The Jeepers
Creepers Quote Whores
Hey whore,
how's the whoring?
Adam Winer of FHM
says "The year's best horror movie."
Dark Horizons'
Paul fisher says "An extraordinary, genuinely frightening
film."
Xpose's Steve Gidlow
says "Ding dong the Blair Witch is Dead; Jeepers Creepers
is here!" - What the fuck?
Shivers' Gidlow
(double dipping, Steve?)also says "road-trip Scare Fest!"
Fangoria's anthony
Timpone says "Heavy on the scares."
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©2001 by
Randy Shandis Enterprises. All rights fucking reserved.
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This week:
Jeepers Creepers
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Filthy says:
"I'd rather eat hot shit." |
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Being unemployed gives me more time than usual to make bad
decisions. There are small lapses in judgment and there are large
ones. A small one was earlier this week when Mrs. Filthy was
putting on her nicest muu-muu and the pearl earrings I won for
her for Christmas. They aren't real pearls, but they're really
fucking nice fakes. Like, with the right light, you can't even
tell they're phony unless you're standing near her.
"Where you going?"
She sighs, "I already told you."
"Well, I don't see why I can't come."
I'm broke and bored. As far as I can tell, there're two kinds
of people in the world: people with the capacity to entertain
themselves, and people without. I'm in the second group. The
first group is a bunch of assholes.
I had already picked at my fingernails until I reached the
pink flesh underneath, and we don't get a newspaper anymore since
I got in that big argument with the paper boy about them still
running "Curtis." There was nothing on TV and the library
ladies still recognize me so I can't go there. I didn't want
to spend another evening playing with the magnet in the microwave
door.
She was headed to a party and I wasn't invited. Or maybe I
was and my wife didn't tell me because I embarrass her. Well,
excuse me, but if she's embarrassed because I always end up starting
fights with the host and peeing in a planter, then maybe I don't
want to go.
But of course I wanted to go, so I kept badgering her. Who
will be there? Will their husbands? Why not me? How much does
a bear weigh? Do you want me to drive? I'll be good, I promise.
Do you love me?
Finally, Mrs. Filthy let out one of the longest sighs I've
ever heard, and said "You can come." She didn't want
me to, but I didn't give a fuck. I needed to be away from the
dog, who keeps giving me the eye because she knows I ate some
of her food last week when I was even more bored.
Let this be a lesson to me. The grass isn't always less boring
on the other side. This wasn't a fucking "party," it
was a book club. I was in hell, trapped with a bunch of overdressed
women giggling at some stupid old book about strong women. As
the ladies sat in the wicker furniture, the floor and on the
macramé pillows in the overly warm living room, I tried
to behave. I imagined what everyone's skull looked like, and
looked to see if any of the girls had lopsided tits, and counted
how many God damn cats were crawling around. But the ladies wouldn't
shut up about Mr. Rochester and Gateshead and Lowood and some
other shit. That's fine, I mean, I am not going to strip them
of the pleasure of pretending they appreciate corny old novels.
But why do I have to sit there and listen? I mean, they had a
fucking guest, and they could have had the courtesy to talk about
baseball or some book I'd read, like "Swedish Sex Hospital:
Naughty Ward."
I would have sat quietly all night if Janine had some booze
I could pickle myself silly on. Instead, the ladies were savoring
Folger's "coffee house" instant coffee in fancy flavors
like "Caffe Latte" and "Same Old Shit with More
Sugar." After fifteen minutes, I figured I'd paid my dues
and decided to explore the house. Really, I was looking for something
sharp to jab into my eye. In an upstairs bathroom I found a bottle
of children's cough syrup and this prescription in a dark brown
bottle for "Mr. Kittle." Either my wife's friend was
storing medicine for the old White Sox outfielder, or the stuff
was for one of those awful cats.
I drank it. Then I drank the cough syrup. Then I fell in the
tub. Janine's fat son woke me up when he came in to pee, thankfully,
and he helped me crawl out in the hall where I threw up. That
embarrassed my wife and she's still not talking to me. I also
can't feel two of my fingers and there are motes in my eye that
won't go away. What a fucking idiot I am. I shouldn't have drunk
some cat's ear cleaner with cough syrup. I should have drunk
the cough syrup and saved the medicine for later.
But that was a small mistake, something I'll recover from
in a few months. The big mistake was seeing Jeepers Creepers.
