Jeepers Creepers 3

I love the Jeeper Creeper Series but this was terrible. From drive the truck while standing on the hood, the rigged truck, the buried hand, and overall poor acting, except from the horse. I watched better acting on "In the Heat of the Night" in "Sparta Mississippi" and in my Charles Barkley voice, this movie was turrible.

Arriving 14 years after part 2, this latest installment in the supernatural monster movie series is a dreadful disappointment. Acting as a direct sequel to the first film from 2001, the story follows events from the following couple of days as the Creeper, a mysterious demonic killer of great power, continues his activities.

He awakens every 23 years for only 23 days, during which he causes mayhem and kills and consumes fearful human victims. A contingent of law enforcement officers try to finish him off, but he's determined to reclaim a lost relic that has been hidden away by a local farm family.

Writer-director Victor Salva had trouble securing financing for this film, and it shows, with bad FX work and missing shots. There's also a surplus of badly-done green-screen work. A lot of time is devoted to the Creeper's distinctive truck, which is revealed to be loaded with booby traps. Besides the poor production values, this entry lacks interesting characters or a sense of dread and mystery (found in the first film), or any cleverly executed monster attack moments (as in the second).

It did not live up remotely close to the others. Story was bad. Acting was bad. Plot was bad. Special effects were bad.

Let me save myself some typing and you some time. Everything was really bad.

Go ahead. Watch it if you want. But you'll be all like "man that was bad."

What were they doing in those 14 years between 2 and 3, staring at their shoelaces? I love the first two films because they are both scary and well made, but WOW, this film is GARBAGE. TRUST ME, this is coming from a HUGE JC fan! The film takes place between the 1st and 2nd movie, which is dumb because nobody wanted to see what happened between the 1st and 2nd movie. I wanted to see what happened after the 2nd movie, but even then, it's really confusing because the plot keeps jumping back and forth between all of these dumb characters. I couldn't tell if the film was set in the present day, in 2001, or in the 70's because of the craptastic pacing. There's even a scene where you can see a 2016 Chevy truck in a film that supposedly takes place in 2001. Speaking of pacing, there is none! Nothing happens in this movie and the film ends right when it should've started! There are so many characters that the film gets lost in itself. The first film had Darry and Trish, simple and easy. The 2nd film had the athletes and a side-plot revolving around an angry father, but it was still easy to follow and well balanced. Here, we have an old lady getting visions from her dead son, then we have Sargeant Tubbs from the first movie, then we have the anti-Creeper gang, then we have some teenagers, then we have a country boy who has a crush on a girl, and said girl also gets her own storyline. All the characters are pointless and are not flushed out because the film is trying so hard to give equal focus to everyone. The CGI is SO BAD and is EVERYWHERE in the film. It's so bad that my theater was laughing louder than the actual movie! The Creeper doesn't do ANYTHING, no smelling fear, eating body parts, he just sorta walks around and grunts. There's one good scene where a group of teenage bikers finds The Creepers truck in the woods, and it's the only good scene in the entire film. That's it! Worst of all, WE STILL DON'T KNOW THE CREEPERS'S ORIGINS!!! I've been waiting nearly 2 decades and we STILL DON'T KNOW WHERE HE COMES FROM??? The film ends on a cliffhanger but I do not want a 4th movie. This feels like it should've been made for the SyFy channel and seeing this on the big screen is like seeing Lake Placid 6 on the big screen. Just don't do it!

Normally with a movie like this that took so long getting and presumably had trouble securing financing, you'd expect the problem to be a restrictive budget. But actually "JC3" would have been better-and more like the earlier films-if it were smaller scaled and less costly. There's too much action here, too many characters, all unconvincing and sometimes silly.

But what's really inexplicable is that there's way too much of the Creeper, who is no longer a seldom-seen figure of mystery but one seen WAY too often, in broad daylight, moving around like a regular guy albeit in some kind of Comic Con costume. He's not scary this way. He's just some dude in a mask. Nor is the hitherto teasingly doled-out mythology at all heightened by overly graphic FX views of him in flight, or so much dwelling on the armored truck he's got that isn't just a "death wagon," it's made out of indestructible stuff and has all kinds of lethal gizmos more appropriate to a "Phantasm" movie.

Lingering on a few characters in peril, with few and frightening glimpses of the Creeper, was clearly something that worked well for the prior installments. All that gets thrown out the window here, only lessening atmosphere and suspense. Victor Salva remains a technically proficient filmmaker (at least compared to most direct-to-video-level horror directors), and there are scattered things to like, notably giving Meg Foster a major role. Having #3 bridge the narratives of #1 and #2 was at least an unexpected decision. The movie isn't good, but at least it isn't dull (something you can't say about some of those later "Phantasms"). Getting an interview with Creeper actor Jonathan Breck, who appears a pleasant guy, provides a nice (if sole) bonus feature.

Still, this is a disappointing film that goes from generally wrong-headed to just plain ridiculous at its ill-judged climax, at which point the Creeper becomes so feeble a menace he might as well be shown dancing to "The Monster Mash." It's almost as if Salva wanted to deliberately kill off his own franchise, no matter that (of course) he claims #4 is already written.