Jeepers Creepers (2001)

Susan Granger's review of "JEEPERS CREEPERS" (MGM/UA Entertainment)

This nasty, little horror film begins as a bickering brother (Justin Long) and sister (Gina Philips) are driving through the desolate countryside on their way home from college and spy a man dropping wrapped-up bodies down a drainage pipe. When Long decides to investigate, there's nothing but trouble. "You know the part in scary movies where somebody does something really stupid and everybody hates them for it? - Well, this is it!" Philips warns. What he finds in the basement of an old, abandoned church is a dying boy with a horrifying, jagged-stitched incision from his neck to his navel, plus hundreds of other mutilated bodies, stitched together on the walls and ceiling like a disgusting tapestry. Long flees but now the monstrous, winged Creeper (Jonathan Breck) is after both of them! Eileen Brennan appears briefly as the Cat Lady and Patricia Belcher is Jezelle, a psychic who explains the evil creature's bizarre feeding habits. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Jeepers Creepers" is a fiendishly visceral 2 with an extraordinarily gruesome conclusion, giving new meaning to the old song "Jeepers Creepers."

And now - as Paul Harvey would say - for the rest of the story. What's more scary than the cruelty of the satanic film itself is the fact that writer/director Victor Salva is a convicted child molester who videotaped himself having oral sex with a 12 year-old actor in California. Sentenced to three years in prison, he served 15 months and completed parole in 1992. When Salva made "Powder" (1995), the story of an albino boy with supernatural abilities, Disney studio executives claimed that they did not know about his prior conviction as a pedophile. And now, once again, in this MGM/UA film, that fact is conspicuously absent from his press kit bio.

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X-RAMR-ID: 29271
X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 244983
X-RT-TitleID: 1109558
X-RT-SourceID: 742
X-RT-AuthorID: 1274
X-RT-RatingText: 2/10