Director – Timo Vuorensola, Screenplay – Sean-Michael Argo & Jake Seal, Producers – Michael Ohoven & Jake Seal, Photography – Simon Rowling, Music – Ian Livingstone, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jason Rayment, Visual Effects – Black VFX, Special Effects Supervisor – Keith Harding, Creature Designed by Lea James, Production Design – Sivo Gluck. Production Company – Orwo Studios/Infinity Films/Ink Pine Media Limited/Great Point Media.
Cast
Sydney Craven (Laine), Imran Adams (Chase), Jarreau Benjamin (The Creeper), Peter Brooke (Stu), Ocean Navarro (Carrie), Dee Wallace (Marie), Gary Graham (Ronald), Matt Barkley (Jamie), Georgia Goodman (Lady Manilla), Gabriel Freilich (Sam), Alexander Halsall (Michael), Jodie McMullen (Madame Carnage), Jake Seal (Brent)
Plot
Boyfriend and girlfriend Chase and Laine travel to the Horror Hound horror convention in Louisiana. Chase is fascinated with the legend of The Creeper that originates from the area. Unknown to Laine, Chase is planning to propose, while unknown to him, she is pregnant. Her pregnancy is detected by Lady Manilla who runs a voodoo shop. At Horror Hound, Lady Manilla organises it so that Laine gets to win a special trip to an escape room house. As Laine, Chase and a livestream camera crew accompany them into the house, The Creeper emerges to stalk them so that it can snatch Laine.
This was the fourth film in the series that began with Jeepers Creepers (2001) from director/writer Victor Salva. The original was a modest film and it has gained a cult following over the years. There have even been a series of Jeepers Creepers novels and comic-books. Salva followed this up with the even better Jeepers Creepers II (2003) and the fairly negligible Jeepers Creepers 3 (2017).
With Jeepers Creepers Reborn, Infinity Films and producers Michael Ohoven and Jake Seal, who were behind the previous entry in the series, have wrested the copyright away and made their own film without Salva. In the moral climate of today’s Cancel Culture, Salva is fairly much an unemployable director. This is due to the fact that he received a conviction for child molestation in 1988 for having sex with twelve year-old Nathan Forrest Winters, an actor in his film Clownhouse (1988). This new film has made every effort to distance itself from Salva, which is understandable. The production team made a big thing in publicity about how Salva would not financially benefit in any way from the film. There were rumours circulating about how Salva sought to sabotage the production, forcing the production team to relocate to England for shooting.
The Salva problem aside, what much of this new film also amounts to in any other words is the theft of a intellectual property from its creator. It is not dissimilar to Disney and Marvel Studios and their use of comic-book properties without paying a dime to the original creators. I don’t wish in any way to defend Salva for what he did but he is also a legitimately aggrieved party here. The film has been constructed as a large Fuck You to him – it even includes a dedication to his victim Nathan Forrest Winters on the end credits. (Do any of the production personnel really have such a personal connection to Winters that they are acknowledging his help or is this just done to piss Salva off in which case it feels as though Winters is being used as a pawn by the filmmakers?) Was there not some point during this that it occurred to the filmmakers that it was maybe a bad idea to make the film?
The Creeper (Jarreau Benjamin)
The new director is the Finnish Timo Vuorensola, a not interesting name. Vuorensola emerged in the late 1990s with a series of Star Trek parody fan films, culminating in the feature-length Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning (2005) that came with a series of homemade effects that rivalled those of any Hollywood studio. Vuorensola followed this with his Nazis on the Moon film Iron Sky (2012) and its sequel Iron Sky: The Coming Race (2019), both taking full advantage of effects studios that Vuorensola has assembled from scratch.
It should be noted that Jeepers Creepers Reborn is Timo Vuorensola’s first film as a director-for-hire. That is to say, it is his first one made without the vast army of self-organised visual effects teams that he has marshalled for his other films. Outside of their visual effects, Vuorensola’s other films seemed to fall into being overly broad comedy so it was curious to see how Jeepers Creepers: Reborn ended up.
In films where you read about troubled productions histories, you kind of hope that there is a film at the end of it all to make such a struggle worthwhile. In the case of Jeepers Creepers Reborn, I can say quite easily there is not. It is a dull and routine film. It lacks any of the uncanny atmosphere of the other films and is easily the worst entry coming out under the Jeepers Creepers name.
Young couple Sydney Craven and Imran Adams
All of the other three films centre around The Creeper in its van stalking people on the road. This does a mildly meta thing and refers to the legend of the Creeper and then that there have been three films made about it – this is largely because the production does not have copyright on the designs used in the other films. On the other hand, the setting of an open-air horror convention-come-carnival alongside people dressed in costume as various versions of Pennywise and Beetlejuice waters the effect of The Creeper down – now it seems just another pop culture boogeyman.
We get a standard young couple as leads – Imran Adams plays with quite a degree of energy and animation but this fails to be matched by Sydney Craven who gives all indication she would rather be somewhere else. The latter half of the film confines all of the action to a standard big old house where The Creeper is reduced to no more than another hulking Boogeyman like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, pursuing a series of victims through the house and despatching them. It seems a sad comedown in contrast to the eerie otherworldliness of The Creeper’s appearance in the other films. The one nifty effects sequence is where The Creeper has its hand damaged, tosses it away and replaces it with one taken from a corpse.
Timo Vuorensola subsequently stayed in Hollywood to make the airplane thriller 97 Minutes (2023).
