31 Days of Horror: Jeepers Creepers (2001)

jeepers creepers poster

I’ve talked many times on these pages about how much I like Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) and to a lesser extent the many sequels that followed. Oddly enough I didn’t actually watch a lot of the many (many) films that followed in its wake and were influenced by its winking, meta-narrative.

There are a variety of reasons why that is true. I was becoming a true cinephile around then which meant I was more interested in the Coen Brothers, Steven Soderberg, Akira Kurosawa, Francois Truffaut and the like – directors who made “real” cinema rather than horror which wasn’t great art. I had started dating the woman who would become my wife and she doesn’t like horror movies.

But mainly my horror interests were changing. I was starting to discover J-Horror and Giallo. There was this wonderful world of world horror that I had previously not known existed. Suddenly my desire to watch silly little American horror starring hip, young TV stars disappeared.

Over the last few years, I’ve enjoyed going back and watching a lot of those films from that period that I missed the first time around.

Mostly. Some of those films weren’t very good and I was smart to have skipped them.

Jeepers Creepers begins with a car ride across a lonely stretch of Florida. Siblings Trish (Gina Phillips) and Darry (Justin Long) are coming home for Spring Break. They talk and argue, and they play the type of silly games you play on long road trips.

Suddenly a large, old truck begins tailgating them. It weaves back and forth and honks its horns, scaring the two half to death. Finally, it passes them and all is calm. Sometime later they spy that same truck parked next to an abandoned old church. A man gets out of it carrying something wrapped up in a sheet tied shut with ropes. Our heroes have seen the same scary movies we’ve all seen so they naturally assume it is a body. The dude then throws the object down a drainage pipe. As he turns around he realizes those two have seen him do it.

He gets into his truck and rushes after them. Apparently, this old truck has a souped-up engine because he catches them quickly and rear-ends them multiple times. But when he finally runs them off the road he rushes on ahead instead of stopping to kill them.

Instead of acting like normal, intelligent people who would zoom as fast and as far away as possible and perhaps call the police when they get to a safe space, these two decide to go back to the church and have a look around.

Maybe one of those people tied up and wrapped in bloody sheets is still alive Darry muses. Maybe they – these two people without any medical experience – can give them emergency care before calling in any real help.

The pipe goes deep underground leading to what was the old church basement. Darry tries to take a look and instead slips falling to the bottom where he discovers…well I won’t spoil that but it is pretty gruesome.

I will spoil that the guy in the truck isn’t a guy at all but a monster. A poorly designed monster who is on the hunt. And now he’s got the scene of Darry and Trish.

Though there are periodic meta-references to other horror movies these two characters make all the dumb maneuvers people in dumb horror movies make.

After the first attack, seeing the horrors in that basement, and then watching the policeman they finally tell about all of this get ripped to shreds, they do not get the heck out of Dodge as fast as they possibly can, but rather stop at some random house in the middle of nowhere. Trish declares they need to call someone. Exactly who she wants to call and what she will tell them is unclear. Even after Darry asks those exact, and very reasonable questions.

While watching this insane monster do insanely horrible things the two just sit and stare at him. Again, they don’t run. This film is all reaction shots. Over and over again something horrible will happen and the characters will just sit there, mouths agape. The camera cuts between the action and their reactions. Back and forth. Back and forth until I’m screaming that someone needs to do something. Maybe that’s supposed to be shock or something. Maybe real people would act that way when exposed to something so traumatic. But in a horror movie, they need to run or start shooting.

The acting is passable, the script isn’t half as clever as it thinks it is, and again the monster design is bad. Yet, I think I kind of liked it.

It has this laid-back, breezy quality to it. The film never takes itself seriously, but it isn’t winking at us either. It isn’t a hipster film smirking at its audience. The in-film stakes are very high – life and death – but the film never really expects you to care all that much. It wants you to have a good time watching a movie and that’s exactly what I did.

31 Days of Horror: The Fog (1980)

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John Carpenter’s The Fog begins with a cheesy old campfire tale told by an old man that essentially gives us the backstory to the movie we’re about to see. Both the backstory and the actual story are pretty silly. The monsters are goofy, and the ending somewhat anti-climatic. Yet I love the film through and through.

Carpenter is the master of creating a mood and The Fog finds him at his moodiest. Since time immemorial (or at least the time in which films have existed) movies have used fog to create a spooky, eerie mood. Fog was made for cinema. It is both opaque and translucent. It obfuscates your vision and yet seem to reveal. It crawls in and moves with the wind. And it looks great when lit up.

One hundred years ago, on a dark foggy night the founders of Antonio Bay, a small coastal town in Northern California murdered a group of lepers for their gold. Now as the town celebrates its centennial anniversary the fog is back, as are the lepers and they are looking for revenge.

