Shilo "Jeepers Creepers" scared the complete hell out of me and was, for the most part, effective and a scary picture. That's a sad note when the sequel "Jeepers Creepers 2" features a fourth-rate cast who can't act, dialogue that sounds like ten-year-old kids fighting with each other and a villain, now called "The Creeper" being on a first class ticket to a third-rate movie."It's about a group of kids on their way home from a basketball game when their school bus is broken down on the side of the road. They soon discover the bus breaking down was no accident and The Creeper (Jonathan Beck), who is on the final day of its 23-day eating- spree has chosen the kids for one final meal before he goes back to sleep for 23 years. The kids attempt to stay alive and fight back while a farmer, Jack Taggert (Ray Wise), who has a personal vendetta against the beast, races to save the kids before it's too late.The had a setup with "Jeepers Creepers" and "Jeepers Creepers 2" throws it right off the tracks with stupidity and characters that are annoying to listen to, to dumb to watch and none of them can act. This is not the sequel we were hoping for. The original was a road picture with the Creeper in the shadows and this screenplay gives us a story where the Creeper attacks a bus full of dummies. It's not scary and the attempted claustrophobic setting on the bus doesn't work either. They attempt to use this setting by making the Creeper selective about who it wants but who cares when we don't care about any of the characters who are simply lunch.It opens well enough, like the original. This time there is no church or anything. The Creeper poses as a scarecrow on a farm and when he is discovered, he takes off with the farmer's young son, Billy (Shaun Fleming) to set up a subplot of the picture. We felt bad for, Trish (Gina Phillip) and Darry (Justin Long) in the original as they drove for their lives and we feel bad for the farmer Taggert but we know he will end up hunting the Creeper and possibly getting revenge. So what do have to look forward to? Not much.Everything revolves around these kids hoping to be rescued from the Creeper. He disables the bus by blowing out the tires with some interesting throwing stars and picks off the adults in charge before attempting to descend on the kids. As usual, there's the nerd, the smart one, the know-it-all and there's the foul-mouthed idiot who will most likely end up getting himself and everyone killed because he is too stupid to think. I'll get to that idiot later. He was my main source of frustration for the movie.What's really disappointing is that we are not given anything involving the farmer. He opened the picture but he becomes a second-rate character who we don't see much of until the last half of the third act. He travels the road with his son, Jack Jr. (Luke Edwards) as they attempt to save the kids. Yes, there is a showdown and Taggert spares no mercy to the Creeper but it's pretty dumb when the third act of the picture has him shooting the Creeper over and over to no effect with homemade harpoons launched from the back of his truck with a rigged up post- puncher.Anyway, the Creeper attacks the bus and eventually they are forced out on the deserted road, by the aforementioned idiot, with the Creeper flying high to easily pick them off. This dummy, Scotty (Eric Nenninger) is the typical moron with a mouth who acts like he knows what he's doing when he doesn't and when they all discover why the Creeper is targeting them and what he does, they panic and make stupid decisions. How do they find out? Apparently, one of the girls on the bus, Minxie (Nicki Aycox) is psychic and tells them they have until the next morning to survive before the Creeper goes to sleep for 23 years. A lonely teenage basketball cheerleader is psychic and knows about the creeper from a dead boy? Yeah...okay. Why doesn't the Creeper just break into the bus and grab them? He intentionally locks them in the bus for the majority of the picture to make sure they don't get out, why? He was such a menace in the original and now he seems to be playing with the kids. Maybe he knows how stupid they are and that eventually, they will try to find a way out of the bus and run where they can become easy targets? The Creeper must be smart because that is exactly what these idiots do even after they were told to hold out until the morning where they will be safe which seems like only a few hours by the end.There is too much stupidity going on to care but the ending sets up "Jeepers Creepers 3" and because of the way this one ends, it could be interesting but don't hold your breath if it's anything like this sequel. As it stands, it's a disappointing and wasted attempt of a thriller that doesn't live up to the original in any way. Speaking of disappointing, you remember in the original how we only learned about what the Creeper does? Well, we learn nothing new about him in this picture either. We don't learn where he came from or, most of all, what he is and why he does what he does. That's a huge slap in the face that I'm sure audiences were hoping to find out and we learn nothing. Hopefully, "Jeepers Creepers 3" will be much better.

