arry (Long) is taking the long way home as he drives his sister, Trish (Philips), home for spring break in her old car. Without a working radio, the bickering duo play a game, trying to decipher vanity license plates. Without warning, an enormous rusting truck pulls up behind them on an isolated country road, blaring its horn and weaving as it tries to pass. Terrified, Darry and Trish let him by. Darry eyes the license as the truck roars off into the distance: BEATNGU.
The unnerving encounter reminds Trish of the myth of a high-school couple who vanished on the same stretch of road 20 years earlier. Searchers eventually found her body, but not his—and not her head.
Up the road, Darry and Trish pass a white building, an abandoned church. BEATNGU is parked out front, and a cloaked figure removes large bundles from the back and tosses them down a huge pipe in the ground. "Wrapped and roped in a sheet with red stains on it," Trish observes ominously.
The figure sees the pair as they drive past. Suddenly, the truck pulls back onto the road and gives chase, smashing Darry and Trish's car as it tries to run them off the road. Only by driving off the road does Darry escape BEATNGU, who speeds off. As they sit in a field, Darry tells Trish they must go back to the old church to see if there's someone hurt back there.
"You know the part in scary movies when someone does something really stupid and everybody hates them for it?" Trish asks Darry as he pokes his head into the pipe. "This is it."
Sure enough, Trish loses her grip on Darry and he falls into a pitch-black, evil-smelling basement room. What he sees down there fills him with fear. Later, at a roadside diner, Darry gets a mysterious telephone call from a woman who warns him that something has awakened, knows about them and will hunt them down. When you hear the old song "Jeepers Creepers," she says, run like hell.
Jeepers delivers the creeps
Jeepers Creepers, from executive producer Francis Ford Coppola, is writer/director Salva's biggest film since his critically acclaimed Powder. Salva's career took a bit of a detour when it was revealed that he pleaded guilty in 1988 to molesting a boy on the set of his low-budget picture Clownhouse and served three years in prison. This modestly budgeted big-studio film marks a kind of comeback.
Whatever his personal troubles, Salva remains an accomplished filmmaker, and Jeepers is a stylish, suspenseful and original entertainment, marred only by some bad choices in the last act and an unsettling ending. Highlighted by excellent lead performances, Jeepers is another in a string of old-school horror movies that have emerged as a backlash to the post modern irony of the Scream movies.
It harkens back to earlier films, from Steven Spielberg's Duel and Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre to James Cameron's original Terminator. In the early going, Salva uses music sparingly, photographs with flat, natural light and makes creative use of ambient sound to mimic reality, while at the same time employing dynamic camera movement to heighten suspense. Later, as Darry and Trish find themselves pursued by a malevolent force, Salva transitions to more stylized images and lighting.
All the while, Salva suggests more than he shows, carefully doling out details and using misdirection and surprise to avoid obvious horror-movie cliches. To create tension, Salva will show something happening in the distance, out of focus, so that the audience becomes aware of it well before the characters in the foreground do. So effective is Salva's storytelling that it almost seems a miscalculation to reveal too much of the evil being toward the end.
Philips' Trish is a refreshing change from the usual vapid horror-movie girl. A rational, mature young woman, she assumes the lead role normally assigned to the hunky high-school guy. Darry, by contrast, is nearly paralyzed by his dread, which Long conveys most convincingly. The admirable Eileen Brennan has a welcome cameo as a woman with too many cats, in a sequence that's a nice study in tension.