Our heroes are Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau) who owns and DJs the coolest looking lo-fi radio station inside a lighthouse, fisherman Nick Castle (Tom Atkins), and Elizabeth Solley (Jamie Lee Curtis) the hitchhiker Nick picked up one foggy night.

Stevie spends most of her time in the lighthouse talking to her listeners (and us) whilst playing light jazz records. She acts almost like a narrator, feeding her listeners (and us) information. Nick and Elizabeth run around trying to figure out what is happening.

The monsters apparently only appear between the hours of 12 midnight and 1 AM. They show up the first night mostly messing with electronic equipment and freaking everybody out, and then on the second night, the night of the actual anniversary they start killing people.

Whatever, the story takes second chair to the general creepiness Carpenter is creating. As usual, Carpenter wrote his own score and it is terrific. The film looks terrific and there is an enormous amount of creepy fog drifting into town across the bay, floating across streets and into rooms. The film lights it up giving it a hypnotic look.

It isn’t particularly scary and there are just a few scenes of genuine violence (although none of it is bloody) but the general vibe is excellent.

31 Days of Horror: Cursed (2005)

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Several years after creating the hugely successful Scream franchise writer Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven teamed up to make a werewolf film starring Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, and Judy Greer. If that sounds like a good time at the movies you should know that the studio, specifically the Weinsteins, had their perverted, gnarled hands all over it.

They demanded numerous reshoots, edited down Craven’s original R-Rating down to a PG-13, and exchanged Award Winning special effects artist Rick Baker’s physically-made Werewolf designs for lousy-looking CGI ones.

The end results aren’t terrible, but they aren’t great either.

Ricci and Eisenberg play siblings Ellie and Jimmy. On a drive home one evening something jumps in front of them causing their car to crash. Let’s not be coy here with the plot, that something was a werewolf and it bites them. Slowly they will start turning into the beast as well.

But not too much because we like these guys and we can’t have them turning so bad they wind up having a bunch of mutilated corpses on their hands. Jimmy will find himself lying naked in the garden at one point, and Ellie keeps getting little bodily changes from time to time.

In this story, they can keep from becoming full-on werewolves if they can find and kill the werewolf that bit them. A lot of time is spent with them trying to figure that out (and the audience guessing it might be one of the assortment of semi-famous actors who keep showing up.)

You can see hints of what could have been an interesting film tucked into the corners of what we actually get. Looking online and it seems a lot of folks absolutely hate this movie. I didn’t hate it, but it doesn’t do anything original or all that interesting. If Craven and Williamson’s names weren’t on it and if we didn’t know the Weinstein’s mucked with it I suspect the general consensus would be, well not great, but not hated. It is very, as the kids like to say, “Mid.”

Bring Out the Perverts: What Have They Done To Your Daughters? (1974)

what have they done to your daughters poster

Italian Cinema was dominated by two genres in the 1970s – the Poliziotteschi and the Giallo. The Poliziotteschi was a particular type of crime drama that is noted for its gritty, down-and-dirty take on police work featuring loads of violence and action sequences, highlighted by corruption at the highest levels. Gialli were murder mysteries featuring graphic violence, hyper-stylization, overt sexuality, and wild soundtracks.

What Have They Done To Your Daughters? is an interesting blending of both genres. Plotwise it is very Poliziotteschi as it follows the police as they try to catch a killer and are then pulled into a child prostitution ring with ties to the upper echelon of the city’s political sphere. Stylistically it is mostly gritty like a Poliziotteschi, and it features a couple of terrific chase sequences, but it also has a few stylish Giallo-esque moments.

There is also a black-gloved, motorcycle helmet-wearing, hatched-yielding psycho going around hacking people to death, and a few moments of sleaze where the camera lingers on naked female bodies (one of which is supposed to be a 15-year-old girl – the actress is of age – which makes it particularly gross).

I cover the basic details of the plot in my old review of the Arrow Video Blu-ray release (which you can read at Cinema Sentries) so I’ll skip them in this write-up.

I mostly really dug the film this go-around. I think I enjoyed the Poliziotteschi elements more than the Giallo. The story is good, the investigative elements are interesting, and the action sequences are top-notch. It is not unusual for this type of crime drama to dive into underage sex rings, but it still grosses me out, especially now that I have a young daughter. And this film gets a bit skeevy in that area.

I did dig the hatched-wielding killer, but like, why is he running around in a motorcycle helmet (other than the film keeping us from seeing his face I mean)? It is especially weird since the cops figure out who he is fairly early in the film (it is the guys who hired him that remain a mystery).

