August 29, 2003
By D.K. Holm
Children of the Corn
JEEPERS CREEPERS 2
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
"It doesn't matter what you do."
That's what, with a shrug of defeated shoulders, one of the characters in JEEPERS CREEPERS 2 finally says in the face of the relentless onslaught of violence and death that the film's monster, the underwear-sniffing demon from JEEPERS CREEPERS, visits upon the film's teenage characters.
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But has it not always been so in the teen horror genre? Since the advent of the teen slaughter film with THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE in 1974 (the teens being a declension from the fashion models, actresses, and other single women of Italian giallos), teens have marched onward as to war, cut down in groups of two, three, and even in the tens (THE BURNING). Filmmakers have scrunched their brains to come up with more and interesting means of comic death, but also in order to uncover new killing grounds and expanded modes of transportation (trains, planes, and automobiles). JEEPERS CREEPERS 2 takes place mostly on a bus trapped on a lonely country road, with a few subsidiary forays into a cornfield, and though it may lack gross imagination and wit in the teen deaths themselves, the film more than makes up for that in genre fidelity … and controversy.
For JEEPERS CREEPERS 2, (A.K.A. LIKE HELL: JEEPERS CREEPERS 2 and JEEPERS CREEPERS 2: THE SECOND NIGHT) is, like its predecessor, and like CLOWNHOUSE and POWDER, written and directed by Victor Salva. Mr. Salva is, of course, the horror and suspense filmmaker and former child care worker who was arrested in 1988 for videotaping himself having oral sex with a 12-year-old youth — a kid who also happened to be the star of Salva's movie CLOWNHOUSE. For more details (and links) see my review of the CLOWNHOUSE DVD (MGM has postponed release of the DVD and as of this writing has not yet announced a new street date).
As I said in the DVD review, Mr. Salva has paid his debt to society, and must live the rest of his life registering as a sex offender in whatever new community (or shooting location) he chooses. One wants to balance a certain horror at his private demons and sympathy for his victim with respectful if academic curiosity about how Mr. Salva's private life interacts with his public artworks.
JEEPERS CREEPERS 2 provides ample fodder. Not only does it continue the weird dialectic between monsters and young boys that the previous movie enacts, but in the script Mr. Salva actually dilates on issues of homosexuality, prejudice, and irrational hate. When it is not impersonating a lawyer's brief, the film is a modestly effective horror film.
The soapbox that Mr. Salva mounts is a very small one, and does not interfere too much with the film's narrative trajectory. After a printed reminder of the series' premise — that every 23 years a mysterious demon arises from hibernation to feed on fearful human beings for 23 days — the film drops in on a femaleless farm family setting up scarecrows in a corn field (a visual quote from the first movie). One of the scarecrows happens to be The Creeper, the so-named demon who is still on a rampage from JC1, and who then snatches up the family's youngest boy and flies off with him, like the aliens in PITCH BLACK.
Next target: a busload of 20 teens and three adults associated with Bannon County High School, all returning from a sporting event. The Creeper has fiddled with the bus and seen to it that the thing gets stalled on a country road, apparently also hijacking the power of its passengers' communication devices, such as short CBs and cell phones. First the adults are picked off, perhaps just to clear them out of the way. As the kids listen to radio reports about the first movie's burned church and its hundreds of years of corpses found preserved there, the demon advances its plan of attack, pounding against the bus, ripping the lid off the top of the can, forcing the teens to subdivide into contentious little groups.
At this point, a rickety soap box is hauled out from under the bed and Victor Salva rises up on his hind legs and commences to preach to us, somewhat indirectly, about tolerance.
