Every bad scary movie has a psychic. In Jeepers Creepers, a prophet named Jezelle (Patricia Belcher) predicts dire consequences for Darry (Justin Long) and Trish (Gina Phillips), the brother-sister duo at the film’s center.
Anticipating skepticism, Jezelle defends her dreams. “They’re not like the movies,” she explains. “Sometimes there’s parts missing.”
Sometimes movies have parts missing, too. Take this one. (Please). Its missing parts include intelligence, originality, wit and a single reason to watch.
Even the effects (if you can call them that) are pure cheese. In one scene, Darry wanders into a cavelike torture chamber lined floor-to-ceiling with what appear to be department-store dummies. Later we learn that they were supposed to be the mummified remains of the Evil One’s victims.
Your generic Halloween haunted house boasts higher production values.
Neither Darry nor Trish is particularly quick on the uptake. Making a strong case that stupidity is genetic, the siblings embark on a Spring Break drive along a picturesque country road in an old car that ought to come with a sign that reads “Will conveniently break down for monsters.”
They bicker, they trade insults, they discuss the legend of a teen couple who vanished some 20 years earlier while driving that exact same stretch of highway. Driving past an old church, they slow down to watch a cloaked figure stuff something shaped like a body down a drainage pipe.
Spooky dude, of course, spots the gawkers. Hopping into a brown truck that looks like something from the set of Mad Max, he gives chase and eventually runs the dense duo off the road.
At this point, you’re thinking “AdiM-ss, stupidos.” But finishing them off at the point where it makes the most sense would shorten the movie to something like 20 minutes. Knowing that he needs to make the film last at least another hour, spooky dude drives off.
So what do our brilliant protagonists, their lives inexplicably spared, do next? Call the cops? Buy guns? Take out term life insurance policies?
No, they go back to look down the drain.
Idiots? Yes, certainly. But no worse than anyone who, after reading this warning, still feels the need to peer into the dark hole that is Jeepers Creepers.
