April 2nd, 2012 
Dane Sager 
What The Film?! is a weekly column exclusive to Under The Gun Review that brings to light the plot holes Hollywood hoped you’d never notice. Written by comedy writer Dane Sager, this column shows no mercy to films that try and pull the proverbial wool over our eyes.
If you know a film with major plot holes that you feel needs to be exposed, tell us! Email utgjames@gmail.com with the subject “What The Film” and we’ll try to get your suggestion featured on the site.
This Week’s Movie: 2001’s Jeepers Creepers
Jeepers Creepers is a “horror” movie written and directed by the extremely troubled and ironically conservative film maker Victor Salva (of 1995’s Powder fame). Now, I could write an entire piece on how Victor Salva is a disgusting, awful, human being who should have been blacklisted from Hollywood, left to scrounge for food on the streets or in jail where he belongs, but I’m above that. Who am I to judge one’s mistakes? I understand that people slip up occasionally and I’m not going to respect that. Hell, I won’t even mention what he did.
This is his mugshot from when he was arrested for molesting a 12 year old boy.
The thing is, I’m not here to inform people of the horrible horrible things that he video taped himself doing that he only received just a little over a year of jail time for. No, that’s TMZ styled news, UTG is above that and I’m only here to critique this movie on its own in no other context. His misdeeds will not be mentioned again.
Kevin Costner lost his career after Waterworld but this guy still makes movies
Jeepers Creepers takes place in early spring, beginning with Trish and her brother the Mac-Guy driving home from college where they encounter a weird steampunk-rusty-truck tries to pass their car in the most ridiculous and inefficient way possible. The lighting in this scene is inconsistent, as every few minutes it changes from afternoon to dusk to afternoon again. The siblings stumble unto the steampunk truck guy dumping bodies into a large pipe. He immediately storms after them, ramming their car off the road, leaving them stranded in the same backwoods Florida countryside that birthed Fred Durst.
Mac-Guy decides to head back to the pipe to investigate the bodies, because one may be still be alive and in need of help and also he really wants to be dead apparently. He ventures down the pipe and the bodies are no where near where the pipe ends. This wasn’t a scary “the bodies are gone now!” moment, this was a continuity error, because the bodies are found a distance away from the pipes. He finds out that the pipe leads to the basement of a nearby church. Mac-Guy investigates the nearby body and discovers it’s abdomen has been cut open and sewed back together. As he further progresses through the basement, he finds several bodies decorating the place. It’s almost as if the owner of the church did an episode of Trading Spaces with Ed Gein.
Being associated with this movie actually makes Ed Gein look worse.
Not a bad set up for a horror movie, it just has a lot of cliches and cheap directing problems. Justin Long is shown to be able to shift gears in a manual car with both hands on the wheel, Trish’s eye color changes randomly through out the movie, and there are several close ups of crows cawing that are completely motionless while a cawing sound is played over it. I knew crows were almost hyper intelligent, but I had no idea they were such great ventriloquists as well.
It’s eventually revealed that the bodies were dropped by a demon named “The Creeper” which walks the face of the earth once every 23 years for 23 days to feast on human organs. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is. It’s as if Victor Salva watched The X-Files episode “Squeeze” (where a serial killer awakens every 30 years to kill people and eat their livers) and thought “Know what? I can make this a whole of a lot worse”.
I’m not the only one seeing problems with this movie. UTG Founder James Shotwell actually suggested the movie to me, saying “In one scene, The Creeper is on top of a cop car that is following our protagonists on an empty country road. During the sequence, The Creeper reaches through the roof of the patrol car and decapitates the driver. After doing so, he throws the head and it somehow lands on the hood of the car our protagonists are driving.
I am not a mathematician, but the force and aim required to throw a severed human head from atop a moving (swerving) vehicle moving at a rate of 60mph onto another car located at least 1/4 mile ahead that is also traveling a minimum of 60mph would essentially make The Creeper the hulk”
The Creeper used to play basketball back in college. So that guy knows how to throw.
The siblings end up getting to a police station where they believe they’re safe, but the place is immediately attacked by The Creeper. After The Creeper is found breaking the bars to a holding cell to eat the organs of someone within it, the police decide that the safest place to put the two college students is in a holding cell (which doesn’t happen due to the chaos caused by The Creeper). The Creeper then takes Mac-Guy and runs off with him, ending the movie there. It’s as if Victor Salva wrote a movie and just kind of ended it when he felt like it, ignoring pacing, structure, or really anything resembling entertainment.
Why is this man still allowed to make movies? The scariest part about this movie is that Victor Salva will write and direct Jeepers Creepers 3, which will come out next year.
Jeepers Creepers, where'd you get those peepers?/Jeepers Creepers, where'd you get those eyes?
Dane’s mommy always said there were no monsters – no real ones – but there are. You can follow him on Tumblr and Twitter!
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What I don’t get is why The Creeper doesn’t take Gina Philips at the end… come on dude, look at her.
Quit fucking hating on him dumbfuck I don’t wanna hear your shit about how much you hate him he makes good movies and I can’t wait for the third jeepers creepers
yeah who cares if this dude molests people? *sarcasm* although 90% of hollywood is made up of child molesters :
Well…I do enjoy the film, despite a couple of flaws. The monstrous “head toss”…that just falls under the “How powerful IS this guy?” category. The ending…what’s the big deal, the Creeper got the eyes he needed/wanted…why would he hang around? For a costume party? As for the crow…meh, who cares? This seems more like you wanted to spotlight his terrible act more than really pointing out serious flaws in the movie. If you REALLY wanted to delve into the film, you might have been more astute had you pointed out that not only does the Creeper appear to have a driver’s license, he also has personalized license plates. Way to go, DMV. As for the film itself, all agendas aside, the monster looks awesome.