One of the kids is a school sports reporter, riding along with the team. We are given to understand that his schoolmates think he is gay. I'm not sure that we learn what he is one way or another (there is some reference to a stolen car toward the end), but the point is that the others think and fear that he is and so act harshly toward him. Being a pussy and scarred are also sins to these lads, and nerd team equipment boy Bucky (Billy Aaron Brown, the new Charles Martin Smith) suffers the worst of that disapprobation. And then there is the blond team leader (didn't catch his name) who is a sexist, a racist, and a homophobe (because he is unselfacknowledgingly gay himself?). From its tiny platform, the film makes clear what we are suppose to think about all these characters and attitudes.
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Before their full awareness of the horror about to befall them descends, the stranded kids are shown sunbathing on the roof of the bus, and having group pissing sessions. If the movie hadn't emerged from a cloud of pedophilia I suppose these shots wouldn't elicit much interest, though they might still excite members of the audience who would have been freed by ignorance from the taint of the shots' origins. But in the Salvanic context they evoke the idea that they are the real reason the film exists in the first place. On the other hand, in "normal" horror films, nude or nearly nude women are highlighted to involve the male viewer in the proceedings. Tossing in some bare-chested male teens doesn't exactly turn Salva into Tom of Finland — in a better world, he might argue, pedophiles would get their soft-core porn, too — but they are a distraction, in this context, from the real purpose of JC2, which is the slaughter of the not so innocent.
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Fortunately for plot purposes there are three girls on the bus (the team's cheerleaders), and the blonde one turns out to have psychic powers, which allow her to commune with the boy victim (Justin Long) from the first film, and then turn around and explain to her schoolmates and the viewer the whole 23 year cycle thing. She's also the one who suggests that it doesn't matter what you do to the demon, because he cannot die.
But all is not lost. Yet. The little corn-farming boy's father, Taggart (Ray Wise), is not taking the disappearance of his son lightly. He has rigged up a harpooning device on his truck and gone out demon hunting, eavesdropping on the police band for other disappearances as clues about where to hunt. The film concludes with a long sequence in which Taggart and the demon, along with some of the kids, all face off in a battle to the death.
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As a horror film, JEEPERS CREEPERS 2 more or less works, but it is somewhat empty. You can never remember the names of most of the characters or their relationships to each other. On the other hand, it looks clean and classical, almost like a Coppola film (Coppola is an executive producer). But then it's also a little inconsistent. The film ends with a coda that suggests that all of JC1 and most of JC2 take place in 1989. I guess the sulfurous Midwest never changes its fashions in clothes and cars. Also, why, or why, does the Creeper ever run or walk when it can more effectively fly? Like the bicycles in ET, the demon flies solely at the behest of the director.
And like the scary head flaps on some of the dinosaurs in JURASSIC PARK, the Creeper can startlingly unfurl his wingspan at odd moments. Unfortunately, he is made to do so just five or six times too many to maintain the novelty of the action.
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Unintentionally, JC2 calls into question why we make movies at all. If an underwear or hair or boot fetishist were to sneak images of his folly into his films, nobody would really notice unless they shared his obsession. And even if the viewer was informed, I doubt if it would matter that much, because the obsession wouldn't necessarily affect the moral tilt of the story. But Mr. Salva makes films about older males preying upon young boys — and usually winning (the end of JC1 was pretty bleak). Mean older brothers and bullies are another feature of Mr. Salva's films, and family and group dynamics are fairly spiced with hostility and sarcasm (just as they are in sit-coms, though). When the demon salaciously licks the rear window of the bus with his ghastly tongue you wonder if there is a subtext to the lurid image, and you wonder which side the filmmaker is taking in the general conflict between good and evil.
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As the title suggests, eyes figure in the plots of both movies. Justin Long's character is harvested for his eyes; the Creeper here loses an eye to the end of a stick. The blonde has visions. One imagines that Mr. Salva himself has seen some horrific things, and is working out his combination of longing and revulsion from those images, consciously or not, in his JC movies. But movies are a commercial enterprise and so a director must bury his interest in hair or undies or boots or boys into the cracks and seams of his movie. The rest of us are just along for the bus ride.
NEXT TIME:DICKIE ROBERTS: FORMER CHILD STAR
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