Jeepers Creepers was one of the most successful horror films of recent years. It was never a film that particularly impressed me because I felt that it was two films stitched together (rather clumsily) in the middle. It was inevitable that a sequel would be made though. The first movie took so much money, that a follow-up was really just a license to print money.

Days later, a coach load of championship basketball players is travelling through the region on the way back from a tournament. When their bus suddenly gets a puncture, they pull over to the roadside, where they find a strange, sharp implement embedded in the rubber. Unable to make contact with the emergency services, they slowly carry on with their journey, relying on the vehicle’s remaining good wheels. On board the bus, a young cheerleader called Minxie dozes off and finds herself in the middle of a bizarre dream. A young man is stood by the side of the road, desperately urging her to turn back, but as he disappears into the distance, she sees a cloaked figure running through the corn fields towards her. As the figure approaches, she realises that it is brandishing one of the sharp projectiles, but she is awoken from her dream by a loud bang, as another tyre on the bus explodes. This time, the bus is completely disabled and the bus driver starts to suspect that something is going on when she finds another one of the implements embedded in the rubber. Little does the group know that The Reaper has found its new prey. It only gets the chance to eat every 23 years and that time is nearly up. You need to eat a lot of food to last two decades…..

What this means, of course, is that the teenagers in the film have to be put in a vulnerable position as quickly and as perilously as possible. The adults are quickly removed from the picture, radio communications disabled and any means of escape of defence limited to the rather wobbly old bus in which they have been travelling. And it’s either on or around the bus that most of the action takes place.

Things are complicated further by the local farmer and his son who, following the abduction of the youngest son, set about building an appropriate weapon and monitoring the police airwaves to try and get a chance to kill whatever it was that took Billy. It’s actually quite a useful touch. The farmer inevitably turns into the cavalry, but in order to blur the boundaries of good and evil a bit more, it becomes clear very quickly that he is driven solely by revenge and that he has no real interest in the teenagers’ fate. There is quite a lot of build-up to his arrival, but it all turns into a bit of an anti-climax when he turns out not to be as well-prepared as we first thought.

You get to see a lot more of The Reaper this time round and you also get to see a lot more of him in action. I don’t remember such close-up shots of the Reaper’s face in the first movie and it has to be said that when he is cavorting around the outside of the bus, he loses a lot of his menace purely by behaving almost comically. Once he starts flying around he really comes into his own and I liked the introduction of his new semi-organic weaponry that was used to disable his prey. The special effects used to bring the Reaper to life are never outstanding but there is nothing shoddy or amateurish. Nonetheless, it is only when he is made to look like a shadowy, sinister human being that he is truly frightening. The dream scenes showing him running through the crop fields are by far the most memorable.

Jeepers Creepers 2 is never a film to be taken truly seriously. It isn’t a comedy as such, but it does seem rather tongue-in-cheek at times and if anyone tells me they were frightened then I simply won’t believe them. In terms of peril and adventure, it’s a good action romp and the running time fairly seems to hurtle past as the Reaper starts to tuck in. The 15-certificate is an indication that the levels of horror aren’t particularly extreme. There is a bit of blood and guts but nothing that would particularly disturb. The soundtrack is very effective too. It’s nothing revolutionary, but the orchestral arrangement is always well timed and perfectly paced. If you really liked the first movie, then I think you will be very disappointed with this one, because it has none of the feel of JC1. However, I actually preferred this one overall, because it stuck to one formula and made the best of it.