Nice eating you

Writer-director Victor Salva has left himself wide open for a big plagiarism lawsuit with Jeepers Creepers 2, a paltry follow-up to his effective 2001 creep-fest involving a winged monster with a taste for human body parts. In 1998, Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park created an episode titled City on the Edge of Forever in which animated Cartman and friends were trapped on a school bus while a big black monster picked them off one by one. (Yes, the monster killed Kenny.)

While the South Park episode was hilarious and worth repeated viewings, Jeepers Creepers 2 is nothing but a subpar genre retread that’s thin on scares, but hefty when it comes to clichés. Salva’s sequel features a plot remarkably similar to the Parker-Stone creation: A bus full of high school students is stranded on a rural road, and the Creeper plans to treat himself to the veritable buffet of high school film stereotypes. The movie is so reminiscent of the South Park episode that I anticipated Cartman jumping out of the back seat of the bus and exclaiming, “Screw you guys, I’m going home! Winged monsters trying to eat my balls is where I draw the line!”

On the menu in Salva’s weak, unscary film are the jocks, the brainy geek guy with big glasses, the psychic, the ditzy cheerleaders, the racist and the scary female bus driver with a bird’s nest hairdo. The Creeper, so ugly and frightening in the original, now looks not unlike one of the slick gargoyles from Joe Dante’s Gremlins. I half expected him to croak the line “Gizmo kaka!” after the eradication of victims.

Too much of the film is spent on the bus in some sort of ill-advised homage to Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. Most of the carnage in the movie takes place off screen, with a winged CGI Creeper swooping down and picking up victims, carrying them off to certain death. This gimmick works nicely in the opening sequence, a scary passage set in a cornfield that results in a child being snatched. The trick gets all too repetitive during the body of the film.

Here’s another small problem: Salva, a convicted sex offender (it’s true) goes a little heavy on the half-naked boy group pissing scenes. These days, movies seem real big on the male-bonding, communal urination scenes, and it’s my guess (just a guess, mind you) that most guys generally don’t like pissing out in the great wide open with other guys standing nearby, watching and pissing. If a guy did find oneself in a situation where pissing in front of someone was a necessity, he certainly wouldn’t do it with his shirt off, sweaty muscles glistening in the sun as the urine flowed from his body. Salva seems to think that the high-school buddy, shirt-off, erotic urination party is the super cool thing to do among hipster adolescents. No wonder this guy got in trouble with the law.

An opportunity for a nice campy performance is missed with the under utilization of actor Ray Wise (Leland Palmer of Twin Peaks) as a father seeking revenge against the Creeper. Wise is obviously modeled after Moby Dick‘s Captain Ahab, with the Creeper being his white whale. But rather than have Wise whoop it up in crazy, over-the-top fashion, Salva directs him to play it mostly straight. A boring decision.

Like Halloween‘s Michael Meyers, it looks like the Creeper is a slasher freak good for only one film. If someone does decide to greenlight a third Jeepers Creepers, let’s hope that Salva never saw the anal probe episode of South Park. That would be really ugly.