A great argument for legalized abortion.

Jeepers Creepers Reborn is a title that lends itself to some great review set ups like; Jeepers Creepers Reborn: Should Have Killed This One In The Crib. Or Jeepers Creepers Reborn: The franchise that should have stayed dead. Jeepers Creepers Reborn: Simon Rex’s gay porn had more dignity and directorial talent. Jeepers Creepers Reborn is the rebirth of the Jeepers Creepers series, and unfortunately for the creators this baby has severe fetal alcohol syndrome and came out begging to be euthanized. I doubt anyone attached to this project cared about its quality and I have my doubts they particularly care about the fact that it can’t even make a $5 million budget back and turn a profit. I’m guessing much of this film was funded thanks to tax rebates.

Jeepers Creepers Reborn released theatrically as a Fathom Event, a title that used to mean something other than that my Regal Unlimited card doesn’t get me free access. But within a week of its release, Regal Unlimited was begging me to come see this film by offering free tickets, something that never happens with Fathom events unless that Fathom event is unusually shitty and failed worse than…you know I was going to make an Uwe Boll joke but I’d rather not denigrate Uwe Boll by putting him in the same pot as this movie. Uwe Boll ran a successful restaurant and actually had some well made films like Postal and Rampage. Timo Vuorensola is no Uwe Boll.

I suppose the best thing you can say about this entry in the series is that they finally kicked Victor Salva out, the convicted child molester who directed the first three films in the series. Unfortunately the big wigs decided to bring on Timo Vuorensola instead, a hack fraud director who much like Friedberg and Seltzer has seen a dramatic degradation in the quality of his work since his one-hit wonder Iron Sky back in 2012. Personally I don’t think Vuorensola ever had any talent to begin with, he just happened to capture lightning in a bottle releasing a so-bad-it’s-good movie at the right time and with the right ensemble of charming actors. The film was also saved by the VFX artists, again nothing to do with Vuorensola’s talent as a director. I’d buy canned farts if Christopher Kirby was running the sales pitch.

Who would have thought Vuorensola’s career would have him playing second fiddle on the work of a convicted child molester.

Iron Sky: The Coming Race was a pathetic mess and one of the biggest failures in Finnish cinema, being the most expensive movie ever made at the time ($25 million USD) and also the biggest flop ($400,000). Vuorensola and Iron Sky Universe defrauded backers who supported the film’s creation on Indiegogo by not delivering on the goods people paid for. Blind Spot Pictures went bankrupt in 2019, Iron Sky Universe filed as bankrupt in 2020, and the producers were so utterly incompetent that they actually lost the copyright to the Iron Sky franchise because they didn’t understand Finnish work for hire laws. That Vuorensola. Stupid? Yeah. Incompetent? Definitely. An undeserved ego? Hell yeah. Iron Sky 3 has been sitting in limbo for years because nobody will fund or distribute it on account of the legal problems, oh and it’s obviously a really stupid investment.

Jeepers Creepers Reborn is the ugliest movie I have seen in a long time, and I’m not sure how anyone looked at the finished reel and said “yeah, this is good enough for public consumption.” Almost every shot in this film is ugly and poorly lit not to mention overly lit and framed. It’s very obvious to anyone watching that a lot of the movie was shot on a green screen set, a horribly balanced, very ugly, very incompetently shot green screen set. I have no idea if the car scenes had the actors in front of a green screen with the car being pulled along a track, but goddamn did it look like the car was being pulled along a track on a green screen set. The reason I say this is because Imran Adams doesn’t even bother pretending to work the steering wheel like he’s driving a real car. Like he was under the impression they were doing test shots and then the director shouted cut and he realized too late they were using those takes.

Nothing works in this movie. Absolutely nothing. The car scenes are ugly because they’re not quite at a That 70s Show level of obvious green screen for comic effect, but the team put almost no effort into making the lighting in the foreground match the lighting in the background and it’s clear something is wrong. It’s also obvious that the crew is on a green screen set most of the time because Vuorensola made the bizarre and baffling decision to make every shot in the film very brightly lit. There’s parts of the film that are clearly supposed to be dead of night, and yet there’s a constant presence of off-screen flood lights illuminating everything and making it almost daytime throughout the entire film. At one point our characters end up in a haunted house, in what should be deep darkness, and yet the whole house is not only very well lit for having few lights and the windows have a flood of spotlight coming through them with no source.

And I know this is coming from Vuorensola because his films have a distinct ugliness in their coloring that the dude hasn’t improved on in over a decade. Improving is something that people with talent would do. Vuroensola meanwhile can’t shoot a horror film using actual darkness or real sets, because he’s a hack fraud. In case you’re wondering the actors in this film are also blitheringly talentless, although they might simply be mediocre and held back even further by the terrible script. Like a Celeste pizza that the dog vomited on but it’s literally the only food they can get their hands on. The dialogue is terrible, a mishmash of pseudo-intellectual nonsense by writer Sean-Michael Argo, you who may recall from Jesus Christ who cares.

Jeepers Creepers Reborn violates a big rule of bad films, which is that you never make references to better movies. There’s a ton of references to better horror movies including those that even at their worst never degraded themselves as badly as Jeepers Creepers from 3 onward. Seeing Sydney Craven dressed as Harley Quinn or sexy Freddy Kreuger just made me want to go watch The Suicide Squad or even one of the worse Nightmare on Elm Street movies. Or Simon Rex’s gay porno.

Jeepers Creepers Reborn isn’t a horror film, as that would entail actually attempting to spook the viewer which the film never even feigns interest in. The costume for werewolf Mussolini in FDR: American Badass puts the Creeper costume to shame, and that was a deliberately low budget comedy. The hours they spent putting that makeup on would’ve been better used putting lipstick on roadkill for a goof. We actually have to sit multiple times over and watch the Creeper fumblingly reset the gramophone to start playing the Jeepers Creepers song, and oh yea it’s not the Jeepers Creepers song. The cheap bastards who make this crap didn’t want to pay Jack Teagarden royalties, so they went with a terrible jazz cover that has none of the ominous feeling the original gave. The green screen effects are the quality you’d expect from a YouTube comedy sketch, and actually worse in many cases.

The film is stupid, lazy, boring, and utterly moronic. It is pure trash, the horror movie equivalent of Seltzberg parody film laziness. It makes me want to revisit some of the worst Tubi horror movies I’ve seen, because as bad as they might be those directors knew how to work with actual darkness, real sets, and actors with halfway decent talent. Vruorensola is box office cancer. Characters have psychic premonitions because the director and writers are too talentless to organically put those plot beats in the script. Characters have these weird ass outlines of light because the film is so horribly lit and green-screened. Sydney Craven stabs the Creeper in the eyes and says “how do you like those peepers, bitch?” and that’s the point where the two other people in the theater walked out too pissed off to sit through the last three minutes.

I spent $1.40 for my ticket to Jeepers Creepers Reborn because it was a convenience fee on the app for a Fathom event, and I was ripped off of $1.40. There were a few parts where I was ready to walk out of the theater and the only reason I didn’t was because the movie was on the tail half. Don’t pay for this movie. Don’t watch it. I’m willing to say this is without a doubt the worst movie of 2022 and I’ll go even further and say it’s going to be the worst theatrical release of the 2020s barring another Vuorensola film being released this decade.

Rating: F———-