Trish and her brother Darry are returning home from college. The journey seems quiet, but danger is always lurking: along the way, they encounter a truck trying to run them off the road. Narrowly escaping the accident, the two spot shortly after, near an abandoned church, the mysterious driver of that same pickup truck who hides a strange sack that seems to contain a corpse. It is their first encounter with The Creeper, a demonic creature that returns to Earth every 23 years to feed, continuously for 23 days, on humans in order to regenerate. The terrible being decides to target Trish and Darry, who will try to confront it with the help of a psychic.
Released in Italy as "the horror that shocked America," this "Jeepers Creepers" is a film written and directed by Victor Salva, a young director passionate about horror since childhood.
The story, although Salva has stated it was inspired by "The Blair Witch Project" and "The Sixth Sense," actually resembles more closely "The Night Flier" by Mark Pavia and turns out to be rather predictable and banal. Even the monster does not break the typical B-Movie canons and holds up well in the scene only in the first part of the film, until it "shows" too much: once its identity and true appearance are revealed, "The Creeper" loses much of its charm and becomes decidedly less terrifying.
It is precisely in the first half hour that "Jeepers Creepers" offers its best: the story, organized on a solid thread of suspense and terror, moves quickly, and the film offers some moments of good tension, such as the sequence of the discovery, by the two young people, of the monster's lair, a kind of cave "decorated" by sticking hundreds of corpses to the walls, in a "hallucinated vision of the Sistine Chapel." A series of films come to mind, from "Night of the Living Dead" (in the long initial dialogue between brother and sister) to "Duel" (the truck chase) up to "The Silence of the Lambs" and as in Demme's thriller, it is the monster that dominates the film, generating the danger.
Victor Salva uses few actors to cleverly build tension, chooses soft lighting, careful images, evocative locations. After the first excellent half hour, the film slows down and the fear drops sharply; one "wakes up" only in the final scenes and a special recognition goes to the concluding sequence, of great effect, and for once, not at all comforting but rather "mean" just right.
Nothing new under the sun, therefore, but still a good film that seeks to revive the horror genre of the eighties: a simple story, a bad and sufficiently terrifying boogey-man, some corpses scattered around, and a couple of young people to persecute. Some healthy scares and an hour and a half of entertainment, but nothing memorable.
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