Overall, a very enjoyable cinematic experience.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Final Destination 2 (2003)

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In the first Final Destination, a group of teenagers board a plane for a fun trip to Paris. One of them falls asleep and has a premonition that the plane is gonna explode mid-air. He, a teacher, and a few other friends get the heck off the plane, and sure enough, it does explode. Then the survivors slowly get picked off in increasingly ridiculous Rube Goldberg-esque death traps because Death is mad they escaped his grasp the first time.

Final Destination 2 is basically the same film but with less melodrama and better deaths.

Exactly one year after the plane explosion in the first movie, Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) heads out for a Spring Break holiday with three of her friends. Just before she pulls onto the highway she has a premonition of a massive, deadly, pile-up on that highway (we see it too and it is the best scene in the movie). Freaked out she decides not to pull out. Moments later that accident does occur.

Knowing the story from the first movie, Kimberly is now afraid that those she saved are now being stalked by death. Knowing this is a movie, we now anxiously await those deaths.

Most of them are top-notch. The film does an amazing job of setting up a scene, showing us multiple possible ways a character could die then finding ways to surprise us. It is terrific fun.

It is less fun when it is giving us exposition. At least twice in the first twenty minutes, characters explain to us the setup of the movie (by explaining the plot of the first movie, which presumably the majority of folks watching the sequel have already seen.) Between kills the characters discuss what they need to do in order to survive.

Clear Rivers (Ali Larter, first billed but who doesn’t show up until a good 30 minutes into this 90-minute movie), the Final Girl of the first movie, has been living in a psych ward (padded cells seem safer than the real world) is brought out for helpful advice (and explain the rules of this movie).

There is less exposition in this one than in the first film, and it is cleaner and faster, but still kind of a drag. The death scenes work best when they seem to be freaks of nature rather than supernatural in nature. The early ones are the best, by the end Death (always invisible) starts moving things on his own which is a lot less fun than random crap killing the characters.

None of the characters are particularly well-developed, but honestly, who cares? You come to these films for the intricate death scenes and this one delivers on that front incredibly well.

Bring Out the Perverts: Torso (1973)

torso movie poster

I’m not sure how the Criterion Channel decided to organize their list of Giallos. It certainly isn’t chronological, and I can’t see any sort of thematic relevance. But we have definitely entered into the sleazy section of the list. By their very nature – black-gloved, knife-wielding maniac stalks and murders beautiful, young women – all Gialli are at least somewhat sleazy. But some definitely lean into that aspect of the genre.

Torso is not the sleaziest Giallo I’ve ever seen (that award goes to Strip Nude For Your Killer which is on the list and will be reviewed soon) but it certainly has plenty of gratuitous sex, nudity, and violence.

In the Italian city of Perugia, someone is strangling and then mutilating women from the local university. Terrified, four students take off for the weekend to an isolated villa that sits on top of a tall cliff overlooking a small village. Naturally, the killer follows them there and now they have nowhere to run.

But first, the two lesbians have to do a little sexing, and everybody must lounge around in skimpy lingerie. The violence ratchets up until our Final Girl is stuck inside the villa watching the killer literally make torsos out of his victims.

But Sergio Martino is too good a director to let this slip completely into sleaze. The mystery is well done (even if I did guess who the killer was early on). There are lots of red herrings and the kills are gruesome, but interesting and effective.

It is definitely not the first film I’d recommend to people looking to dive into the genre, but it is definitely not one I’d say you should avoid.

31 Days of Horror: The Invisible Woman (1940)

the invisible woman poster

The original The Invisible Man (1933) is a classic Universal Horror picture. It was followed by a sequel, The Invisible Man Returns in 1940. The sequel stays pretty close to the original in that it is a serious dramatic film with horror undertones. It is also very much a sequel in the sense that one of the characters is the brother of the original film’s Invisible Man and the plot follows it chronologically.

The Invisible Man Returns was a success and so Universal immediately put a third film into production, also releasing it in 1940. But it is a sequel in name only. None of the plot has anything to do with the first two films and the characters are unrelated. Gone, too is the serious tone of the first films and instead, this plays as a very broad comedy.

Professor Gibbs (John Barrymore) has created an invisibility potion but he needs a human test subject to make sure it works. Naturally, he puts an ad in that paper (as one does) and Kitty Carroll (Virginia Bruce) answers the call. She’s less interested in scientific progress and more interested in being able to give her sexist, slave-driving boss a good kick in the pants without being fired. The experiment works, Kitty turns invisible and she gives her boss a literal kick in the pants whilst making him understand he needs to treat his employees better.

Meanwhile, a gang of criminal stooges (including one real-life Stooge – Shemp Howard) have learned about this invisibility experiment and decide to steal it for their boss who is stuck hiding out in Mexico. They steal the invisibility machine but don’t understand how to make it work. They try it on the biggest, meanest stooge and only manage to make him speak in a high-pitched voice.