drrothe ....Re the first "Jeepers Creepers," I thought that opening section (up until the kid falls down that long dark hole) was brilliant how it slowly and believably developed tension, always maintaining the "outsider" perspective of the brother and sister; I was so "into it" that when the Gina Philips character said "Girls are smarter than boys about things like this," I "said" to her brother "Yeah, listen to her, moron!" (I also liked the interaction of the two in the car, I could believe they had known each other all their lives. By the way, kudos to Philips for convincingly playing a college student at age thirty.) But as soon as the director let us see the basement, I thought "JC" started downhill fast; at first I couldn't even tell those were supposed to be human bodies, they looked like cartoons. For me it became by-the-numbers horror/monster stuff to include batty old lady conveying key plot information, & the ending left me confused; I thought "That's it? Was there re-editing by the studio?" "JC 2" is one of the few sequels that I think is better than the original, mostly because of the Aristotelian "unity of time, place and action" centered on the crippled bus, although I found it odd a bus full of athletes and cheerleaders having just won a title could disappear so long without, I don't know, the police sending out a helicopter or something---I mean this was fairly soon after 9/11/2001, wouldn't the authorities have assumed it was a terrorist action? Also some time before I die I'd like to see a horror flick where somebody's cell phone or radio ACTUALLY WORKS--also wouldn't mind seeing a prostitute WITHOUT a "heart of gold." I thought the director did well capturing the undercurrents of homophobia and racism in American high-school culture, and Eric Nenninger was convincing as the proto-fascist jock--- "I want you, you and you off the bus"--- in fact all the young cast members (unknown to me then and now) were fine. But for me Ray Wise owned it; I'm not sure he's even capable of playing a "normal character," but his scenery chewing never rings false, he endows his loonies with gritty realism; I wouldn't have wanted anyone else delivering the line "Well, it seems dead to me." Speaking of lines, I loved how they borrowed the classic line from John Carenter's "The Thing"----"You gotta be blanking kidding me"---and divided it between two actors. I saw oddly minimal gore for this genre (even the dancing decapitated body has hardly anything gushing out) but instead some suitably squishy special effects, although it got a bit silly when the creature ripped off it's own head and replaced it with one of the kids' heads, like a cartoon; also if I remember right, didn't it's wings get detached went it went through the back window and windshield of the car---hence we saw it hopping instead of flying later----yet in the barn at the end it had it's wings back? (Maybe the Wise character and his kid found and re-attached them?) But the two flicks together are among the better made horror duos I've seen, and if one doesn't let the controversy about Victor Salva's past bother one, they're both well worth a look---try to see them for free (as I did) if that makes one feel "morally cleaner." Yeah, Salva did a very bad thing a while back, but even if I had to the time to go delving into everyone's background before seeing a movie or reading a book or whatever, I don't particularly have the inclination.....

bruener This excuse for a horror movie has made me lose all faith in movies. I was in my club hoping to watch a GOOD movie and my friend brought this in and after I watched it, there could be only one word to describe it; "bullc***". This movie felt like a 10 minute episode of SpongeBob season 6 as it was very boring. The main synopsis here is that a bus full of kids gets stuck in the middle of a strange road near a forest, I think it was; i.e. like the middle of nowhere. They soon argue about stupid things and soon a hideous monster comes to ravage them which ISN'T scary at all! Like as I said in my title, I even find Teletubbies scarier than this insanity, what the writers call a horror movie. It doesn't seem like a movie at all due to the one location plot if ya know what I mean.

SnoopyStyle Every 23rd spring for 23 days, it gets to eat. On day 22, young Billy Taggart is putting up scarecrows with his father when a scarecrow grabs him and flies off. A school bus carrying a basketball team and cheerleaders gets a blown tire. Someone had thrown a shuriken made of talon bones at the tire. They listen to a radio report of the incident in the first movie. They get back on the road. Minxie Hayes (Nicki Aycox) has visions of the Creeper's victims and the tire gets blown again. They are stranded in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night.The movie works well with the stranded school bus. It's not original. It's sort of like stranded in a lifeboat with sharks circling around. It doesn't have the same tension and the cool isolated vibe as the first movie. I like the truck in the first movie. The psychic mind melt is a bit silly. The Taggarts are a bit of a distraction. The movie could be better by keeping the Taggarts out of the first half. This has a few cool horror moments but is is mostly a horror retread.