Jeepers Creepers (2001) is one of my favorite films due to its creativity and uniqueness. I wish I could say that Jeepers Creepers 2 had that same kind of creativity. Instead, it ends up being a tired and pretty boring teen scream. Before watching, I knew the plot involved The Creeper hunting down a school bus full of teenagers and while I thought that sounded like a poor idea, I still had some hope it could be good. Unfortunately, that hope was dashed rather early on in the film.
The first film had a lot of scenes that were truly creative and while it wasn’t necessarily very scary, it was entertaining and also well acted. This film is missing both of those key things. It doesn’t feature any creativity except for maybe one scene and the acting is subpar at best. I also think it was a mistake to have a whole big group of characters being hunted instead of just a couple like in the first film. This makes it hard to get to know any one of the characters.
The victims we have here is a high school male sports team with a few female cheerleaders and they just don’t have well written characters. One of the males that gets a lot of the screen time is the stereotypical bigoted jackass that’s likely overdosed on testosterone.He’s homophobic, he’s racist, at one point he pushes the idea of Darwinism and wants to sacrifice certain characters he thinks the monster wants.
In a horror film, it’s generally a good rule of thumb to have lead characters we like instead of giving a lot of time to a jerk we just want to see get taken out. With that being said, there are a couple characters that are good people but they still are underwritten and don’t get any time to shine.
Not only are we stuck with these uninteresting/poorly written characters but we’re also stuck with a film that’s pretty boring for the majority of the time. The opening scene of Jeepers Creepers 2 is mildly entertaining and appears somewhat promising but then the whole middle is just these teens trying to hide from The Creeper and fighting amongst themselves. I can handle horror films that are a little predictable. They can still be entertaining. But this film is both predictable and boring and that is a fatal combination.
The first onscreen kill is really laughable too, it happened and I was like oh come on! It was just silly, not frightening in the least. While the first film had a lot of interesting visuals, like the human tapestry in the church, Jeepers Creepers 2 only “visuals” are the monster itself. There’s only one shot I thought was cool but the rest of them are really just run of the mill. After all this negativity you may wonder, is there anything positive about this horror sequel? Well there’s two things in my opinion that are good about this film.
The first thing is Justin Long’s short cameo and what they do with his character. I didn’t expect to see him in this because of obvious reasons but he’s in probably a total of like 2 minutes, and while I do think that was a smart decision, it was really the only interesting thing in a sea of boredom. The other thing I liked was the final scene. I thought what they did in the last scene was a little different from some other films in this genre. Unfortunately those are the only unique things in misguided, largely lame film. If I were you, I’d stick to the first film, which is actually pretty entertaining and very unique.
Jeepers Creepers 2 is a very disappointing sequel because of it’s lack of creativity and it’s lackluster characters. Enjoy the first film and just skip this one.
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