Jeepers Creepers: Reborn (2022) Review

Decades following the original case of Creepers exposer, a twenties-something couple Chase and Laine travel to the Horror Hound Festival for a night of horror move admiration and local legend celebration in the form of the Creeper. During their travel, Laine begins to experience unexplained premonitions and visions of a disturbing possibility of events that lay ahead, as well as visions of the Creeper itself. As the festival kicks into high gear, Laine and Chase win the opportunity to visit the infamous Creeper mansion, and whilst being accompanied by a media crew coming under threat from an awakened Creeper, ready for a new batch of victims.

With the original Jeepers Creepers releasing back in 2001, it’s safe to say the Creeper earned itself a certified cult following with its tension-laced yet ludicrous original. Soon solidifying the Creeper as a serious contender amongst greats within the genre, soon spawning a fun yet criminally overlooked sequel in 2003. It’s without question the nightmare-fuel’d Creeper should have remained a figment of Noughties fascination when it made its painfully dire return to the screen in 2017 with Jeepers Creepers 3. Evidently tarnishing just about any fans desire for more Creeper chaos due to its bizarre development of the villains mythos. With Jeepers Creepers 3 setting the bar to a seemingly unbeatable low standard for the franchise, with the long-awaited release of Reborn finally here, surely the only way is up, right?

Wrong. Jeepers Creepers: Reborn is anything but a return to form for the franchise, reinforcing the very notion that the longevity of the Creeper itself has long past its expiry date. With heaps of potential material and lore to play with, it’s truly astonishing how Timo Vuorensola and team had gotten this so wrong; a painfully misguided misfire of devastatingly intolerable results. A sequel that got it so wrong you could be mistaken for the creative team behind it having their only source of Creeper knowledge be from a slew of Youtube clips or snippet trailers.

Where all previous entries of the Jeepers Creepers catalogue take its titular villain to the back roads and empty stretches of derelict USA, Reborn decides to take its villains killing spree back to the very abandoned building with the infamous pipe we were introduced to back in 2001. This time however, we are brought back here again in such a bizarre yet hilariously ill-conceived manner; through the attendance of a horror-fest.

This angle might work with the likes of Haunt or Hell Fest, therein potentially lying the writer Sean-Michael Argo’s very inspiration of this choice of set-up; one that undeniably feels left-field for a Creeper movie. Above all,  Vuorensola handles it in such a crass manner, you’d be fooled into thinking he was promised a budget much higher than the final amount, resulting in an endeavour that feels so woefully cheap and reeking of a b-movie bargain bin bastardisation, that you wonder how it got the green light in the first place.

Somehow playing out worse than Jeepers Creepers 3, a task that once seemed nearly impossible – Reborn could have really benefited from a back-to-basics approach, an opportunity to bring the franchise back to its roots for a welcome return to form for the Creeper. The cast do there very best in an attempt to elevate this material past the point of generic obscurity, but between the wooden dialogue and its convuluted story, it’s hard to imagine anyone here truly knew just how bad this was going to be, or what the hell was actually going on.

Where Reborn suffers the most however, is in how its potential evidently shown from its opening scene. Thankfully with the resurgence of the slasher genre with 2018’s Halloween, horror fans have been treated to a wheel of genre icon resurrections with the likes of Ghostface, Leatherface, Chucky and Pinhead. Whilst the quality here peaks and valley’s depending on who you’re talking to, it’s safe to say Jeepers Creepers return to screen is undeniably the genre’s most painful return yet.

With narrative’s surrounding Trish from 2001’s entry, or Jack Taggart having the Creeper pinned to his farmhouse wall in the sequel, it’s puzzling why the team behind Reborn opted out of these more delectable options in favour of a “clean slate”, one that amounted to more head-scratches than applauds. Yes, the Trish revenge narrative has been seen and done multiple times (Halloween (2018), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022), and most likely would have been a weaker retread, it’s nonetheless still an angle fans have been gagging for decades in the making. Ignoring all this delectable lore in favour of a tasteless cluster of genre cliche’s feels both injudicious and unnecessary, a slap to the face of any fan who’s patience for the franchise will undoubtedly wear thin by the time they get their peepers on this fourth entry.

When it’s not the narrative taking your brain-cells for a back alley brawl, it’s the film’s precistent use of CGI that really takes the franchise to a new low. Not only is Reborn narratively inept, but its visual effects are the work of low budget and rush time; so bad I was convinced I had received an early cut of the film to view, not a final product ready for release. From the off-kilter two-dimensional effect, to the incessant use of CGI backgrounds at any given opportunity, you truly wonder if Vuorensola was determined to make a new Jeepers Creeper‘s movie or a spiritual sequel to House of the Living Dead. Reborn would certainly make Uwe Boll proud.

A solid chunk of Reborn‘s runtime is consumed in green screen locations, down to the very ground they walk on, making the entire experience so distractingly unpolished it renders the movie almost unwatchable. Once scene in particular which has our group of victims galavant through an entirely CGI graveyard is as hilariously cringe as it is frustratingly distracting. Imagine Jeepers Creepers by way of Sharknado, minus its more’ish camp appeal and longevity, a sense of humour or knowingness Reborn could have embraced to work in its favour.

This 2022 return for the Creeper plays out like an ill-conceived scrapbook of lacklustre concepts that fit together as well as Hannibal Lector in a vegan bakery. Aside from a small handful of welcomed nods to the original, is nonetheless a painfully misguided attempt at both rebranding and revamping the Jeepers Creepers franchise, so cynically ugly it renders its iconic villain almost unrecognisable. Nothing here works, and Reborn will be quick to remind you of that, rightfully earning itself the title of one of the worst horror sequels of the past 20 years. Move over I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, Leprechaun: Origins and Hellraiser: Revelations; there’s a new kid in town.

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