Director: Victor Salva
Cast: Ray Wise, Nicki Aycox, a bunch of shirtless young guys, etc.

SYNOPSIS
The Creeper is a half scarecrow/half dragon creature who lives in corn fields and goes on a killing spree once every 23 years. He has many ways of killing people, the most innovative being weird shurikens that look like the throwing star from Krull. (except these shurikens have teeth and bellybuttons sewn onto them). The Creeper makes the mistake of killing a young farm boy, thus setting his father (Ray Wise) off on an Ahab-like quest for revenge.

Coincidentally, a bus filled with shirtless high school basketball players and a couple of young girls crosses the Creepers path. He cripples the bus with a couple of well placed teeth-shurikens and starts going after the teenager filled vehicle like an old sailor tearing into a can of sardines. One of the girls conveniently has a couple of dreams in which the thin premise of the Creeper is revealed. Her revelations have no bearing on the plot. After that, everyone runs around. The Creeper flies around. The angry farmer drives around. They all meet up for the climax and the movie finally ends.

REVIEW
I’ve never seen the first Jeepers Creepers and after seeing this sequel, I count myself lucky. While I am a big supporter of dumb fun and even gave Freddy Vs. Jason a decent review a few weeks ago, I can’t recommend that anybody go see this or even rent it.

This film has no plot, no character development, no suspense and no imagination. The most interesting element of the movie is the ***censored***-erotic subtext Victor Salva’s direction brings to the film. With all it’s leering camerawork, I’m sure this film will find a huge audience among the NAMBLA crowd.

Ray Wise reprises his grieving father performance from Twin Peaks. The intensity of his performance seems very out of place in this movie. His performance is almost blistering compared the the rest of the performances which wouldn’t even be up to far for a syndicated action television series.

The rest of the actors don’t seem to be acting from any kind of script at all. They just bumble around and spout off-the-wall lines about “swinging dicks” and “token white people”. Salva was possibly trying to inject some outdated social commentary into the relationships between the football players, but it just adds to the meaningless clamor of this movie. These characters exist to get killed and yet they are so bland, they even defy the easy stereotypes used by unimaginative horror films. There is the nerdy team manager that stands out because he wears glasses, but the rest of the characters totally blend together.

At times, it seems that Nicki Aycox’s character is meant to be the protagonist of the piece, but she doesn’t get much screen time. Aycox is really cute and it seems like she’s trying to give an actual performance, but she has absolutely nothing to work with. She has a series of convenient dreams in which she comes to an understanding of what is going on with the Creeper. However, nothing happens with these revelations or her character. Towards the end of the movie we see her running around lost and confused, and she apparently survives, but her character is utterly inconsequential.

By the end of the movie, everybody is running around, but we don’t know who anybody is or where the hell they’re going. Then the grieving father shows up and starts firing a home-made harpoon gun out of the back of his pickup truck.

This is the type of movie where you ideally you could at least root for the monster to kill these idiots. But in the case of Jeepers Creepers 2, the monster is just as bland as the rest of the characters.  The film itself doesn’t display even have a spark of imagination or humanity. It’s a soul-numbing waste of time.

Director: Victor Salva
Cast: Ray Wise, Nicki Aycox, a bunch of shirtless young guys, etc.

My review of the original Jeepers Creepers began thusly: “Jeepers Creepers. Movies don’t suck much deepers.” The sequel is a hair better, but a hair better than ***censored*** is still ***censored***.

As the film’s opening crawl informs us, the flying, winged Creeper feasts for 23 days every 23rd spring. We begin on day 22 of such a season, when the youngest son of farmer Ray Wise (Twin Peaks) is snatched up out of the cornfield and carried away. On the next day, a school bus full of a high school state champion basketball team and assorted cheerleaders blows a tire on the near-deserted highway, thanks to the Creeper’s well-aimed special brand of homemade ninja stars. With nowhere to go, the bus serves as a Hometown Buffet for the hungry Creeper, at first picking off (or up) all the adults, until Wise shows up for some heavy-duty harpoonin’ with his truck-mounted, jerry-rigged Post Puncher 500.

JCII has its moments, but only a precious few, and fleeting at that. This installment gives the monster far more screen time, but it’s simply the same thing over and over: Creeper attacks, Creeper flies away, Creeper attacks again. If we were supposed to empathize with the characters, writer/director Victor Salva could’ve picked another group besides cocky athletes. For my money, the Creeper can’t kill them fast enough. But then, Salva’s camera wouldn’t be able to linger on their shirtless, hairless upper bodies. For those who have forgotten all about the Clownhouse-to-
Powder controversy. Salva’s a bit of a Post Puncher 500 himself (think oral sex with underage boys). It’s hard to believe the film’s overt homoeroticism isn’t at least semi-intentional, what with all the bare chests and dialogue like “You want to poke it with sticks?” and “Can’t they just whip out the jack and pump this mutha up?”

