Day 22. It’s an impossibly orange day in the Taggart family cornfield. Little Billy is helping out his Paw and older brother by hammering away at one of a couple of nearby scarecrows. Older brother tinkers away at the undercarriage of the family truck, while Dad putters around with a device discretely labeled in enormous CAPS as a POST-PUNCHER. The sun burns down. Dad’s POST-PUNCHER belches away loudly. A dog barks in the distance. All this is well and good, but … gasp!
Suddenly ominous underscore drifts into the afternoon soundscape, and it doesn’t appear that any of the Taggarts are taking notice. If only they could hear the dissonant chords growling and sighing in the background music, oh-then perhaps they could put a pre-emptive kibosh on the carnage to come. Alas, for what might have been. Something wicked this way comes, Little Billy, and it ain’t no crow.
It’s the Creeper, that ubiquitous and wackily-titled killing machine from 2001’s kooky horror romp “Jeepers Creepers,” and today’s main course is shaping up to be Billy Al Orange. A flying whoosh and a couple of screams later, a close-up of Dad’s bereft face lets us all know that today’s Billy is now little more than tomorrow’s table scraps.
You see (in case you miss this important bulletin the first 19 times it’s thrown around in “Jeepers Creepers 2”), every 23rd spring-for 23 days-IT GETS TO EAT!
And eat it does, ad nauseum, slicing and dicing its way through a veritable homo sapien buffet as the frightened yokels of Poho County drop like flies between Days 1 and 23.
The Creeper takes the adage “you are what you eat” a tad more seriously than most. Apparently, the Creeper stumbles out of his quarter-century’s hibernation half-formed and must fill in his own anatomical blanks through a sort of body part scavenger hunt. He screens his victims based on which organs he himself is still missing, then he eats said victims, and voila! A better, more complete Creeper after every meal. Doesn’t it seem, though, that after 22 days of solid feasting, the Creeper should have already hit all the major stuff and moved onto fineries like eyelashes and acne? Don’t forget that pinky toenail, Creeper! And, hey, how ’bout an appendix and some chest hair?
At any rate, now it’s day 23, and it looks like the Creeper has picked out dessert. Somewhere on East Route 9, a busload of rowdy players, cheerleaders and stone-faced coaches are returning home after a rousing victory at the state basketball championship when a series of tire blow-outs leads to suspicions that someone or some THING may be trying to stop the team from getting home to celebrate their victory in one piece. It isn’t long before all semblance of gaiety evaporates from the situation when the Creeper comes for one last bite before bedtime.
Meanwhile, Paw Taggart stews in his own anger at the homestead (replete with a painting of “Dogs Playing Poker,” by the way), listening to radio reports of the county’s growing body count and plotting how best to PUNCH a POST through the Creeper’s crusty cranium. Oh, you’re goin’ down, Creeper! You’re goin’ down to Chinatown!
Writer/director Victor Salva squanders the momentum of the original “Creepers” on a stillborn sequel that ignores the mythos established throughout the first installment in lieu of a more straightforward slasher plot. A mysterious force is killing people, and that’s that. Yawn.
Let’s meet the cast, shall we? There’s Minxie, the doe-eyed pom-pommer who keeps fainting her way into visions of a dark future where “Jeepers Creepers” alum Justin Long earns a day’s paycheck warning her to turn back before the Creeper goes medieval on the bus and its riders. There’s Jake, the mean-spirited jock who gets his jollies torturing poor Andy the waterboy. There’s Scotty, the whiney white renegade who feels cheated that he rode the bench in the big game while African-American Deundre was dunking his way to adolescent glory. And then there’s Izzy, the shy guy everyone suspects is gay.
The movie only really works when it focuses on the surviving Taggart’s determined hunt for vengeance. God bless Ray Wise, who somehow manages to make the bloodlusting bereaved father a weighty onscreen presence despite the movie’s prevalent tendency to become too silly for words. As it is, the film is dull and regretfully overlong. A script this empty should never have occupied the screen for more than 80 minutes, yet this “Creepers” clocks in at a little over a hundred. Salva seems to think nuance is derived from scenes in which next to nothing happens. He has effectively created a thriller with no thrills, a plot with no payoff, characters as interesting and fun to root for as chunks of wood. Perhaps fluid character development is too much to hope for in a movie called “Jeepers Creepers 2,” but it shouldn’t be unreasonable to yearn for a plot that can move from point A to point C effectively without pausing ponderously and taking a nap by point B.
The audience knows the creature from the first film, even if the kids on the bus don’t. It’s grating to have to watch the bus-riders discover the Creeper step by step by baby step, because it’s nothing more than a 45 minute re-hash of what we learned in the original.
Things pick up once the slasher flick meets and melds with the paternal revenge flick, but it’s too little, too late. “Jeepers 2” creeps to the finish line on a full stomach but an empty noggin’. Sure, nobody really objected to seconds with our dear friend the Creeper, but let’s all agree to clear the table before Salva tries to force-feed us thirds.