WARNING! This post contains extensive spoilers for this movie. Watch the movie before reading! Or don't. You have been warned.
Jeepers Creepers (2001)
Rated R
IMDB Says: “A brother and sister driving home through isolated countryside for spring break encounter a flesh-eating creature which is on the last day of its ritualistic eating spree.”
IMDB Rating: 6.1/10
Metacritic Rating: 49/100
Rotten Tomatoes: 45% critics, 48% audience
Solee: 3/5
Mikey: 3/5
We watched on Hulu.
Solee: You realized as we watched the opening scene of
Jeepers Creepers that you had seen it before. There’s obviously something about it that calls to you. Do you know what that thing is?
Mikey: Well, I quickly realized it, but I also quickly after forgot it, because I remembered nothing about the movie. So it didn’t call very loudly to me. Nonetheless, I remember when it came out that people were talking about it, and it was one of those popular horror movies. So I thought we should check it out! Had you heard about it in advance?
Solee: I vaguely remember the title. In 2001, I was not watching many horror films or paying attention to them, as I recall. I had no idea what it was about, although I know the song well enough to suspect eyes were involved. Let’s start by talking about the craft. What did you think of how the movie was put together?
Mikey: At first, it looked surprisingly like a TV movie. There’s something about long slow crossfades and white text with no drop shadows (or something… no outline?) that just screams TV movie. But even though I really didn’t like either of the two main characters, I did feel like this was a big step up from the usual teenagers-getting-slashed movie in terms of acting. It was a little cartoony, but that beats deadpan and unaware of how humans emote.
Solee: Now that you mention it, I didn’t really care much about either of them. But not in a cheering-for-them-to-die way, like in most movies with dumb teens as the protagonists. I feel like this movie did a much better job of portraying a sibling relationship than others we’ve seen recently (I’m looking at you, Altar!) The acting wasn’t hideous … but I did make a note about how I just CAN’T take Justin Long and his stretchy face seriously. He just has a face for comedy (and I mean that as a compliment!).
Mikey: I suppose that’s kind of sad, but true. What was even more cartoony was that bit where the monster jumped up on the roof of a house, and it followed with one of those cartoon sequences where the camera pans down through the house and we hear the bang-pow-smack-MROWR noises as he clunks his way through. That was just not the right choice for horror. But back to the pair in general, they were just rude to everybody who tried to help them!
Solee: Yeah. I’m a skeptic and I often wish horror characters weren’t so easily convinced that they are facing supernatural stuff, but this Tricia was just too skeptical for her own good. I mean, she’d already seen enough crazy stuff with her own peepers to take the psychic lady seriously, if you ask me.
Mikey: Jeepers! The same psychic lady who called them out of the blue, knowing their names and describing things they had seen when alone. She’s either psychic or stalking them, either way just acting like she’s dumb doesn’t make a lot of sense. There was a running theme of them not being concerned enough with the things they saw. Not like some movies where they fail to emote, but they’d stare dumbstruck at something (such as a demon picking up a severed head and licking it) for minutes on end before they decide it’s time to run.
Solee: I had the same problem with the initial scene involving the big tube leading underground (is there a word for that?).
Mikey: That’s a Body Tube.
Solee: DUH. I knew that. I was right on the tip of my tongue. My streeeeetchy, streeeeetchy tongue. Anyway, from where they were standing, it appeared that there was no other way out. And it was obvious you couldn’t climb back up the Body Tube. AND YET. He decides to hang face first into the darkness where they suspect a body has been dumped and which they themselves have indicated smells terrible. That’s just Stupid Movie Decision Making in action.
Mikey: I can’t believe you had a problem with that tongue. You like gummy worms!
Solee: *gag*
Mikey: I agree with you about getting in the tube (but think of what a hero that makes him! Except in other scenes he’s a cringey coward). But I did like the overall path of how the plot begins. It was fun that these two basically stumbled across the monster doing his thing, in the middle of a killing spree. It’s almost like we’re catching a side-story to an existing movie. And it was believable that they’d decide they need to try to help the bodies. They just did such a bad job of being careful and fast about it. Not nearly enough effort put into surviving.
Solee: Yep. And I’m very concerned about that car. Even before the accident, it was obviously the slowest vehicle in the world (not counting the RV they passed). They spent WAY too much time inching past the murder house making eye contact with the scary demon.
Mikey: You should be concerned about that car, it’s clearly near-impossible to drive.
Solee: AND the cigarette lighter is broken!
Mikey: The true horror of the movie! But speaking of driving past his house… I know this is a rural area in the middle of nowhere, but his body-dump church is right on that road which is clearly not *dead dead* (we saw at least 3 cars use it in like half an hour), and he dumps bodies in broad daylight… and he’s never been caught in over 20 years (the urban legend couple was in there from 20 years ago)? Well, I guess he doesn’t operate except for 23 days, once every 23 years though. But still, those bodies have then been sitting in there for 23 years. Questionable, I say. Even for 23 days, I don’t buy it.
Solee: Perhaps there’s an element of bewitching the town, like in
IT? Those diners were pretty sedate and unconcerned. The cat lady was a little more lively, although not very helpful.
