Jeepers Creepers

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]

The Conference

If you have ever had to endure the tedium of a corporate retreat, consider yourself lucky. The Conference puts office workers in exactly this kind of scenario, however their team building exercises are much higher stakes than even the most important PowerPoint for Corporate.

Cubicle workers descend on a remote Swedish woods, splitting up two per cabin – glamping, as befits white collar culture. Their task? Basically a big SWOT analysis of a planned shopping mall project rollout, which promises to be a bounty/windfall for a local town, which is nonetheless receiving pockets of opposition. Hell, there are even rumors that IKEA will be the anchor tenant.

Soon, before they’ve even had a chance to munch on stale donuts in the boardroom, two members of the team, Lina and Jonas, are at loggerheads over a land deal signed with a local farmer, for which she can’t recall being a signatory – a few colleagues even gaslight her about it, as she was on mental health sick leave.

When the whole team is ziplining, Lina sneaks away and commandeers Jonas’ laptop, vindicating herself, and finding out he’s crookeder than a Chicago mayor. Amidst the serious intra-office drama, however, there is something more sinister afoot: a figure in a Pinocchio-esque mask skulking about in the woods, dressed like a mascot meant to endear the mall project to local kids.

What really works for The Conference is the disparate and relatable team members – spanning not just personalities, but also ages, ethnicities, and demographics. There’s a blowhard, wallflower, keener, world-weary vet (who’d rather just kick back and enjoy good food and beer), cynical chain-smoker, bootlicker, and of course, a relentlessly positive team lead – basically, archetypes of everyone who works in an office.

Another plus is the sheer creativity of the deaths – conjuring up Final Destination and referencing a few deep cuts from horror films’ past, like Friday the 13th, The Mutilator, Saw, and Zombie Holocaust.

The Conference, despite considerable devotion to character-building, zips along at quite a pace, a considerable achievement. It’s also funny and at times, really gory. The only quibble: the deaths could’ve been more stalky/atmospheric.

***1/2 (out of 5)