Jeepers Creepers (2001)–Cyclical Demon In The Crops

2001’s Jeepers Creepers is a movie that I’ve meant to watch several times over the years, this weekend, I finally got around to it.

Starring Gina Philips and Justin Long as Patricia and Darius (Darry) Jenner, sister and brother are driving back home through the country after spring break. Along the way they are victims of a strange road rage like incident with a very large, armoured, almost steam punk like vehicle that tries to run them down, scaring the hell out of both of them. Later they witness a dark figure loading something body shaped from the back of the vehicle that had just shortly been trying to kill them,into a large ground pipe next to a church. Well because stupid movie characters do stupid movie character things, Darry decides that they should go back to see just what was going on back there at the church. Finding the evil vehicle gone, Darry and his sister look down the big pipe but it’s too dark to see anything. Being stupid, Darry insists on climbing down the pipe to see what’s going on… Yeah, bad idea, right? So he gets stuck in a room below ground…like a part of the Church’s cellar only accessible by this pipe. Oh, and the room is full of corpses of varying ages, all missing some part, but all weirdly well preserved.

Okay, that’s how the movie starts, and I know I paint it as lame, but it was actually quite a good start to a film that was better than I expected it to be. The creature in this film is some supernatural beast, or demon, perhaps, that is active every 23 three years, for just 23 days. During that time it feeds on people, choosing them by the way they smell when they experience fear. Apparently  some people smell/taste better than others to evil demons. The title of the movie comes from the fact that it’s victims hear the song, Jeepers Creepers” shortly before it kills them. Weird, but interesting idea. The film’s creator’s did a good job creating a cool, intimidating and scary supernatural style monster and wrapped a movie around it that’s good enough not to suck – and that’s not an easy thing to do. I have to say that this is actually a fun horror movie. Sure, it’s not perfect, and right off the bat I was hoping something bad would come to Justin Long’s character, but over all it was entertaining, fun and not a copy of everything that’s gone before it. I guess I really should have watched this quite some time ago. I definitely recommend it if you enjoy horror and haven’t seen it yet.

Check out the trailer below: