Your peepers will enjoy Jeepers Creepers’ visual appeal, and low budget DIY feel.
The film competently combines rustic hicksploitation (think Dark Night of the Scarecrow or Hatchet) and roadside horror (think Tourist Trap or Duel) but with a mythical monster in the mix too (think Pumpkinhead or Cellar Dweller).
Siblings Darry (Justin Long) and Trish (Gina Philips) are road tripping it back home from a typical college weekend, even giving as good as they get in the good natured ribbing department. That is, until they get tailgated by a rust bucket truck.
Soon, their fortunes literally take a turn for the worse as eagle-eyed Darry spots a figure roadside heaving what looks like a body over their shoulder.
Darry cajoles Trish into pursuing the matter further, and they acknowledge the elephant in the room: Roger Ebert’s frequent bugbear that horror movie characters always make stupid decisions that put them in peril. It’s very meta, but then again, everything was in this, a post-Scream milieu.
The duo investigates a pipe leading to an abandoned church basement, and Darry slips and falls down the chute, the bottom of which is a hellscape right out of the nightmares of Hieronymus Bosch.
And that’s where Jeepers Creepers deviates from its early 2000s brethren. It’s far more creative than you would be made to believe up until this point.
Justin Long is solid as Darry, and has fashioned quite the horror career for himself having starred in the likes of Tusk and recently, as a me-tooed A-list actor whose legal troubles force him to sell off assets in Barbarian. Gina Philips is great too.
Their dynamic pushes this into the category of interesting, as does the pivot away from what could have been a scary townsfolk hick-flick a la The Children of the Corn.
***1/2 (out of 5)
[For a more fulsome discussion of Jeepers Creepers including its unseemly backstory, check out the Really Awful Movies Podcast discussion here]
Really Awful Movies 