Jeepers Creepers 3 (2017) – Review

So unfortunately the time has come to once again plunge into that most thorny of movie debates – to separate the art from a legitimately upsetting artist – and the prime offender in the genre of horror is undoubtedly that of the Jeepers Creepers franchise and the horrible crimes committed by it’s creator, Victor Salva. We’ve covered this before in the reviews for the previous movies that – if viewed in a vacuum – actually contain more than enough genuinely great moments to induct the villainous Creeper into the realms of the horror icon; but while we were all ignorant of Salva’s past when the first film came out and the news finally broke around the release of the second, the fact that a convicted child molester was allowed to make a third entry fourteen years later is utterly unforgivable. Was the lure of an origin story for the Creeper really so strong that an entire film production was OK with signing on the dotted line to work with the guy?
However, with the third film, the whole Jeepers Creepers issue is thankfully circumvented by the convenient fact that the movie is complete shit.

Set between parts 1 and 2, we pick up the story the day after the flesh-eating Creeper carried a screaming Derry Jenner into the night leaving the local police force in a state of shock. The sense of unreality is heightened by the fact that the winged creature has left its imposing truck behind that also seems to double up as a storage for his recent victims and contains some fiendish self protection devices that goes far beyond a simple car alarm. However, while Sergeant Davis Tubbs struggles to accept what he’s just witnessed, some sort of explanation arrives in the form of Sheriff Dan Tashtego and a team of monster hunters he’s assembled from various people who have lost loved ones over the last few days to the Creeper’s insatiable appetite.
But while Tashtego and Tubbs race to stop the Creeper’s truck from being taken to be impounded (can’t see the Creeper coughing up to pay the fine, can you?), other stories spin out from the influence the creature has had on the area in the last twenty-odd days its been feasting. One of these people is the elderly Gaylen Brandon who’s son, Kenny, was killed by the Creeper during its last rampage 23 years earlier, but while she’s being haunted by ghostly visions of her boy, he reveals that he had managed to take something personal from the creature and had buried it on the property before the beast eventually came and claimed him.
While the Creeper targets Gaylen’s granddaughter, Addison, the old woman discovers that the thing that Kenny buried was actually a part of the Creeper’s anatomy (leaving a hand lying around is fairly careless for a creature that wants to keep its existence a secret, no?) and to touch it allows you to see it for what it really is. Is this the information that will finally lead to the Creeper’s downfall? Well, it’s unlikely seeing as chronologically speaking, part 2 is still to occur…

As we’ve covered the distasteful issues that exist behind the camera already, I’m now going to focus solely on the film itself and I have to say, for a film that seems to exist only to apparently she’d some light on a pretty facinating movie monster, Jeepers Creepers 3 proves to be nothing more than a titanic con job. For a start, the film has immediately hamstrung itself by the restrictive nature of its own rules and the decree that every twenty-three years for twenty-three days it gets to treat the backroads of America like it’s own all-you-can eat buffet means that there’s some major storytelling issues. For a starts, we already know that the Creeper is fought to a standstill in Jeepers Creepers 2 and falls back into hibernation after getting harpooned more times than Moby Dick, so immediately, we know that most of what we’re about to see will blatantly be inconsequential unless some genuine revelations about the bat-winged bastard comes to light. However, despite all the promises, the movie actually offers no explanation whatsoever to us, the audience, instead having those who gain the knowledge choose to remain frustratingly tight-lipped on the subject. We’re told that it’s ancient, but that kind of like reporting that water is wet and anyone desperate to find out how a monstrous creature managed to score his snazzy personalised number plate will also walk away grumpily unfulfilled. However, worse yet is that a heavily truncated budget means that a big finish for the trilogy is completely off the cards and while the Jeepers Creepers franchise is one that’s been repeatedly blighted by some iffy CGI, things manage to feel extra cheap here.

There’s the occasional ray of hope here and there (if you particularly want one) that does manage to build on the established lore and the main one is that the budgetary restrictions on the Creepers wings means that we get reintroduced to his gnarly death wagon that proves to have a whole bunch of tricks up its chassis this time out. Coming across like Jigsaw from Saw has managed to design his own version of a James Bond spy car, this thing now protects itself from intruders by firing a spear from it’s exhaust, having a bone crushing booby trap protecting its cargo and even has spikes that shoot out to stop people escaping. Elsewhere, even though we don’t have the budget to match the exciting series of showdowns that closed out part 2, there’s still a decent car chase that sees the Creeper’s truck dumping explosive mines as it fends of fire from a mini gun, but it’s soon swallowed up by the film’s primary weakness. Without the reveal of what the Creeper is (not that we actually needed to know in the first place) the movie ends up being indefensibly boring. The whole subplot that sees a young girl trapped inside the Creeper’s truck should be excruciatingly tense, but us kind of an after thought and even though we have Meg Foster on hand to lead us through the whole business with the creature’s severed hand should be cracking the entire franchise wide open, it’s just bland and ends on something on a confusing note. Even more damning is the fact that Jonathan Breck’s Creeper has gone from an atmospheric beast shrouded in mystery to a rubbery looking bloke standing in the middle of a field in broad daylight and while he gets the odd cool moment, the fact that he’s constantly upstaged by his own vehicle is just confounding – I mean even David Hasselhoff held his own against K.I.T.T. in Knight Rider.

Ultimately, we have an entry of a franchise that’s a shadow of its former self and that constantly trips over its own continuity despite the fact that it’s all been written by the same guy. For example, a final reveal that shows that one of the characters is destined to be aboard the fateful school bus from part 2, but if this guy has already had a run in with the Creeper, how come he keeps shtum the second the flying predator stars swooping down and killing members of his own high school team? Slow, muddled and cheap, this (almost) final flap of the Creeper ends up being a low point of an already compromised franchise and everyone would have been better off if it simply hadn’t be made.
Jeepers Creepers, you’re gonna cause some sleepers.
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