Jeepers Creepers

Being unemployed gives me more time than usual to make bad decisions. There are small lapses in judgment and there are large ones. A small one was earlier this week when Mrs. Filthy was putting on her nicest muu-muu and the pearl earrings I won for her for Christmas. They aren't real pearls, but they're really fucking nice fakes. Like, with the right light, you can't even tell they're phony unless you're standing near her.

"Where you going?"
She sighs, "I already told you."
"Well, I don't see why I can't come."

I'm broke and bored. As far as I can tell, there're two kinds of people in the world: people with the capacity to entertain themselves, and people without. I'm in the second group. The first group is a bunch of assholes.

I had already picked at my fingernails until I reached the pink flesh underneath, and we don't get a newspaper anymore since I got in that big argument with the paper boy about them still running "Curtis." There was nothing on TV and the library ladies still recognize me so I can't go there. I didn't want to spend another evening playing with the magnet in the microwave door.

She was headed to a party and I wasn't invited. Or maybe I was and my wife didn't tell me because I embarrass her. Well, excuse me, but if she's embarrassed because I always end up starting fights with the host and peeing in a planter, then maybe I don't want to go.

But of course I wanted to go, so I kept badgering her. Who will be there? Will their husbands? Why not me? How much does a bear weigh? Do you want me to drive? I'll be good, I promise. Do you love me?

Finally, Mrs. Filthy let out one of the longest sighs I've ever heard, and said "You can come." She didn't want me to, but I didn't give a fuck. I needed to be away from the dog, who keeps giving me the eye because she knows I ate some of her food last week when I was even more bored.

Let this be a lesson to me. The grass isn't always less boring on the other side. This wasn't a fucking "party," it was a book club. I was in hell, trapped with a bunch of overdressed women giggling at some stupid old book about strong women. As the ladies sat in the wicker furniture, the floor and on the macramé pillows in the overly warm living room, I tried to behave. I imagined what everyone's skull looked like, and looked to see if any of the girls had lopsided tits, and counted how many God damn cats were crawling around. But the ladies wouldn't shut up about Mr. Rochester and Gateshead and Lowood and some other shit. That's fine, I mean, I am not going to strip them of the pleasure of pretending they appreciate corny old novels. But why do I have to sit there and listen? I mean, they had a fucking guest, and they could have had the courtesy to talk about baseball or some book I'd read, like "Swedish Sex Hospital: Naughty Ward."

I would have sat quietly all night if Janine had some booze I could pickle myself silly on. Instead, the ladies were savoring Folger's "coffee house" instant coffee in fancy flavors like "Caffe Latte" and "Same Old Shit with More Sugar." After fifteen minutes, I figured I'd paid my dues and decided to explore the house. Really, I was looking for something sharp to jab into my eye. In an upstairs bathroom I found a bottle of children's cough syrup and this prescription in a dark brown bottle for "Mr. Kittle." Either my wife's friend was storing medicine for the old White Sox outfielder, or the stuff was for one of those awful cats.

I drank it. Then I drank the cough syrup. Then I fell in the tub. Janine's fat son woke me up when he came in to pee, thankfully, and he helped me crawl out in the hall where I threw up. That embarrassed my wife and she's still not talking to me. I also can't feel two of my fingers and there are motes in my eye that won't go away. What a fucking idiot I am. I shouldn't have drunk some cat's ear cleaner with cough syrup. I should have drunk the cough syrup and saved the medicine for later.

But that was a small mistake, something I'll recover from in a few months. The big mistake was seeing Jeepers Creepers. I don't know what to say. This movie is so fucking bad it's the cinematic equivalent of having someone ram their hand up your ass and start yanking on your lungs. It's a ballpeen hammer to the shin , a heavy screwdriver shoved into your ear, a glass rod shoved up your urethra and shattered, your kneecaps split in two in a vise, the small bones of your hand crushed under a car tire, your knuckles caught in wood chipper, your thumbs sliced to the bone by a deli-meat slicer, as painful as Whipped and more hurtful than Down to You. This is, without comparison, the worst movie of the year. It's a scare-free horror movie.

