding, sandy-haired jock who is complaining to his girlfriend that the coach, who is black, won't let him play because of the color of his skin. Yeah. Way to win over our sympathies right away. Anyway, several of the tires blow out, and when they get out to investigate they find a couple of elaborate throwing star thingies carved out of bone. But nobody's really concerned until the grown-ups start getting sucked up into the sky, and then they are very concerned indeed. The Creeper then hangs like a vampire at the back window of the bus and makes eye contact with some of the kids, who proceed to freak out about it. After awhile, a portion of the ceiling is peeled back like a sardine can, a kid is pulled out through the hole, and we realize that, for The Creeper, the school bus is nothing more than a buffet of brats.

At this point, I'm annoyed. I'm thinking to myself: seriously? This whole movie is going to consist of obnoxious football players/cheerleaders being yoinked out of the bus one by one? Yawn. Except it's supposed to be so much more than that, dude. Because now they're talking about how there are two classes of people, those who have been selected by The Creeper and those who haven't. Mr. White Supremacy decides that those who have been selected need to be removed from the bus so that those who haven't been selected won't be endangered more than necessary. Problem is, Mr. White Supremacy himself seems to have been selected and is in denial about it. It's pretty dumb. So they all argue some more about whether they should segregate the two classes of people and what that would mean for their humanity and stuff. Did I mention they're on a bus? A bus! Get it? Like with Rosa Parks and...ah, forget it. So what we have now is like the high school version of The Poseidon Adventure, people bickering and trying to save themselves at any cost, except that no one really cares if any of these sorry individuals live or die. (Psst. I have a secret to tell you, Mr. Salva. There's more to a horror film than a high body count. All you have to do is give us a couple of characters that we get to know just a little bit and can care about, then put them in a series of dangerous situations. Bam, instant suspense. It's not really that hard. You managed to do it with the first one...remember?)

So this moronic plot continues, and eventually the farmer guy appears and starts kicking some Creeper heinie, but by then no one cares. Most of us have already drunk our toxic Kool-Aid and/or shipped ourselves out to sea on an iceberg in order to avoid having to witness the rest of this travesty. But I've already revealed my secret. You already know I watched the whole thing, so there's no point being cute about it and pretending I switched to Masterpiece Theatre or something. And truth be told, I was actually kind of impressed by what they did with the ending. It's not anywhere as cool as the ending of the first one (which went to such a dark, wry place I could hardly believe it), and it's not even remotely enough to redeem this mess of a movie, but it's got some imagery that I really liked. Check this out: (SPOILER!) It's 23 years later, and the much-older farmer is sitting in a chair in his barn. The Creeper is pinned up on the wall, all Silence of the Lambs-like, and the farmer has a cobwebbed harpoon trained on it, ready to fire when it wakes up. It's cool. Of course, there are some logistical problems with this. Even more so than usual for a B-movie. Since The Creeper has gone back into hibernation, why not just cut him up and send his parts to the four corners of the earth? Maybe shoot some of the pieces into space or stick them in a nuclear reactor. Bury him in concrete. Turn him into a giant acrylic paperweight. Drop him in a volcano. Sell him to the military. Douse him in some liquid nitrogen and smash him to pieces (although this didn't work in Terminator 2 or that Jason Voorhees-in-space movie). Twenty-three years is a long time to come up with a better solution than the one we get in the movie. Still, I like the image of that grizzled old man with his rickety harpoon. I like it so much, in fact, I find myself hoping there's a clone of that guy sitting outside the film studio, waiting to shoot down this franchise if it tries to come to life again.

Tags: movies