Jeepers Creepers: Reborn ★★★
(MA15+) 88 minutes
Victor Salva was already an experienced horror director, with four movies under his belt, when he came up with the idea for Jeepers Creepers around 2000. Francis Ford Coppola helped him raise the low budget and Salva directed two more Jeepers Creepers instalments in 2003 and 2017.
Ocean Navarro in a scene from Jeepers Creepers: Reborn.
Salva had a chequered past well before these movies. In 1988, he pleaded guilty to sexual misconduct with a 12-year-old male actor and served 15 months. He eventually returned to directing five years after his release. This fourth Creeper film appears to have been made without him – no reasons given.
Finnish director Timo Vuorensola makes his American debut, after some wacky work back home. This included two Iron Sky films, in which Nazis who fled Germany in 1945 turned up on the moon, preparing to reinvade the earth.
This is more of a post-modern, rock ‘n’ roll kind of thing, where the characters think they are too hip to fall for any of that old haunted-house nonsense. In fact, Jeepers Creepers: Reborn is neither as skilful nor scary as the 2001 original. It’s a cheap knockoff, inferior in every way.
Vuorensola gets to play with the American toys, some of the original actors make another cheque and everyone’s happy except the audience – but then, if you pay good money for the fourth instalment of a horror series, you’re probably not worried about the quality.
Sydney Craven and Imran Adams in Jeepers Creepers: Reborn.
The Creeper is a confederate-states ghoul who appears every 23 years to feed on humans, for a strictly limited 23 days of spring. Salva, despite his shortcomings, knew to keep the Creeper obscure for as long as possible, recognising that what we can imagine is far scarier than what we can see.
In the new film, we meet him early – and he’s a 1950s leather-skin throwback, like the man in a rubber suit who emerged from the slime in Creature from the Black Lagoon. Scary, not at all.
The young couple about to have a very bad night are Chase (Imran Adams) and Laine (Sydney Craven). They’re en route to a gore festival in the backwoods of Louisiana, where horror buffs dress up and scare each other when things go wrong. This allows the writers to bring in voodoo, misrepresented as usual, some Christian iconography with crosses and ravens, and a big old antebellum mansion where most of the bad things happen, thus saving on costs by shooting indoors.
The performances are poor, the tension almost non-existent, the violence largely inferred and off-screen. On the other hand, there are some laughs in the cheesy, knowing way that Vuorensola plays with expectations. It’s alleged to be the first in a new trilogy, so we have much to look forward to.
A cultural guide to going out and loving your city. Sign up to our Culture Fix newsletter here.
Most Viewed in Culture
From our partners
Source: Read Full Article