An annoying, bickering brother and sister are on their way home from college when they are run off the road by a huge, mysterious truck. Farther down the road, they watch the shadowy truck driver standing by the road, dumping bloody bodies down a pipe. The driver, unseen except as an undefined hulk, knows they saw him and stalks them down the road in his big truck. Of course, the bad guy is so fucking stupid he doesn't just kill them. And the kids are so fucking stupid they have to go back and look in the pipe. It leads to the basement of a church, where this beast has stored hundreds of dead bodies. He cuts them open and eats their organs, then glues them to the ceiling.

Now, all of that sounds pretty fucking standard. Tired old horror movie clichés told with a modicum of suspense and a remarkably static style. But, at about 40 minutes in, we get our first good look at the "monster," a guy in an overcoat and a cheap rubber mask. The theater I was in erupted in laughter and shouts of "stupid." Any fear there may have been disappeared because the thing looked so fucking stupid. I mean, this thing is funnier looking than the Harelip digging through the peanut shells on the Arvada Tavern floor looking for quarters.

To give you an idea how fucking lame the movie is, "Jeepers Creepers" is a bad novelty song from the 30s. It's not scary, it isn't meant to be. It's about as harmless and lame as a Dido song. It also has no tie to anything in this movie other than writer-director Victor Salva wanted to name it the same. So there are some painfully awkward attempts to make it spooky. When you hear the song, you know the monster is near, or something like that. But why? Why would some supernatural monster listen to that song? The story doesn't bother to explain that.

Usually, this kind of story is about the two kids trying to kill the beast that's haunting them, but Salva isn't clever enough to follow a blueprint. Instead, the story just wanders around the neighborhood like a drunk man trying to find his house. After a mid-point attempt to run it over, the kids don't do a fucking thing except for be scared and hide. A "psychic" pops out of nowhere to explain the dubious connection to the same-named song (there is no connection, no reason for the song other than to give the movie a title) and what the kids should expect. She also has the cumbersome role of explaining that this monster comes out every 23 years for 23 days to eat people. No, not the number 23!

Great horror movie monsters have a mythology, one that plays on our collective fears and give the monster some shred of pathos. Lousy ones (Jeepers Creepers) don't. Michael Meyer was loose from an asylum and seeking revenge. Freddy Krueger wanted to avenge his own death in the school's incinerator. But this monster has no reason to exist. Okay, it comes out every 23 years, but what the fuck is it? Why does it come out? Why has nobody in this rural area noticed hundreds of deaths occur in huge clumps every 23 years? Why does it operate on the bodies and keep them? None of these questions are answered, we're just asked to accept it.

The story just dicks around, piling up improbabilities, terrible decisions by characters and laughably bad secondary actors spouting horribly awkward dialog. It peters out long before a climax that never comes, and the second half is entirely worth walking out of. But what do you expect from a writer-director who thinks that a clever twist on the old car-won't-start gimmick is a car-won't go-into-gear schtick? It doesn't build tension, it doesn't become more scary, nothing additional is on the line.

The other cheap touches don't help. In one scene, the monster is apparently doing some very cool, terrible things. But we don't get to see them, we have to listen to a policeman report it over his radio while other officers stare at walls. In another, we are forced to listen to a bad remake of Siouxsie and the Banshees' bad remake of the original shitty song. Apparently the moviemakers couldn't afford the original bad remake.

The pacing helps nothing. Salva is one of those directors who thinks we're so fucking stupid everything has to be repeatedtwice. One character does something, another character has to narrate it, and a third later recounts it to someone else. Splice those with scenes where actors stare on in abject horror for minutes. Any normal person would be running, but these people need to drag things out, and show us how scared they are in hopes some of it will rub off on us.

It doesn't. this is shit, amateur, annoying, laughable shit. One Finger for Jeepers Creepers. Don't go see it, you won't recover.