Review #107: Jeepers Creepers III (2017)

This review was originally written in October 2020.

October Movie Review #24- Jeepers Creepers 3

I've spent the three hours since finishing this film trying to figure out where to even begin talking about it. Strap in, folks.

This movie is... bad. It's very bad. It's so bad it retroactively makes the previous two movies worse, and I think I can say definitively that the world as a whole would have been better if this movie was not made at all. Now, is it the worst movie in the world? No. Is it the worst movie I've watched this month? No, that would absolutely be Hellraiser: Revelations. But this movie definitely marks the biggest gulf in quality between two successive entries in a series so far, and I find it remarkable that after fifteen years they mustered up the money and effort to make a follow-up to Jeepers Creepers 2 and they came up... with THIS.

First I'll talk about the timeline. Rather than screw up the awesome ending from part 2 by either ignoring the final scene or somehow having the creeper escape being chained up in front of a giant death cannon, the filmmakers made the (in my opinion) MIND-BOGGLINGLY STUPID decision to set this one between the two previous films- starting the night the creeper stole Darry from the police station, and ending with the bus heading to the state championships. I'm on the record as kind of hating all prequels in general (a good story doesn't need a prequel) and like all prequels, this one starts off by hamstringing itself because we know they're not going to kill the monster. We know it because the previous film showed us they wouldn't. So it's just kind of a lesson in guessing which characters are going to die before the monster inevitably loses interest I guess?

But it's not just the utter lack of stakes, it's the way this one makes the timeline of these movies worse. Remember that part in the first film where Darry and Trish run into the gas station screaming about a monster, and everyone inside said, "Yeah, we know about that thing, it comes to life every 23 years and there's a posse of people in the next county over that have been training to kill it, heck, it's so well known even our kids know what its license plate says"? Yeah, I must have missed that scene too. Or in Jeepers Creepers 2 when one of the athletes on the bus said, "Whoa, that's the monster that attacked me last week, I know exactly what it is and what it can do," I must not have been paying attention. But I definitely remember in the first movie when Darry and Trish were talking about the urban legend of two teens getting killed on that stretch of highway, of course I had the thought, "I hope we find out that one of those teens had a psychic connection with the monster because he found its severed hand and buried it in his yard, this is such a rich vein of lore we can derive from this cautionary tale that was otherwise a complete and concise story."

I just cannot see how this story was made better by having everyone and their son know who this monster is and how it functions, when that would have utterly changed the first two movies. There were like twelve people on the bus in Jeepers Creepers 2; how did they think they could just say "Oh yeah, one of the new protagonists was on that bus, you just didn't notice him there"? He clearly was not there. And if he was, HE WOULD HAVE SAID SOMETHING WHEN THE MONSTER SHOWED UP. I have to imagine someone in the writer's room giggling and tapping their feet on the floor in triumph and saying, "Oh, people will LOVE this connection with the other film" and that person was so utterly, utterly wrong.

Oh, and one more thing about the timeline: I was maybe 2/3 of the way through this film before I could even say for sure WHEN this was taking place. I knew that the first scene was immediately after the first film, but the creeper's truck had a completely different paint job this time around (it looked like it was painted blue- I thought maybe it had been repurposed in the 23 year period after the previous films) and so many characters were referring to it attacking 23 years ago, so for quite a while I thought I had missed a title card indicating that they had jumped forward in time. It was not at all helpful that every single car in this film is from the 1950s, and aside from cell phones, nothing modern happens or appears in this movie, so I was VERY confused. No, it turns out they just shoehorned in a lot of very bad ret-con in order to serve this movie's plot.

Next, let me talk about the monster. Oh, the monster. "Look at how they massacred my boy," Don Corleone would say. Can someone tell me: Was there a particular reason why 70 minutes of this 90-minute film had to take place in broad daylight? Because the midday sun isn't doing this monster any favors. It's a common adage to encourage filmmakers not to show full-body shots of a monster until the very end, because it has a tendency to ruin the magic (as the monster rarely looks as scary as they want it to, so letting the audience's mind fill in the gaps is a very powerful tool). The first two movies had plenty of full-body shots of the monster, but they were always either in the dark (like most of the first movie) or it was a quick action shot and was over in two seconds (like the intro of the second movie).

In this film, there are NUMEROUS shots of the monster, just like... standing around, in a jacket and red shirt. In daylight. Not even doing anything menacing, just like, standing outside someone's window so it can roar at them in a little bit. It takes what should be a horrifying monster, and makes it look so normal, so unassuming, so unimposing, that you just can't be scared of it. I get it, this thing is super strong and will probably kill someone in a moment, but it's hard to remember that when all I'm seeing is a dark-skinned dude in a red shirt standing out in the sun. And unlike the other two films, it never loses its human clothes- it never reverts to just a horrifying monster form- until its last shot in this film, the creeper is wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Who thought this was a good idea? Was this a budget issue or something, like they couldn't afford any makeup beyond the face prosthetic?

Also, the monster can just kind of do whatever in this movie. In the previous ones, the exact extent of its power was never really laid bare, but it still felt pretty grounded. It could fly super-fast, it was super-strong, it could regenerate by eating things- the moment in JC2 when it tore a giant chunk out of its own head was spine-chilling and super well-done. There wasn't even a need to question the fact that it seemed to generate bone shuriken and ceremonial knives- that just seemed right in line with what we had come to expect from this thing.

But in this one... it has a seemingly magical death truck (that it can control telepathically? Or maybe the truck itself is sentient?) with armor plating that sends any projectile right back at whoever launched it, regardless of what part of the truck is hit or what angle they were firing from. (Like, literally. It's a plot point that if you fire a gun at the tire, or the window, or the angled cow-catcher, the bullet is going to bounce back and hit you.) The truck also has AI-controlled time grenades that can travel faster than a speeding car. The creeper has an axe that it can move with its mind, and block bullets with. The creeper can kill birds and break windows by roaring. The creeper's limbs remain alive when not connected to it. Also, the limbs can fly (!) and if you touch one of its severed limbs you get a psychic vision of the creeper's origin?

That last one REALLY bothered me. So much importance is placed on the fact that "you need to know where it came from to know how to kill it", to the point where the climax (?) boils down to one of the protagonists telling the creeper they know what it is, and that means they can kill it (so the creeper gives up and goes somewhere else rather than keep pursuing them, I guess). However, it is VERY clear the writers have no freaking clue where this thing came from, because even after two separate characters have the psychic vision, neither one offers a single word whatsoever about what they saw. It feels like the writers wanted something they could tease to entice people to come see the inevitable Jeepers Creepers 4, at which point they will (maybe) have made up their mind about what this thing is.

This movie is a freaking mess. I don't care about any of the characters. I don't care about any of the lore they're trying so desperately to get me excited about. Nothing made any sense, it breaks its own logic, it breaks its own canon, and everything looks and sounds worse than the previous films. This movie adds nothing good to the series and actively detracts from it.

If you ever want a laugh, go to IMDB and look up the trivia for this film. Much of it is in the future tense (so it was written before the movie was released, based on things said in interviews and such) and others are just statements of things that happen in the film.

Anyway, this movie was bad. Very bad. If you liked either of the first two films, don't watch this one.

Overall Rating: 2/10 Inexplicable 8-Foot Spikes Emerging From A 3-Inch Truck Roof

Missed Opportunity: They should have called this movie "Jeepers Threepers"