Review of Jeepers Creepers 3 (2017) by Jesse O — 26 Feb 2018

I often wonder how many things from my past I have forgotten as I've gotten older. And I'm not even talking about repressed memories, of which I'm sure I have some. I'm talking about events from my youth that may have slipped my mind.

Happy moments, sad moments, tense moments. Perhaps I may have forgotten old toys that I used to love playing with. There's probably a shit-ton of movies that I have seen that I've forgotten about to this day.

There's a point to this. Let us get to it, shall we? The point is that it has been seventeen years since the release of the original Jeepers Creepers and fifteen since its sequel. 2017 was the date of the release the third installment in this 'cult classic'.

That's a shitload of time between movies. I'm certain that the first two movies have an established fanbase that loves these two movies, though I'm perplexed as to why, exactly, they love these movies.

I remember seeing the original in theaters when I was 13 years old. I am now 30 years old. If the idea for this movie was to bring in new fans to this franchise, then I'll tell you right now, they chose THE worst way possible to introduce people to this world and its characters.

This isn't so much Jeepers Creepers 3 as much as it is Jeepers Creepers 1.5. What you're watching is the events that took place between the first and second installments in the franchise. Talk about misleading.

If the world really needed another sequel to Jeepers Creepers and, let's be honest, it didn't, why would you choose to make it a continuation of the first one and not a standalone sequel that didn't require any knowledge of the series? Talk about an incredibly stupid and shortsighted decision.

You're thrown into the events of this film expected to know absolutely everything, right down to the smallest detail, of what happened in the previous movie(s). Who in the actual fuck cares about serialization (this isn't Breaking Bad) in a stupid, B-tier slasher flick? Watching this movie only makes sense if you watch it exactly after watching the first one and it's a bit jarring seeing the actor who plays Davis (Brandon Smith) look so old, when the events here are supposed to be taking place exactly after the original.

Like how do you not even think about this prior to making the decision to stick with a timeline when it's almost TWO decades after the first movie came out. Idiocy. I know The Creeper (what an appropriate name for the villain, given that the writer/director of this film was convicted of sexual abuse of a minor and possession of child pornography in 1988, the year I was born) is supposed to appear once every 23 years on the 23rd day, so you have a limited timeframe to work within if you wanna tell your story.

But just say that he broke this part of the curse or something, so he can appear whenever he wants. It doesn't fucking matter, it's a shitty sequel to a substandard horror franchise. I doubt that the hardcore fans are so hardcore enough that they'd be legitimately annoyed at this retcon of Jeepers Creepers "lore".

On top of that, the Creeper inspires no actual fear. He's just not an effective villain. He's just a guy wearing a really cool-looking wrestling mask. Another one of the major problems of the film is the fact that, in reality, this isn't actually much of a horror movie.

It's a movie about our 'heroes' trying to put a stop to the Creeper before he kills again. I didn't wanna see that shit. I wanted to see the Creeper kill some stupid teenagers doing stupid things.

That's, theoretically, what everyone wanted to see from this sequel. Nope. That's not the movie you got. I don't wanna call this an action film, because calling this an action film would be like calling Titanic a surrealist thriller, it's just not.

But it's close enough to it that the horror elements are completely negated. The Creeper does kidnap some people and kills them, but most of them leave it the gorier details. Like, for example, he'd throw something like a javelin and kill two teens at the same time, javelin going through them both, but you'd just see the aftermath.

The only thing that could have made this movie better, the gore, was left almost all to the imagination. And the gore that is there is so, so, SO tame that you wonder why they even bothered. The special effects are horrendous.

They're kept to a minimum, but they're still really fucking bad. And I understand that the film, really, had a very low-budget, but work to your strengths. Don't use the money that you DO have to pay for special effects that are downright laughable.

The acting. Boy, where do I even start? Let's just say that it's really fucking bad, everyone here is hamming it up to the tenth degree. I will say that this movie is obviously not meant to be taken super seriously.

And I will be honest when I say that the movie did make me laugh. It wasn't because there was any sort of comedy, but its badness did bring me a few chuckles. I think that's why the movie gets one star.

I'll take the positives where I can take them with this shitshow. But the fact that the film was designed to not be taking seriously is still no excuse to produce such a terrible movie. How about you make somewhat of an effort to produce a quality horror movie instead of just doing what's easiest.

In theory, you could say that they made an effort with the timeline they chose, that just counts on the surface. The content of the movie itself is what matters. And that content, in my opinion, was largely terrible.

Shitty acting, nonexistent horror, awful storytelling does not a good movie make. If you're a hardcore fan, maybe you can get something out of this, but I just didn't like this at all. The few laughs that it did provide are not worth wading through mostly shit for.