Horror movies exist to scare their audiences.
The bigger the scares, the more fun the flick.
Victor Salva's Jeepers Creepers is a cover-your-face, duck-in-your-seat, scream-out-loud slasher that, for the first hour, pushes so many of the right buttons.
It's creepy and suspenseful enough to make one's heart pound and skin crawl.
Trish (Gina Philips) and her younger brother Darry (Justin Long) are driving home during their spring break.
They take a meandering, back road because Trish has just split with her boyfriend and loathes the prospect of breaking the news to her mother and friends.
This is the very road where, according to an urban legend, a pair of teenagers disappeared on their prom night. The couple's heads were never found.
If you're a fan of scary movies, the premise is mighty familiar and so is most of what happens next.
Trish and Darry are chased by a phantom truck.
Instead of contacting the police, the siblings turn around and go back to explore on their own.
Big time wrong move, but if they hadn't, there would be no movie. In horror films, it's only when people do dumb things that unbelievably nasty things begin to happen.
Nasty and gory only begins to describe what Trish and Darry discover and what they bring upon themselves and everyone they try to contact.
Unfortunately, too often with horror movies, it's not just the characters who do dumb things. So do their creators, which is the case with writer-director Salva.
When it is inspired by Steven Spielberg's Duel or Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it's genuinely terrifying.
Then Salva shows his real hand. He's looking for a slasher franchise in the vein of Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, I Know What You Did Last Summer... .
Francis Ford Coppola is an executive producer, which explains why the demon looks suspiciously like Gary Oldman in Coppola's Dracula.
Philips and Long have mastered the ability to look genuinely terrified. Their cringing disbelief is far more terrifying than what the camera eventually reveals.
(This film is rated R)
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