I don't know what to say. This movie is so fucking bad it's the
cinematic equivalent of having someone ram their hand up your
ass and start yanking on your lungs. It's a ballpeen hammer to
the shin , a heavy screwdriver shoved into your ear, a glass
rod shoved up your urethra and shattered, your kneecaps split
in two in a vise, the small bones of your hand crushed under
a car tire, your knuckles caught in wood chipper, your thumbs
sliced to the bone by a deli-meat slicer, as painful as Whipped
and more hurtful than Down to You. This is, without comparison,
the worst movie of the year. It's a scare-free horror movie.
An annoying, bickering brother and sister are on their way
home from college when they are run off the road by a huge, mysterious
truck. Farther down the road, they watch the shadowy truck driver
standing by the road, dumping bloody bodies down a pipe. The
driver, unseen except as an undefined hulk, knows they saw him
and stalks them down the road in his big truck. Of course, the
bad guy is so fucking stupid he doesn't just kill them. And the
kids are so fucking stupid they have to go back and look in the
pipe. It leads to the basement of a church, where this beast
has stored hundreds of dead bodies. He cuts them open and eats
their organs, then glues them to the ceiling.
Now, all of that sounds pretty fucking standard. Tired old
horror movie clichés told with a modicum of suspense and
a remarkably static style. But, at about 40 minutes in, we get
our first good look at the "monster," a guy in an overcoat
and a cheap rubber mask. The theater I was in erupted in laughter
and shouts of "stupid." Any fear there may have been
disappeared because the thing looked so fucking stupid. I mean,
this thing is funnier looking than the Harelip digging through
the peanut shells on the Arvada Tavern floor looking for quarters.
To give you an idea how fucking lame the movie is, "Jeepers
Creepers" is a bad novelty song from the 30s. It's not scary,
it isn't meant to be. It's about as harmless and lame as a Dido
song. It also has no tie to anything in this movie other than
writer-director Victor Salva wanted to name it the same. So there
are some painfully awkward attempts to make it spooky. When you
hear the song, you know the monster is near, or something like
that. But why? Why would some supernatural monster listen to
that song? The story doesn't bother to explain that.
Usually, this kind of story is about the two kids trying to
kill the beast that's haunting them, but Salva isn't clever enough
to follow a blueprint. Instead, the story just wanders around
the neighborhood like a drunk man trying to find his house. After
a mid-point attempt to run it over, the kids don't do a fucking
thing except for be scared and hide. A "psychic" pops
out of nowhere to explain the dubious connection to the same-named
song (there is no connection, no reason for the song other than
to give the movie a title) and what the kids should expect. She
also has the cumbersome role of explaining that this monster
comes out every 23 years for 23 days to eat people. No, not the
number 23!
Great horror movie monsters have a mythology, one that plays
on our collective fears and give the monster some shred of pathos.
Lousy ones (Jeepers Creepers) don't. Michael Meyer was
loose from an asylum and seeking revenge. Freddy Krueger wanted
to avenge his own death in the school's incinerator. But this
monster has no reason to exist. Okay, it comes out every 23 years,
but what the fuck is it? Why does it come out? Why has nobody
in this rural area noticed hundreds of deaths occur in huge clumps
every 23 years? Why does it operate on the bodies and keep them?
None of these questions are answered, we're just asked to accept
it.
The story just dicks around, piling up improbabilities, terrible
decisions by characters and laughably bad secondary actors spouting
horribly awkward dialog. It peters out long before a climax that
never comes, and the second half is entirely worth walking out
of. But what do you expect from a writer-director who thinks
that a clever twist on the old car-won't-start gimmick is a car-won't
go-into-gear schtick? It doesn't build tension, it doesn't become
more scary, nothing additional is on the line.
The other cheap touches don't help. In one scene, the monster
is apparently doing some very cool, terrible things. But we don't
get to see them, we have to listen to a policeman report it over
his radio while other officers stare at walls. In another, we
are forced to listen to a bad remake of Siouxsie and the Banshees'
bad remake of the original shitty song. Apparently the moviemakers
couldn't afford the original bad remake.
The pacing helps nothing. Salva is one of those directors
who thinks we're so fucking stupid everything has to be repeatedtwice.
One character does something, another character has to narrate
it, and a third later recounts it to someone else. Splice those
with scenes where actors stare on in abject horror for minutes.
Any normal person would be running, but these people need to
drag things out, and show us how scared they are in hopes some
of it will rub off on us.
It doesn't. this is shit, amateur, annoying, laughable shit.
One Finger for Jeepers Creepers. Don't go see it,
you won't recover.
Want
to tell Filthy something?
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