The original Jeepers Creepers was a surprisingly good horror movie two years ago when it was released. The cliché of the masked killer was brought to a new level by The Creeper (Jonathan Breck), a seemingly immortal being who collected bodies and made tools and wallpaper out of them. The scare factor of the first movie wasn’t jump-out-of-your-soiled-seat but the film did introduce us to a good time. Now, two years later, in a summer where sequels have continued to under perform and leave fans displeased Jeepers Creepers 2 continues the tradition.

Think about everything you liked about the first Jeepers Creepers, delete it, and you have Jeepers Creepers 2 a film lacking any of the coolest parts of the original, instead putting a group of teenagers (how original) in a situation where they are picked off one by one (again, how original). The innovation and originality of the first film were plucked from their happy home and replaced with standard horror-fare that leaves you groaning on just how bad a script can be, and still get made.

JC2 is nothing more than a B-movie wrapped in a franchise name and force feed to a set group of moviegoers who, not just two weeks ago, saw a much more impressive Freddy vs. Jason. Truth be told MGM is smart for releasing this film so close to New Line’s Freddy vs. Jason as to cash in on the inevitable demand for new horror after the two titans of terror fight to the “death.”

The main problem with JC2 is that it can’t even stand tall enough to even think about holding a torch to the original. Aside from a short cameo by Darry (Justin Long) you wouldn’t even know this movie is connected to the franchise. Gone is the immensely cool, fear-producing truck. Gone is the home of the Creeper complete with hundreds of bodies sown together on the walls, although the house is mentioned as having gone up in flames earlier in the movie. Gone is the creepiness of the Creeper who is now just flying around picking people off the ground while avoiding spears to the head. Hell, they don’t even play the infamous song associated with every death in the original film.

It doesn’t help that the script is full of enough holes to satisfy the porn industry. No name characters disappear and reappear from time to time. During the film’s climax a girl is pushed from a truck just before it crashes and explodes. We never see her again. Before the aforementioned truck explodes we see the driver crawl out of the wreckage, but we never see him again. Plus the entire side-plot of a farmer, Jack Taggart (Ray Wise) going after the Creeper because he killed his son looks as though it was tacked on to put more action in a film that only needs to be 20 minutes long to get the point across.

Try as I might I couldn’t find anything redeeming for my $6.50. The badness of the bad guy is gone. The coolness of the truck and hide-out are gone. The characters are nothing more than canon fodder, and while some other movies at least attempt to interject some story into the mix, JC2‘s writers don’t even give them names, and when they do, they are called Minxie (Nicki Lynn Aycox).

The whole film is just a very disappointing experience with it’s only bright spot being great cinematography, especially the opening cornfield sequence. Jeepers Creepers 2 should be avoid by fans and horror patrons as it leaves a sour taste in your mouth. See Freddy vs. Jason again if you just need some horror in your life, or venture to a discount theater and glimpse 28 Days Later once again.

If you asked me back in February about which movie I would have the most fun at this year I’m sure I would have a bunch of different answers. Trailers touting The Hulk, X2, The Matrix: Reloaded, etc. all would have me enticed with the thought of comic book heroes coming to life on the big screen, or huge sequels to some of my favorite movies. I wouldn’t even have dreamed that Freddy vs. Jason could be a shinning spot in an otherwise lacking summer movie season, but here we are, days after the film’s release, and I can’t stop thinking about just how cool the film actually was.

Even if you aren’t a fan of both series, or either of them, you know who Freddy Kruger and Jason Voorhees are. For the unenlightened the film gives origin sequences to each character, but true fans will see the joining of two huge horror series into a bloodbath of gratuitous nudity, decapitation, disembowelment, and, my favorite, dismemberment.