I liked Wise, but then again, I like him in just about anything. I also liked Nicki Aycox as the Girl Who Has It All Explained to Her in Dreams, but then again, that’s probably because she’s the only hot one in the movie. But any horror film that delivers such an illogical ending (so chop it up, whydon’tcha!) and christens its characters with names like “Double D” and “Big K” deserves a straight-out D.

Director: George Romero
Cast: Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander

If you’re going to set a zombie movie at a military installation – as the recent ‘n’ decent 28 Days Later – you need to do it like George Romero’s Day of the Dead. Set after the events of the superior Dawn of the Dead, this apocalyptic thriller has a small group of soldiers and scientists hiding from the zombies in an underground fortress. The scientists are the good guys, seeking a way to understand what makes the zombies tick while trying to ensure the ongoing survival of the human species. The soliders, meanwhile, are even more loathsome than the zombies.

For a long time, the movie is zombieless, delving into the political struggle between these two parties. As I watched, I wished it were different, but now I understand how crucial that was to the story. The last third is basically the all-out zombie carnage you expect, with utterly realistic gore effects from Tom Savini and company, with countless bodies being ripped apart, intestines
spilled and flesh ripped. The acting is amateurish and the score better suited to a B-level ‘80s teen film, but they still can’t bring down the power of Romero’s zombies. Has there ever been a Romero film that was truly well-acted anyway?

Anchor Bay’s new two-disc collection comes with a pair of commentaries, one with Romero and one with Dead fan Roger Avary (director of The Rules of Attraction). You also get an excellent 40-minute making-of documentary, half an hour of behind-the-scenes footage, a promo video for the mine the film was shot in, plus trailers and TV spots and more! It’s a very nice package that makes me salivate for AB’s upcoming deluxe treatment to Dawn of the Dead, arguably the best of Romero’s zombie trilogy.

Director: Wellson Chin
Cast: Michael Chow Man-Kit, Anya, Ken Change

Asia loves mixing up their kung fu with monsters on occasion, though the end result is not always as great as one would hope. Tsui Hark’s Vampire Hunters is not Hark’s best work; in fact, it’s not even really his! The director of Once Upon a China, Time and Tide and, um, Black Mask 2 merely serves as screenwriter of this horror-action combo that offers nothing new, but does an okay job of doing what very little it does.

Four guys – named Thunder, Wind, Rain and … I can’t remember, Precipitation? – spend their days fighting vampires and zombies. That’s about all the plot there is, which explains why the film often slows to a halt whenever they’re not fighting the vampires and zombies. There’s some mumbo-jumbo about a treasure of gold and a wax museum, but really, all you want to see is gore and wirework. It gives you that, but not as much as you’d like.

Director: Patrick Lussier
Cast: Jason Scott lee, Jason London, Craig Scheffer

Not a single cast member from the Wes Craven-presented Dracula 2000 returns for Dracula II: Ascension, the first of two straight-to-video sequels, and who can blame them? Unlike D2K, which was fun in a pure genre way, Ascension is only occasionally fun in a really-bad-movie sorta way.

Picking up where D2K ended with the count burnt to a crisp on a neon crucifix, Ascension wheels the charred, crispy body of the vampire into a morgue, where the enterprising workers steal the corpse, sensing an opportunity to make some money. They take it to the conveniently vacant and isolated mansion of their professor, Craig Sheffer, who is confined to a wheelchair because of
cerebral palsy and has his left hand drawn up and turned in a way that looks like he’s constantly playing charades and no one has yet guessed “hieroglyphics.”

Sheffer – like Stephen Hawking without the RoboVoice and the charisma – believes the key to his cellular regeneration lies within the blood of Dracula, so he has his students revive the body by literally giving him a bloodbath. It works, and the first to die is former Playboy Playmate of the Year Brande Roderick, who briefly comes back as cinema’s only vampire to sport matching red bra and panties from Victoria’s Secret semi-annual lingerie sale. Eventually dying (but not soon enough) is the token black guy who, after sprouting fangs, exclaims with no irony, “I got the hooyah power in me!”

Meanwhile, the increasingly oval-faced Jason Scott Lee tracks them down. He’s a priest-***censored*** vampire hunter, as quick with the scythe as he is with the scripture, and he is as intent on saving souls as he is severing heads. Oh, and what of Dracula? He’s tied up for nearly the entire movie, freed of his chains only at the end to set up Dracula III. Maybe that one will have more bite.