Mikey: That’s true, he did seem to feed on fear… so a creature who awakens every 23/27 years to feed on the fears of a town for a season. Similarities indeed. A tiny town, which by the way has more cops than all of LA County. More heavily armed, too.
Solee: That police station was a hopping place. Of course, that didn’t help them solve all those missing person cases. Thank goodness for the psychic, cherie.
Mikey: Right, I was bothered by her, because one of the awkward difficult challenges of horror is explaining the backstory to your ghost/demon/monster. In some movies the hero goes to the library and finds old microfiche articles, sometimes they just find it all on google, sometimes an old guy knows the local legend. In this movie they just said, “Ah screw it, the DA from Bones magically knows it all and is compelled to tell our heroes.” Exposition cop-out. They could’ve done better with no explanation and just having the scenes where he eats the guys and regrows his hand/leg. We’d get it.
Solee: Hahaha! Yes. Yes, we would. It wasn’t subtle. Can we go back to the cat lady for a second? She was played by Eileen Brennan, whom we both recognized immediately. She has a very distinctive voice. You said, “Oh, from
Clue” as I said, “She was in
Babes In Toyland”. I feel like this moment in time sums up our respective pop-cultural backgrounds pretty well.
Mikey: Yeah,
Clue was one of the five or six movies we had on a VHS tape recorded off the TV (TVs used to not record themselves magically, and also there were these rectangles of plastic that could record the picture from a TV, called VHS tapes. Look it up) as I was growing up, that we watched again and again. I don’t know why we didn’t just record more movies, but we kinda just watched the ones we had. It was harder in those days since there was no channel that told you what was on all the other channels. We had that IN PAPER FORM.
Solee: That’s funny because
Babes in Toyland was the same for us. It was recorded off the TV, with the first few minutes missing, probably because we were trying to find a tape we were willing to record over. You know, because the idea of going out to buy blank tapes never occurred to us. That’s still a movie I have fond memories of. It had Keanu Reeves in it, back when he was super cute and popular.
Mikey: Just like Justin Long! But back to eating body parts, or at least talking about doing so. I just wanted to point out that all the fake body parts in this movie looked really fake. They had some cover for that because apparently the monster had shellacked them (which is weird - his interest in taxidermy was never explained, although I guess he needs hobbies), but they did not look good. Like the gummy tongue.
Solee: They were very department store mannequin, which was weird to me because I thought the demon was well done. The makeup and special effects were decent. That makes me think the mannequin aspect of the bodies was intentional. Very strange choice.
Mikey: Maybe they spent their budget on the demon. Regarding his makeup, I think a huge flaw in this movie is the fact that we see him. A lot, and in great detail in good lighting. That’s such a fundamental rule of horror. It ruins any scare factor he holds. He basically becomes Cardassian #7 from
Deep Space Nine. With wings. Who’d he eat to grow wings anyway?
Solee: There WERE a lot of birds in this movie. Maybe when people get scarce…? Although they looked more like bat wings. He had some pretty fancy headgear at the end, too.
Mikey: Yeah, he ate a spider’s legs, but he did it while thinking really hard about his head. That’s the kind of hijinks he gets up to during his 23 year break. I like that this was an original monster rather than some tradition we already knew, that was fun. I just didn’t need Cherie to explain it all to me.
Solee: Before we get to ratings, I want to point out one last thing that annoyed me: Tricia did NOT understand how the demon worked or how human anatomy/genetics works. The demon has her brother and she keeps telling the demon to take her instead. Girl! That demon spent the whole movie sniffing out which of you he wanted! And your claim that you “have everything the same inside” is just ridiculous. I was annoyed by that. I mean, even if they’d been twins (maybe they were?), they obviously weren’t identical twins!
Mikey: Fairly obviously. That entire impassioned speech made for such an anticlimactic ending. I fully expected another scene to the movie - she should’ve followed him to his new lair and had a showdown. The final bit is fine - horror movies don’t have to end happy - but this just didn’t feel like the end at all.
Solee: YES! She said all that and then the next thing we know, she’s given up, slouching in the police station, waiting for her mommy and daddy to pick her up and his face has become a mask. I was seriously surprised to see ending credits. I needed something more.
Mikey: For sure. Also, apparently it wasn’t just his peepers he wanted, it was also the back of his head. That was odd, but I guess they really wanted that final shot of the eye through the hole.
Solee: Yeah. It was an unsettling shot. So what are you going to rate
Jeepers Creepers?
Mikey: Well, it definitely is all over the place rating-wise. Good things and bad things abound. It held my interest pretty well, even though most of the time I was scoffing about how dumb one thing or another was. So I’ll go with a 3. Let’s stick it right in the middle. What do you think?
Solee: I’m right there with you. It was obviously done by folks who understand movie making. But there were flaws I can’t ignore. So I’m giving it a 3 as well.
Mikey: Twinsies!!
Solee: Twinsies, indeed! :)
Mikey: I hope you’ve picked out an amazing movie (possibly featuring creepy evil twinsies) for us next.
Solee: For our viewing pleasure tomorrow, I've chosen
Stonehearst Asylum!
