The last frame in the shivery "Jeepers Creepers" answers the question asked in the famous old song: Where'd you get those peepers?
It's not pretty.
Darryl (Justin Long) encounters his evil pursuer in "Jeepers Creepers."
(MGM/UA)
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Neither is the movie, but that's not to say it's ineffective. If the reptile brain in you, that ugly little cluster of cerebral cells where all the destructive urges lie, needs a good jolt, "Jeepers Creepers" offers you just such a treat without having to do hard time as a consequence.
It begins as what looks to be the usual banal teen-slasher pic of 20 years ago, and you keep waiting for the two pretty kids to A) have sex and B) get whacked so we can get on to the real movie. But it turns out that A) they're brother and sister and B) this is the real movie.
Then it more or less recapitulates the history of the genre, taking us through "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Frankenstein," "Dracula," "Night of the Living Dead" and "The Terminator" before it finally arrives somewhere quite unexpected: an almost Gothic old-school fairy tale with a monster straight out of the dark well of the human subconscious, both familiar and new, both ancient and terrifying.
The weird vibration it so expertly produces I will ascribe to writer-director Victor Salva, who has already been subject to much attention on the strength not so much of his first movie, "Powder," but of reports of unpleasant personal stuff in his life. Let's leave that one alone; what is important is that he has a truly creepy sensibility, and he makes of this movie something more than the usual throat-slasher: It's about primordial ideas as much as it is about death by mayhem.
Our heroes are Trish and Derry (Gina Philips and Justin Long), returning home across a bland rural landscape that turns out to be, in the credits, Florida, though there's no particular Florida sense to the film. Instead we're in the state known as Horror Movie, U.S.A.: a lone highway, two rather yappy, incompetent kids in a '59 Impala, no gas stations, no towns, nothing but ominous music. You know what comes next: Cue the truck from "Duel."
It tries to squash them to fudge on the highway. Somehow they survive. Later – or maybe it was earlier, I forget – they spot its driver apparently disposing of bodies in a sewer pipe. They go back to look.
Now, no living creature higher up the food chain than a spermatozoa would go back to look, and even many of your brighter spermatozoa would run like hell; but this is a horror movie, after all, where in the presence of danger, IQs drop to polar-temperature levels.
So they investigate. They find nasty stuff. They reach the cops. Whatever it is, it turns the cops to sushi. It stalks the two kids across the landscape. They hide in a cop station. It doesn't care.
It – the beast, the thing, Him, whatever – is a neatly constructed illusion upon which the movie basically depends. It may stir you, it may make you laugh. I am of the stirred variety. I do not want to meet this guy in the dark, though I've been meeting him in my dreams for years. We all have.
JEEPERS CREEPERS (R, 90 minutes) – contains violence, though the gore could not be called excessive. At area theaters.
