What's Eating You?

Jeepers Creepers Dir: Victor Salva Starring: Justin Long Geena Phillips Jonathan Breck 2001 R, 90  m RATING: 7 out of 10

NIGHT CRAWLER: A sloppy, homicidal man-sect stalks a pair of unlucky college students in this above-average teen horror fare.

For its first half, Victor Salva does a bang-up job of creating dread and suspense in Jeepers Creepers, the latest entry into the teen-horror genre.  director eschewing the normal genre cliches and gives us a truly uncomfortable and disturbing premise:  As two college students (brother and sister, and not boyfriend/girlfriend, for a change) drive home through a rural highway, they encounter a ghastly sight: a cloaked person heaving what appears to be dead bodies down a sewer drain.  They investigate, make a truly ghaslty discovery and are pursued by a road-raged trucker in sequences that echo "The Duel." From the uncovering of the villain, however, Jeeper Creepers becomes quite standard in its course, and thought it offers quite an unseen ending, the rest of the film doesnt measure up to the nail-biting tension of the first half. After establishing a nightmarish premise, introducing smart rather than gullible and dumb main characters, and invoking a gim, menacing killer, the film degenerates into the usual cliches: cops who don't believe the main characters, a CGI killer, and a bad screenplay crutch: a psychic who knows some mumbo-jumbo lore about the killer. Still, Salva does deliver a disturbing start, Justin Long and Geena Phillips are fun and watchable as the siblings, and though it does fail to deliver an equally effective follow up, it's certainly above the likes of the horror tripe that's infested the horror genre (see Valentine) and recommendable.

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