Worth Mentioning - How Do You Like Those Peepers?

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

In which Cody is let down by franchise films.

The following reviews originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com

TERRIFIER 2 (2022) 

Writer/director Damien Leone has been telling stories that involve his maniacal creation Art the Clown ever since shooting a short film called The 9th Circle back in 2006. A short that ended up being one of the segments in his 2013 anthology film All Hallows’ Eve, which had Art or references to Art dispersed throughout its 83 minute running time. The character really captured the horror community’s heart and imagination when Leone made the 2016 feature Terrifier, a simple slasher that mostly took place in one location and featured Art making a mess of several people over the course of its 84 minutes. Now Art is back in Terrifier 2 – and the fact that Leone has already been telling Art stories for sixteen years may make it easier to understand why this first sequel feels like the sort of off-the-rails sequel you don’t usually reach until much later in a franchise.

Terrifier 2 sports a running time of 138 minutes, but don’t let that lead you to believe there’s a lot more going on in this movie than in the average slasher. The story Leone tells with this movie and the events we’re shown could have easily played out over 90 minutes, but instead it’s dragged out for 48 minutes longer than it needed to be. Scenes go on and on, and the running time is padded with trippy supernatural / hallucinatory sequences. For some reason, there’s an attempt to build up the clash between Art and the film’s final girl as some kind of epic battle that has been prophesied and involves a magical sword, but it’s not properly explained and doesn’t make any sense. Maybe Leone wants to save the explanations for a Terrifier 3 – but with 138 minutes to work with on this one, he had plenty of time to give the explanations here. Imagine if the Friday the 13th franchise had jumped directly from part 1 or 2 into the supernatural insanity of Jason Goes to Hell, and didn’t bother to tell us why things had suddenly gotten so weird. That’s kind of what it’s like to watch Terrifier 2. There are so many “latter sequel” type elements packed into this, it almost feels like Leone wanted to run the franchise into the ground already.

If there’s a saving grace to Terrifier 2, it’s the performances of the leads. David Howard Thornton, who took over the role of Art in the first Terrifier film, reprises the role here, and is brilliant as the silent killer who gets a lot of entertainment out of tearing people to pieces. Lauren LaVera is our heroine Sienna, who has put together a warrior angel Halloween costume that’s inspired by a comic book-style character her late artist father created for her. Sienna isn’t a particularly interesting character, nobody in the movie really is (and some of them are quite annoying), but LaVera comes off like a badass when she has a showdown with Art while wearing that costume and wielding her magical sword. Watching the movie, I had the feeling that we’re going to see a lot more of LaVera in the future, and she’s probably going to be kicking ass in the projects she shows up in. Now I see that her IMDb biography mentions, “aside from her acting career, Lauren has 19+ years experience in martial arts including Taekwon-Do, Jiu Jitsu, Kun Khmer, Wushu, and Muay Thai”. She has studied boxing and kickboxing, and has weapon and firearms training. Yeah, she’s definitely an action heroine in the making – and she has already entered the Marvel world, as she played a character with martial arts skills in an episode of the Netflix series Iron Fist.

Sleepaway Camp’s Felissa Rose, Cobra Kai’s Griffin Santopietro, professional wrestler Chris Jericho, and Halloween 5’s Tamara Glynn show up for very quick cameos – and the nod to Halloween 5 is the most fitting, because there are aspects of Terrifier 2 that reminded me of that film. Sienna has a couple friends who are so irritating and stupid, it made me think of how much a lot of viewers hate the teen characters in Halloween 5. Aside from Sienna, the new character fans will probably enjoy the most is Art’s sidekick The Little Pale Girl (Amelie McLain), who is a female child version of Art that he plays pattycake and dissects animal corpses with. She’s another thing in the movie that doesn’t make any sense, but she’s creepy to look at.

Of course, you can’t talk about a Terrifier movie without talking about the gore and brutality. Some of Terrifier 2’s interminable running time is dedicated to showing us gore-soaked slasher kills, and Leone made sure to make them look as disgusting as possible. A few of these kills are ridiculously drawn out, much like the movie itself.

I found All Hallows’ Eve to be entertaining, and really enjoyed Terrifier. I was glad to see that movie catch on with the public the way it did. But Terrifier 2 was a letdown for me. There are definitely some cool things about the movie – Thornton is awesome, LaVera has a bright future, I loved the synth score by Paul Wiley – but it was way too long and nonsensical. It’s not interesting enough to sustain the bloated running time, so getting through it felt like a slog. It’s the kind of sequel you would expect to have a number like 7, 8, or 9 attached to it… and yet it’s just a number 2.