Hilarity ensues whilst our heroes save the day. Because this is The Invisible Woman and one must remove your clothing in order to be fully invisible there are quite a few 1940s-era jokes about how unseemly the whole thing is. The film is full of jokes you could sit around with your grandfather laughing about. It is a light, forgettable, but more or less enjoyable film. But I did find myself hoping the next film would take itself more seriously.

31 Days of Horror: The Phantom of the Opera (1962)

phantom of the opera hammer horror poster

Hammer Studios became well known for their horror output. This is mostly due to the way they remade all the classic Universal Monster movies – Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, etc., though they did make a great deal of other films, some of which were not horror-related at all.

In 1962 they adapted another famous horror story, The Phantom of the Opera, with mixed results. The Gaston Leroux book has been adapted numerous times and, of course, was turned into a Broadway Musical. I loved the book, and have seen at least a couple of those cinematic adaptations (though I’ve never seen any version of the musical, much to my wife’s surprise.)

Directed by Hammer stalwart Terrence Fischer the action is moved from Paris to London. Quite a few other things have been changed as well, but my memory is too faulty to lock those down for you.

The basics are the same. A pretty opera singer named Christine (Heather Sears) gets a chance to sing the lead in a brand-new opera. Producer Harry Hunter (Edward de Souza) takes a liking to her. Meanwhile, the Phantom (Herbert Lom) keeps causing problems.

There is a different backstory for the Phantom and Harry takes a much more active role and is more of a hero here. The Phantom spends a great deal of time training Christine to be a better singer than she already is. The real villain in this story is Lord Ambrose D’Arcy (a wonderful Michael Gough) who stole the opera from the Phantom (which we see in a flashback). And most of the really horrible things the Phantom usually does is given to a henchman to do.

All of this is fine, if a bit staid and clunky. The story never has any real oomph to it, and the ending is a dud. Lom is good and the sets have that usual Hammer charm to them. There are definitely better adaptations of the story than this one, but if you are a Hammer aficionado then you’ll probably like this just fine.

31 Days of Horror: The Retaliators (2022)

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My goal for 31 Days of Horror is to write about a horror movie at least once a day. Honestly, my goal for the blog is to write something every day, but this is especially true during Horror Month.

But sometimes (or maybe even often) life gets in the way. I have work, a family, and another blog to run, and I just don’t always have the time or the energy to review something.

So it is tonight. Work was long and full of sawdust in the face. We decided to run to a nearby (relatively larger) town to look for a manga for my daughter and then we had supper. Now I’m home, in my pajamas, and too tired to come up with actual thoughts about a movie.

Luckily, I still have loads of reviews I’ve written for Cinema Sentries and not posted on this site. Some of those reviews are for horror movies. And here we are.

I barely remember watching The Retaliators. In my review, I can see I didn’t much like it. The film follows a man of the cloth and his crisis of faith. Also zombies. You can read my full thoughts here.

Bring Out the Perverts: Who Saw Her Die? (1972)

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I’ve seen all but one of the Giallos on the Criterion Channel. That is to say almost all of the films that will make up this series. I own quite a few of them on Blu-ray and reviewed most of them for Cinema Sentries. I’ve enjoyed rewatching these films thus far and writing new reviews. It is fun to read the old reviews and think about how my opinions have changed.

The thing with Who Saw Her Die? is that my opinion has stayed pretty much the same. Reading over my review from 2019 I find myself nodding along, pretty much completely agreeing with my thoughts from back then.

So what do I have to say about it now? Not much, really.

Like a lot of Italian films from this period, the actors all spoke whatever language came naturally while they were on the stage and then their voices were dubbed in post-production. They created two soundtracks for the film – one in English, one in Italian. In the English dub star George Lazenby used his own voice. In the Italian version, some Italian actor spoke his lines.

The Arrow Video Blu-ray has both soundtracks. I previously watched the English track. Criterion only has the Italian one. Lazenby once played James Bond. It was weird watching him act but hearing someone else’s voice come out of his mouth.

That really affected my view of his performance. In my review, I praised his acting, this time around I was less impressed.

The plot is pretty standard-issue Giallo. The visuals aren’t all that stylish, and the kills are pretty tame. But it does look lovely. It uses the Venice setting wonderfully and has that warm feel that only an excellent film and a good cinematographer can provide.

I’m making it sound worse than it is. It’s really fine. The mystery is interesting, and it has a good collection of weird characters. There are perhaps a few too many of them, and the plot gets a little too complicated, but it is still enjoyable to watch.

And that Ennio Morricone score is wild.