A long ride home from the big game grows even more tedious when the Horror swoops down on bus full of teenagers.
By STEVE PERSALL
Published August 28, 2003
[Photo: United Artists.]
Drew Tyler Bell, top left, Billy Aaron Brown and Lena Cardwell play teens trapped on a bus and waiting for mayhem in Jeepers Creepers 2.
Freddy Krueger would make mincemeat of the Jeepers Creepers 2 killer with one claw tied behind his back. Talk about a lame psycho. He's a bat out of hell that apparently didn't learn much there about terrorizing and torture. Carnage shouldn't feel this bloodless.
"The Horror," as he's called, has easy pickings in the sequel to a moderately successful 2001 film called - as if you can't guess - Jeepers Creepers. Writer-director Victor Salva made that movie in Central Florida; we should be grateful Salva made this listless sequel in Southern California.
Jeepers Creepers 2 begins in a cornfield where a farmer's son is doing his scarecrow chores. One straw dummy looks suspiciously like the Horror. Hey, it is! And for five minutes we get a lot of wing-flap swoosh sounds and rustling corn sounds and screaming and then nothing much, setting the tone for the entire movie.
Slash, er, cut to a school bus full of high school basketball players and cheerleaders who just won the state championship. Salva's budget is so tight that he can't even afford a trophy for them to pass around. There's tension aboard: A reporter for the school paper didn't write enough about the star player, who is also sulking because he didn't play enough in the final game. A little homophobia, a little racism, and Salva spices up all this dead meat.
The bus gets a flat tire caused by a strange martial arts-style throwing weapon made of bone and a tooth. That gets fixed, then there's another flat tire caused by another bone weapon, this one adorned with a human navel. Give the Horror credit for one thing: He knows how to stretch a victim's resources. It's a good thing.
Trapped on the bus, the teenagers (adults die first here) wait for the Horror to get them, if they don't kill each other first. Salva probably meant for the bus setting to seem claustrophobic, but it only comes across as cramped. The deaths aren't striking, except for one laughably cheap shot of a headless torso thrashing, when you can tell the actor's head was merely blue-screened out of the picture. The budget went almost entirely to the Horror's flying stunts, not the sets, not the actors and certainly not Salva's script.
The most unsettling aspect of Jeepers Creepers 2 is noticing how many times Salva - convicted of molesting a 12-year-old boy in 1988 - devises ways to show young males shirtless, even sunbathing, for no reason. It plays more like a personal fetish than a plot necessity. Now that's scary.
Jeepers Creepers 2
Grade: F
Director: Victor Salva
Cast: Ray Wise, Jonathan Breck, Travis Schiffner, Josh Hammond, Kasan Butcher
