Jeepers Creepers (2001, R)

This one goes out to 75boof, who doesn't have a name and who doesn't like creepers (get it?).
Not currently available to stream on Netflix.

Jeepers Creepers is a horror movie that takes place largely on the road in rural America, where rescue is hard to come by, which is generally a good setup for a horror movie.  It starts off with a brother and sister on a long drive from their respective colleges to see their parents when on break from school.  The brother is played by Justin Long, who you might remember from the "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" commercials (he's the Mac) or from Dodgeball.  The sister is played by Gina Philips, whose face looked really familiar to me, but I looked it up later and I don't think I've seen anything else she was in.  Maybe she just has one of those faces, I don't know (she is pretty though).  She's the more mature of the pair and her brother is a jackass, so I identified more with her.  When a big scary truck runs up behind them and terrorizes them, I assumed this would be a car-horror movie like The Duel or The Car, but I was pleased to see it branch out into other types of horror soon afterward.

Before I get to the next part, I must say my biggest gripe with the film was the scene where the truck terrorized the kids.  A big rusty truck with opaque windows and that moves impossibly fast for its size comes up right behind these kids on an otherwise empty road and blares his horn repeatedly while kind of swerving left and right.  At first I thought the guy just wanted to rattle them rather than actually pass (which would not normally be difficult), until I saw that the moron brother was swerving all over the road in his fear.  Now I understand that fear will affect one's ability to react rationally, but I'm pretty sure a good course of action in this case would be to 1) swerve your car to one side or the other such that the psycho behind you is no longer right behind you and 2) slam the brakes such that a heavy vehicle stands no chance of doing anything other than flying past your tiny sedan with it's short stopping distance.  Instant recipe for not-getting-run-over (works best on empty roads).  With the brother's idiocy and the siblings personal differences established, they do actually pull together when faced with the trouble ahead.

The Creeper (as the scarecrow guy is listed in the credits) spends plenty of time outside his truck and I was then under the impression the main method of the horror in this movie would be a standard slasher plot with a blade-wielding crazy man.  I was even further pleased when the Creeper was revealed to be a supernatural killing machine more like a cross between It (1990) and Jason Voorhees (Friday 13th films 2+).  Also, there's a high-strung psychic lady, played by Patricia Belcher, along the lines of Miss Cleo.

Overall, I expected a run-of-the-mill teen horror flick, but was very pleasantly surprised that this film actually set up its own mythology of a supernatural being, which you don't see too often these days.  Some of the kids' actions were a much needed departure from the standard scream-and-run or swing-something-long-at-it.  If you like horror movies, I strongly recommend this one.  If you don't like horror, then you're just not going to dig this one, so I don't even need to tell you not to watch it.