What does a filmmaker do when he releases a horror movie with a witless plot and a lame monster?
Why, churn out a sequel of course.
"Jeepers Creepers 2" is set a few days after the original, with the monster making the mistake of killing the son of a farmer (Ray Wise). The farmer and his older son are out for revenge and arm themselves with a homemade harpoon gun and their trusty farm dog.
Because the monster only appears during the 23rd spring for 23 days, the two men don't have much time to destroy the creature. But by a stroke of luck, Wise overhears on the police scanner about several disappearances in the area.
The two men find their enemy just as it is attacking a bus filled with high school jocks returning from a championship game on the 23rd day.
Filled with stereotypical teen characters and a monster with an unclear motive, "Jeepers Creepers 2" does little to improve the genre of horror movies from the past 40 years. Since the first movie, the audience hasn't learned what the monster is, where it came from and why it needs to eat people.
Most movie monsters have some sort of origin, but these two movies fail to explain key plot points such as its reasons for eating people and why in both movies two people have a psychic link to it. Apparently showing a decapitated body is more important than producing a well-thought-out script these days.
The only worthwhile part of the movie is seeing the farmer go after the Creeper (or whatever it's called) with a hydraulic post-hole digger turned into a harpoon gun mounted on the back of a truck.
Considering the movie comes from writer/director Victor Salva, who directed the 1995 critically acclaimed "Powder," the outlook was bad to begin with. His style of filming the rural cornfields and farmland in these movies is well done and aesthetically pleasing. But that isn't enough to make you want to sit through two hours of hackneyed dialogue and the same teen characters from every other slasher movie to come before it.
The tagline to this movie is, "He can taste your fear." Well, if I could taste this movie, it'd taste a lot like crap.
