orking on his family farm, Jack Taggart (Wise) yells at his young son, Billy (Shaun Fleming), to make sure the scarecrows are strung up nice and tight. What he doesn't know is that one of them is really the Creeper (Breck), a winged supernatural creature with one day left in his 23-day feeding cycle. But he soon finds out: The Creeper snatches a screaming Billy straight into the sky while Taggart and his other son, Jack Jr. (Luke Edwards), watch in astonished horror.
A busload of high-school basketball players, meanwhile, is heading home from a successful championship game, chanting lustily while cheerleaders and their chaperones roll their eyes. They include Scotty Braddock (Nenninger), his girlfriend Rhonda Truitt (Delfino), Dante Belasco (Santos) and "Double D" Davis (Garikayi Mutambirwa), as well as cheerleaders Minxie Hayes (Aycox) and Chelsea Farmer (Lena Caldwell).
Suddenly, a tire blows out, leaving the group momentarily stranded on a dark country road. The bus driver (Diane Delano) discovers that the tire was shredded by some kind of weapon, a martial-arts throwing star made out of ... bone?
On the radio, the students hear news of a string of disappearances in Poho County, as well as the discovery of a cavern full of bodies beneath an abandoned church.
Driving on a bit more, the bus loses a second tire, leaving it incapacitated. While the passengers are mulling their options, one adult, then another, suddenly goes missing, almost as if they have been sucked into the sky. Panicked, the students climb back on the bus, only to watch Coach Barnes (Tom Tarantini) grabbed in the massive taloned feet of ... what?
Unable to call for help, the students turn on each other, arguing about the best course of action. That's when Minxie falls into a trance, has a vision, then awakes to warn the other students. He's coming.
Not your standard teen stereotypes
Jeepers Creepers, a sleeper hit in the summer of 2001, was a pleasant surprise: a mix of old-school horror, creature feature and involving characters. Two years later, writer/director Salva returns with the sequel, Jeepers Creepers 2, which picks up the story in a new way, with a gaggle of fresh young characters and a more action-packed, suspenseful storyline.
Where the first film had a lot of independent-movie dread, the sequel has more in common with blockbuster summer popcorn fare. Salva has compared his movie with Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and Lifeboat. But the movie owes as much to Steven Spielberg's Jaws as it does to those other two venerable movies, with its story of an Ahab-like obsessive in pursuit of a monstrous creature that preys on innocents.
As before, Salva has constructed a horror movie around strong characters and their volatile interaction, as brought vividly to life by a cast of talented young actors, many of whom are newcomers. This is definitely not your standard pack of teen flesh: The characters reveal themselves by degrees, and, as in Pitch Black, they turn out not to be the stereotypes that audiences have come to expect.
Throughout, the stylish Salva shows that he's a master at building suspense and staging action. As before, he makes great use of indirection and surprise. Sometimes the kills occur in the background or almost out of frame, putting the audience in the position of the protagonists: What just happened? Other times, the action is brutally swift and efficient, as when the camera swoops over the pack of running teenagers, giving the audience the Creeper's near-omniscient point of view, before a hapless victim is plucked straight into the black sky.
Breck's Creeper proves again to be an original horror creation, and he gives it his all: licking a bus window lasciviously, winking and gurgling at the cheerleaders and showing a lot more of himself as a winged harbinger of death. He is ookiness personified. Wise is perfectly cast as the grizzled, single-minded Taggart, who may or may not be as crazy as he is focused.
