BEFORE: I had the honor on Tuesday night of working a shift at the theater which was a memorial tribute to cartoonist Al Jaffee, famous for his work on MAD magazine for 65 years, who died six months ago at the age of 102. Now, I've been reading MAD magazine since I was about 8 or 9 years old, but Mr. Jaffee's career started long before that. By all accounts a very sweet and funny man, he retired in his 90's, but still drew and remained funny, joking with his colleagues at the age of 100 that he was still looking for work. I expected a lot of noted industry people to show up, but then found out it was really just going to be "the usual gang of idiots", as the magazine always referred to their staffers and regular contributors. That's OK, I was just happy to be there and help out and hang posters and supervise the clean-up, because this man was a LEGEND in the cartoonist world. He invented the famous "Fold-In" art for the magazine's back cover and drew HUNDREDS of those pieces, plus wrote and illustrated countless cartoons and articles that I remember from when I was a kid. Also, I never really stopped being a kid, so I still read MAD - but you know, for the articles. And the fold-in. Even though the mag has been running reprints the last few years, I still subscribe, because somebody's got to.
Anyway, I wish I could dedicate a Movie Year to Al Jaffee, but I tend to only pick actors - you know what, Al's in the running for next year's dedication, how do you like me now? I make my own rules around here, this is still MY blog and I can do whatever I want. Al, you're in the running, I hope nobody more famous than you dies between now and January 1, and if so, you're a lock.
Justin Long apparently carries over from "Jeepers Creepers", at least according to the IMDB, although I don't really see how that could be possible, given the events of the first film. Oh, well, even if he doesn't really appear in the sequel, there are two other actors who do carry over.
THE PLOT: Set a few days after the original film, a championship basketball team's bus is attacked by The Creeper, the winged, flesh-eating terror, on the last day of his 23-day feeding frenzy.
AFTER: You know, I took so long to get around to watching 2 "Jeepers Creepers" movies, that there are now FOUR films in the franchise, there's another sequel, "Jeepers Creepers 3" and also a reboot, "Jeepers Creepers: Reborn". I can't bring myself to watch the third film, because it doesn't connect with my chain, I'd have to break the chain to watch it, and I'm not prepared to let that happen, not when I'm just 40 films away from the end of the year, and having another unbroken chain for the FIFTH year in a row. Why go through so much trouble linking these movies just to tank the format now? I've got plenty of other films to watch that DO connect and form a chain, that's not worth giving up JUST to see what happens in the third film of this franchise.
Besides, the actor who plays The Creeper would carry over to "J.C. 3" but not the "Reborn" reboot, and it's great that Gina Philips came back for the third film, but I still can't really GO anywhere from there, so "Jeepers Creepers 3" would end up being a dead-end for me, as far as I can tell. So I'm going in a different direction tomorrow. Oh, and Justin Long IS in the second film, but only in psychic flashbacks and/or dream sequences, so that explains THAT. Three horror films with Justin Long in them does seem like kind of a lot, but it's also respectable at the same time. Right?
This film is set during the SAME 23-day Creeper feeding cycle as the first film, because why wait another 23 years to make a sequel? Yep, they clearly rushed this one into production, it came out just two years after the first film, and we all remember what happened with "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2", right? The rushed sequel wasn't half as good as the original, plus it's like it wasn't even in the same genre, the found footage wasn't the focus of the film, it was just a bunch of teens who got stoned and didn't remember having an orgy/killing spree, that's like a normal occurrence if you live in rural Maryland, right? Like, we've all been there and done that, but we didn't all videotape it backwards.
Anyway, it's the last chance for The Creeper to feed before he goes back into hibernation, so he's got to really hurry if he's going to fatten up for the next 23 winters. So along comes this school bus full of football players and a couple cheerleaders, so that's like, perfect! That's like a packed buffet for T.C., and they're good strong men with solid body parts that he can use to strengthen himself. Wait, who am I supposed to be rooting for here? The humans? Ok, my bad. The Creeper is so much cooler now, especially since he stopped breaking into cars and smelling people's dirty laundry, which is kind of disgusting. Like the football players probably all showered in the locker room after the game, before getting on the bus. Sorry, Creepo.
Before hitting the bus-shaped buffet, The Creeper has a light snack of a boy he grabs in a farm's field, after pretending to be a scarecrow. Sneaky Creeper! The boy's father makes it his mission to take down the Creeper, which I think explains why he doesn't relay the call for help from the bus to the police, I think he wanted to use the football players as bait, so the monster would stay in one place long enough for him to show up with a fence-post driver repurposed as a harpoon launcher on the back of a farm truck. And this is where "Jeepers Creepers 2" starts to resemble "Moby Dick" just a bit, with the boy's father as Ahab and The Creeper as the White Whale, and if you remember the Melville novel, you know things didn't really work out well for the crew of the Pequod. Ishmael survived, sure, but for everybody else it was a crapshoot. It's a fair comparison, because wasn't "Jaws" also just a take on Moby Dick, if you think about it? There are only so many plots in classic literature, after all, and battling a giant monster is one of them that gets repeated again and again. Man vs. nature, that's what it comes down to, are we going to use our technology and intelligence to become the alpha predator, or is nature (animals) stronger in the end? Well, maybe don't count out the whale, that's all I'm saying.
i'd say that maybe Farmer Taggart had something to do with the bus breaking down, if I didn't know better. We did see a shuriken made of bone fragments in the tire, though, and that's more The Creeper's style. When he first attacks the bus, The Creeper takes a javelin to the head, and he's down for a while - but he's able to absorb a severed head from the bus and use that to replace the damaged head. Gah, there would be so many good puns here about "getting a head" or "coming out a head", but it's just not that kind of movie. But the javelin kind of foreshadows the harpooning that's coming up in the second half of the film. It doesn't matter, you can harpoon The Creeper, you can run him over multiple times, you can stab him in the head, but you can't stop him, he's been alive for thousands of years, which one character somehow knows psychically, and I guess that makes sense if he's only active for 23 days every 23 years, he ages differently because he spends so much time hibernating. And moisturizing, don't forget that, it's important - he doesn't look a day over 575.
The dialogue is rather horrible and forced in both movies, but in the first film, that was a bit understandable because the filmmakers had to cut the budget and therefore a large set of stunts was cut out of the third act, and when the action moved instead to the interior of a boring police station, it was up to the actors to improvise some dialogue, and the ended up really just saying the same few things over and over. But, umm, what's the excuse for the sequel? None.
But it's all of the jump-scares of the first film, with really none of the originality, except for the Melville references.
Also starring Ray Wise (last heard in "Batman: The Killing Joke"), Jonathan Breck (also carrying over from "Jeepers Creepers"), Tom Tarantini (ditto), Garikayi Mutambirwa (last seen in "Clockstoppers"), Eric Nenninger, Nicki Aycox (last seen in "Perfect Stranger"), Travis Schiffner, Lena Cardwell (last seen in "The Object of My Affection"), Billy Aaron Brown, Marieh Delfino, Diane Delano (last seen in "The Ladykillers"), Thom Gossom Jr. (last seen in "xXx: State of the Union"), Al Santos, Josh Hammond, Kasan Butcher, Drew Tyler Bell, Luke Edwards (last seen in "Guilty by Suspicion"), Shaun Fleming (last heard in "Teacher's Pet"), Bob Papenbrook (last heard in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Jon Powell, Marshall Cook, Joe Reegan, Stephanie Denise Griffin (last seen in "The Jane Austen Book Club".
RATING: 4 out of 10 road flares
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