Our Review
The movie begins – it is the middle of nowhere, there is a van of which the driver cannot be seen, darkness lurks around. A faceless enemy – this is true horror. Then they go give it a face and suddenly it just isn’t so scary anymore.
Jeepers Creepers centres around two kids driving through the countryside when they see something dump a body down a tube. It turns out to be some kind of brain eating creature which is now hunting them. Just the kind of thing you want to end up running from for your Spring break.
Though it does quite a good job at the beginning of the film of being scary, the horror in Jeepers Creepers is eventually traded off for special effects, cool looking monsters and gore. Which work effectively in speculative fiction, mainly fantasy but in horror movies, I think we have moved beyond this.
Look at the Blair Witch Project. Ok, it wasn’t scary but compared to most of the horror movies that come out these days; it got a lot closer than most. This is because the witch had no face, no physical being to fight. That’s what makes it scary. No longer can you have creatures lurking in shadows – we have street lights. These days they need to be beyond that, they need to be psychological.
Spoilers in this paragraph. I admire the film in some ways for it’s ending though. A new breed of movies has started to hit our screens (be they big or small) with real post modern twists that have not been seen since the age of Westerns, again going back to the Blair Witch Project, today we don’t want such a happy ending. And the decision to kill off Darry at the end was a brave and worthwhile one.
It takes new and shocking things to scare us these days and although Jeepers Creepers has plenty of good stuff in it, it is a fusion of unoriginal ideas and something that could have been good, but, well, wasn’t. It was good effort but could have been so much better.
Chris Worfolk
In a Nutshell
"a fusion of unoriginal ideas and something that could have been good, but, well, wasn’t"
Rating
Movie was rated 32 out of 100
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Book of Shadows: Blair Witch II
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Blair Witch Project
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