Face-Off: Jeepers Creepers vs. Jeepers Creepers 2

During the long drive home from the college they attend, a pair of siblings see the driver of a truck that had previously tried to run them off the road disposing of what appears to be body. Attempting to be Good Samaritans, they instead find themselves the new targets of a seemingly unstoppable evil force.

There are two characters at the center of this film, siblings Trish and Darry. They’ll encounter others over the course of the story – police officers, a cat lady, a psychic who has had visions of the terrible things that are going to happen – but the movie is really carried by Justin Long and Gina Philips as the brother and sister. Their interactions start out playfully antagonistic, but Trish emerges as a tough heroine who is a protective sister while a then-mostly-unknown Long displays the charm and humor you can usually rely on him for to make Darry, soon scared out of his mind, a likeable guy.

At first, The Creeper seems to be a serial killer who drives a rusty old truck and has hundreds of corpses, victims going back decades, preserved in a subterranean lair called the House of Pain. It has a very unsettling presence as it stalks our protagonists and kills supporting characters. Eventually we realize that the Creeper is actually a supernatural creature, an immortal that consumes body parts to replace those parts on its own body. This is when the movie loses some viewers, but for me the moment when the Creeper is revealed to be a winged monster is when it truly becomes interesting – that sets it apart, makes it unique, and gives it a shot at becoming an iconic horror villain. The way it’s portrayed in this film, it deserves to be.

The kills tend to be presented in a rather subtle, bloodless way. They’re often done off screen, bodies are simply tossed aside, we don’t see damage being inflicted. Still, there are some great deaths. My favorite is when the Creeper stands on top of a car driving down the road, pulls the driver’s head up through a hole in the roof, and decapitates them with a battle axe. Another great one is when the Creeper tears someone’s heart out, leaving a gaping hole in their body that flashlight beams shine through before the person collapses.

The majority of the movie takes place on the road with just Trish and Darry, but the scope widens for the climactic sequence, which finds the Creeper raiding a police department full of officers in its quest to capture one of the siblings. It’s not the bloodbath you might be hoping for, but the body count does increase as the Creeper takes out cops with no problem at all. The more it seems that it’s impossible to stop this thing, the more we have to prepare to see a downer ending.