Main cast: Sydney Craven (Laine), Imran Adams (Chase), Pete Brooke (Stu), Ocean Navarro (Carrie), Matt Barkley (Jamie), Alexander Halsall (Michael), Jodie McMullen (Madame Carnage), Jarreau Benjamin (The Creeper), Georgia Goodman (Lady Manilla), Gabriel Freilich (Sam), Dee Wallace (Marie), and Gary Graham (Ronald)
Director: Timo Vuorensola
Jeepers Creepers: Reborn was hyped as a reboot of the Jeepers Creepers franchise, and why not? Everything is being rebooted these days, after all, plus there is that issue about the director and creator of the frachise being a… well, Reddit administrator. We all know that such behavior just won’t do unless one’s name is Roman Polanski, so no, we need a reboot of the whole thing STAT.
Then, when I go online to figure out why anyone would bother with even making this thing, I find that the studio that produced the first three films is suing the studio that produced this thing, allegedly because this film was made without the consent or even knowledge of the former, and that is a no no because the former owns the rights to this franchise.
In other words, this one is basically a glorified fan film. Boy, am I lucky or what to find all this out after I’ve watched this thing?
Oh, and I hope no one rushes to watch this thing because of Dee Wallace and Gary Graham: they die in the first scene as the “first kills played by famous people”, Scream-style, and I don’t even get to see the kill. Maybe these two have “no death scenes” stamped in bright red letters in their contract for whatever minimal amount they must have received for their cameo appearances.
The “real” story is about a couple, Chase and Laine, making their way to the Horror Hound Festival in Louisiana. Also in the area is the legend of the Creeper that emerges after every 23 years and is said to be responsible for many disappearances of folks during the three days he makes a reemergence.
Chase is a believer of these things, while Laine is the skeptic person that believes in science over woo-woo. Oh, and their conversations reveal that there had been three movies made about the Creeper—ooh, so meta—and Chase claims that the real Creeper is far more real and better than the crappy wannabe in those movies. Bold famous last words, indeed.
Oh, and Laine is pregnant. This is pertinent because they soon come up against a cult that wants the Creeper to eat her baby and somehow be reborn. Yes, there a cult here. Also, the Creeper is now a thing that just kills for fun.
Why do I get this feeling that the original script was intended for some standalone film, and some douchebag decided to just slap the Creeper’s name and face over the big bad and call this a Jeepers Creepers reboot? The end is result is like the Wrong Turn reboot: a film so different and so far removed from the soul and spirit of the movies it claims to be based off on, to the point that it probably would have avoided a lot of boos and jeers had it just called itself a different thing altogether.
However, it being different may be okay or even great had it improved on the original. Instead, this one makes the third turd look like a masterpiece.
The plot goes nowhere, as nowhere am I given any credible reason as to why these people would form a cult around the Creeper in the first place. There is no proper explanation given as well as to why Laine will experience visions of her and the Creeper aside from these visions being a cheap and lazy way to create “scares” at various intervals throughout the movie.
Basically, this movie is just a bunch of popular horror movie tropes vomited into a barf bag, and the bag is then violently shaken and then poured into a bowl and served as this movie.
There is no build-up of tension throughout the movie, just this thing happening, then that thing, then another thing, and so forth without any indication that the movie has any direction or focus aside from having the dart they threw hit the paper with the word “cult” on the wall when they were trying to get ideas for this thing.
While I don’t normally consider a low budget an issue had the movie been done well, here, the lack of a budget only amplifies the problems of the movie. The CGI is horrible, especially those colored eye effects, while the poor Creeper looks like he’d been thrown into a pit of dung and hasn’t been allowed to clean up thereafter. Unsurprisingly, the kills come off as fake-looking as well as uninteresting.
More significantly, the lack of proper lighting transition means that every scene tends to be too bright or too dark, thus ruining any atmosphere that the movie is trying to produce, while the lack of a good soundtrack means that there is no good music to help create a good, scary atmosphere for the viewer to soak into.
In the meantime, the cast members put on a performance that range from flat to wooden.
All in all, this is a terrible, terrible thing that is only horrifying when it comes to how much of a failure it is when it comes to accomplishing anything. It’s not scary, entertaining, or even watchable, and in spite of all its many, many flaws, it’s nowhere bad enough to be fun. It’s just a boring kind of awfulness.
Let’s just say that this thing shouldn’t have been reborn in any way. Even in the flood of awful remakes and reboots, this one manages to be so bad that they should have probably switched out “reborn” in the title for “abortion”.
