Jeepers Creepers II (R)
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This is a 2003 sequel to the 2001 movie Jeepers Creepers. I first saw it in 2016, three years after I first saw the original. By that time I couldn't remember how the movie ended, or much beyond the basic scenario, and my review of the original didn't help jog my memory. But anyway, apparently the first movie eventually revealed that the Creeper was a monster, which every 23 years awakes to feed on humans for 23 days. (And it absorbs body parts from its victims to repair its own body, as needed.) I don't remember whether the first movie gave an indication of when it was set, within those 23 days. But the sequel is set a few days later, starting on day 22.

It begins with a boy named Billy Taggart putting up a scarecrow in a corn field. There are a couple other scarecrows already up, and it's a pretty safe guess that one of them will turn out to be the Creeper. It ends up taking Billy and flying away. After that, Billy's father, Jack (Ray Wise) and older brother, Jack Jr., make a homemade harpoon launcher out of a machine for driving fence posts into the ground, and attach it to the back of their pickup. The next day, a school bus with a bunch of jocks and a few cheerleaders is on the way back from a game, when suddenly a tire blows out. (The bus driver is played by Diane Delano, familiar to me from Northern Exposure.) Subsequently, the driver and two coaches are picked off one by one by the Creeper, leaving the high school kids to fend for themselves. They try to radio for help, but no one receives their message. And the Creeper keeps attacking the bus. But eventually, the Taggarts receive their call, and go looking for the bus, to get payback against the Creeper for killing Billy. (And, you know, to save the students.) Aside from that, there's some racial tension between a couple of the jocks. And one of the cheerleaders has some psychic dreams about the Creeper. And there's a minor subplot that goes nowhere, about some of the guys thinking one of the guys might be gay.

And that's all I want to say about the plot. But while in some ways I found the movie inferior to the original, ultimately I think I found the sequel more entertaining. It's really hard to care about any of the characters (other than possibly Jack Sr.), but if I recall correctly, we get a lot more of the monster in this movie than in the original. Which means there's no mystery and no atmosphere to speak of, but it's kind of refreshing to have a straight-up monster movie, whereas the original sort of started as a thriller before turning into a monster movie, which I think made it feel kind of disjointed. Or something. So in a weird way, the sequel kind of made more sense. I guess.

Followed by Jeepers Creepers 3