JEEPERS CREEPERS: REBORN (2022)

While I have always thought that The Creeper was a great monster that had the potential to be a new genre icon, the Jeepers Creepers franchise is a difficult one to support and defend for a variety of reasons. The biggest problem, of course, is the fact that it was created by Victor Salva, who was convicted of molesting the young star of his 1989 film Clownhouse. Many viewers who saw the first Jeepers Creepers in 2001 weren’t aware of Salva’s crime – but now that there’s greater awareness of what he did, some understandably choose not to watch his movies at all. It does tarnish the movies to know who made them. And while the first Jeepers Creepers was a good creature feature, it turns out that the best sequence in the film – when the characters first encounter The Creeper on the road and see him dumping a body down a pipe – was lifted directly out of an old episode of Unsolved Mysteries. So it’s not the accomplishment it appeared to be anyway, and was followed by two sequels that ranged from being disappointing to downright bad. But still, The Creeper has potential. So it was good to hear that the franchise was being rebooted with a “reimagining” from director Timo Vuorensola. Now we have Jeepers Creepers: Reborn, which doesn’t have Salva’s name on it anywhere.

Unfortunately, it’s just another bad movie with The Creeper in it.

Scripted by Jake Seal and Sean-Michael Argo, Jeepers Creepers: Reborn starts out with a recreation of the original film’s opening sequence. The encounter with The Creeper on the road. The sight of him dumping a body down a pipe. The difference is, this time the characters that have crossed paths with The Creeper aren’t college-age siblings but instead an elderly couple, played by Dee Wallace and Gary Graham. Which brings the scenario even closer to the true events that were dramatized in that episode of Unsolved Mysteries. This recreation of a recreation isn’t nearly as effective as the sequence in the first Jeepers Creepers was – so thankfully it turns out to be a dramatization itself. It’s a clip from a show called Macabre Mysteries, a nice nod to that Unsolved Mysteries origin.

Jeepers Creepers: Reborn takes place in a world where The Creeper is a well-known legend. It’s said that this creature appears in a certain part of Louisiana every twenty-three years, where it proceeds to wreak havoc and kill people for a period of twenty-three days. Devouring human body parts to replace its own. For example: if The Creeper loses a hand, it can grow a new hand by eating the hand of a victim. After twenty-three days of mayhem, it goes dormant for another twenty-three years. The three Jeepers Creepers movies are just movies based on the legend, the events in them were all fake. Now we’re seeing a real Creeper incident… and it is incredibly underwhelming.

The lead characters are Creeper superfan Chase (Imran Adams) and his girlfriend Laine (Sydney Craven), who are introduced while on their way to a Horror Hound event. Horror Hound is a real convention that agreed to be associated with this movie, but the way it’s depicted on screen is far from how these shows really are. In Jeepers Creepers: Reborn, Horror Hound is an outdoor festival, complete with carnival games, haunted house attractions, firebreathers, and sword swallowers. There’s a special giveaway: the chance to enter a Creeper-themed escape room that has been set up in a supposedly haunted nearby mansion. But when Chase and Laine win this giveaway, it’s clearly rigged. They have come in contact with too many shady people for it not to be. It seems The Creeper is surrounded by a cult in this one, much like Michael Myers in Halloween 6. And apparently Laine has caught their attention because she’s pregnant. Like Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5, The Creeper needs some help from a “tree bearing fruit”.

Given that this movie is supposed to be a revival of the Jeepers Creepers franchise, it’s not a good thing that it brings to mind some of the least popular entries of other horror franchises. It also doesn’t work very well as a reintroduction of The Creeper himself. There is nothing impressive about our first looks at him – and once we see him in action, it’s even worse. Now played by Jarreau Benjamin under re-designed makeup, wearing clothes stolen from a scarecrow, The Creeper in this movie often comes off like cosplay, but not good cosplay like we see on some of the fans at the Horror Hound festival. Clunky cosplay that doesn’t come close to the level of what we saw in the other movies.

This second rate Creeper is dropped into a movie with medicore characters who bounce awkward, poorly written dialogue off each other… and it doesn’t get even interesting until more than halfway through its 88 minute running time. The set-up of The Creeper stalking and attacking people inside a crumbling mansion is kind of fun, but it doesn’t make up for how cringe-inducing the first half of the movie is. I thought The Creeper could be a horror icon, but apparently it’s too difficult to make a good Jeepers Creepers movie for that to happen. Given who he was created by, maybe that’s for the best.

Vuorensola insists that Salva doesn’t profit from Jeepers Creepers: Reborn in any way, especially since the elements he introduced in the first Jeepers Creepers have been reimagined and re-designed for this one. However, some are concerned that Salva did make money off of the money, that he must have been paid off for the rights at some point. I can’t say for sure either way, I don’t know the financial details. I will say that if you decide to skip Jeepers Creepers: Reborn to be certain you’re not supporting Salva in any way, you’re not missing much. Jeepers Creepers: Reborn is thoroughly skippable.