FilmBlather.com

"You were waving pom-poms at people this morning, and all of a sudden you're a psychic hotline?"

The story so far: Victor Salva, up-and-coming Hollywood director, serves time after being convicted of molesting a young boy, the star of his 1988 horror movie Clownhouse. Upon release, he is hired by Disney to direct his script for Powder, the story of an albino boy with supernatural powers. Salva's victim of eight years ago leads a protest against the new film and winds up successfully burying it, much to the chagrin of Disney, which admirably stood behind it.

Six years and two small, failed films later, the dust has settled. No one remembers Salva anymore. He is given a budget to write and direct something for fledgling movie house MGM, a horror flick called Jeepers Creepers. It's terrific, really, a good suspense film that becomes a good monster movie, before bowing out with the most startling ending of that year. It is only a modest hit, but that's enough for MGM, which immediately greenlights a sequel. Unimaginatively titled Jeepers Creepers II, it arrives this Labor Day with scant marketing and (at this writing, almost a month prior) no advance buzz.

I wrote all this not out of a desire to encourage a boycott of the director, or to dwell on his sordid history, but because Jeepers Creepers II plays like a manifestation of Salva's unchecked id. The setup involves a sweaty high school basketball team stuck in a school bus. Most of the guys wander around shirtless for no discernible reason, at one point sunbathing on top of the bus. The Creeper, the grotesque and ingenious monster who preys on them (coming out every 23 years to feed for 23 days, the story goes), gets his pick of the litter, scrutinizing his selection and making tongue motions at the ones he wants to eat. It's not too hard to figure out what's going on here.

With all this going on, it becomes an almost irrelevant fact that this is actually a pretty effective thriller, relentless and suspenseful, if not as imbued with dread as the less gleeful -- and less exploitative -- predecessor. For all of his, ahem, idiosyncrasies, Salva is a filmmaker rather than a hack for hire, and his two latest movies are notable for actually establishing its characters before gruesomely killing them off. It is unfortunate that the repetitive action constitutes essentially one long climax, and that the characters are too numerous for us to identify with any of them, but Salva's monster movie chops are undeniable.

Despite his formulaic zombie implacability, the Creeper (Jonathan Breck in full Freddie-Kruger-Meets-Jurassic-Park regalia) is actually an excellent villain, well-designed and bizarrely expressive. His regenerative powers are worthy of a good X-Files episode (that's a compliment), and the special effects that create them are convincing without being too gory. After the manner in which the first film concluded, it would be na”ve to think that the heroes here will succeed in dispatching the hungry sucker, but I would still question the wisdom of a second sequel as the Creepers utter indestructibility was beginning to wear on me.

Is it unfair to say that the movie made me feel dirty? Is it homophobic? After all, I rarely complain when male directors make complete sex objects out of their attractive female stars. I think that had I been blissfully unaware of the director's history and known only that he was gay, I wouldn't have cared. But the fact that he is a convicted sexual offender just kept setting off alarms in my head, even if they weren't always rational (none of the stars here are remotely children). Salva is a talented filmmaker, and I certainly don't think that he should be denied employment based on his conviction, but somebody needs to supervise him. Whether or not it is a fair reaction to have, Jeepers Creepers II might make some people uncomfortable. Even if it is pretty good.