Jason (Ken Kirzinger, from the Friday the 13th series, when not getting killed by underachieving teenagers, hangs around Camp Crystal Lake, the site of this drowning nearly 35 years ago. In classic Friday fashion anyone who goes skinny-dipping, does drugs, or has premarital sex is marked for death. Freddy (Robert Englund), on the other hand, is the polar-opposite of the lumbering, mindless Jason. Mr. Kruger was an intelligent child killer who was burned alive by the townsfolk after being released from custody. He seeks children in their dreams (a place you are left defenseless) and kills them there.

After the children of Freddy’s former stomping grounds are given a drug that inhibits dreaming, he is left powerless. Since almost no one remembers his name, they no longer fear him, and without fear, he has now power. So, by way of trickery, Freddy conjures up an image of Jason’s mother and tells him to begin killing and instill fear in the hearts and minds of children once again. This plan works all too well for Freddy, as Jason doesn’t stop once he gets going, leading to a confrontation of two of horrors biggest antagonists.

The film, although very poorly acted on the part of the supporting cast, really gets its spark from the wit of Freddy and the excellent kills provided by Jason. As with every Friday film, we are treated to a number of glorious un-doings, including a rather painful romp on a folding bed. The movie doesn’t skimp on the gore either, no cut away shots, although some blatant MPAA based editing can be seen. With each detached limb comes a fountain of the red stuff that makes Mortal Kombat look like a flesh wound. In fact one scene of the film reminds you a lot of the Monty Python classic.

Freddy and Jason meet twice during the film for a balls out fight to he death, once in Freddy’s decrepit basement lair and again on the shores and docks of Camp Crystal Lake. The film takes into account that you know who these characters are, and who doesn’t, but then asks you to forget every move in each series, more so Friday the 13th than Nightmare on Elm Street. Those wondering how Jason X fits into the picture can figure that it is either a splinter storyline, or happens after the events of this film.

Director Ronny Yu is not stranger to the pairings of weird killers, he directed Bride of Chucky, and shows us that he isn’t afraid to deliver above average special effects, buckets of blood, and a touch of humor to keep you occupied through the movies very few slow parts.

With a cast mainly comprised of no-namers who are just there to become canon fodder in the crossfire you look forward to the next kill and the next confrontation of these two killing machines. Freddy vs. Jason gave me a lot more than I expected to get after reading some preliminary so-so press about the film, but after seeing it for myself I can honestly say I haven’t had a better time at the movies all summer and I certainly can’t wait for the DVD.

XXX (Triple X, man the search engines are going to love this page) does just what is promises, but fails to live up to what some of the critics made it out to be, in my opinion of course. The movie is a high-adrenaline rush full of extreme sports stunts, high-octane driving, one seriously cool Pontiac, and Vin Diesel as the coolest spy this side of Bond. But better than Bond? No way, no how, and any critic that says so is lying through his teeth to please Sony.

Where James Bond, and the 18 movies under his belt, deliver a more cerebral type of spy movie, it is nice to see someone give the standard spy-work a nice kick in the ass to get it into a different gear, but Bond has grown over the years since the disastrous times of Timothy Dalton, and the movies have been getting more and more in touch with high tech gadgets and big explosions, while keeping the thinking man’s spy action alive.

Vin Diesel is Xander Cage, or X as his friends like to call him (stupid nickname, by the way). Xander is well known for video taping his death-defying stunts and making money off of them, a la Jackass. He is so famous that professionals like Tony Hawk (who must have sold his soul to Sony) and Mat Hoffman both appear in the movie to show Xander how much they look up to him. Yeah right…

Which brings up this movies biggest problem, it isn’t believable in any way, shape, or form. At no time during the movie do you believe there is any real danger to any of the characters, and with the cliché “cop switching sides” and “bad guy finds out who you are” plot points inputted between avalanches and a race through Prague in a GTO (sweeeet) you never feel a real connection to the characters because you know they will be okay.

Even before the movie was released in theatres this past weekend, Sony already made it a point to tell everyone that a sequel was on the way. So we know the main character doesn’t die, and all of the satellite characters are meaningless, because if Bond movies prove anything, aside from M, Moneypenny, and Q no one makes the cut to be in a second, third, fourth, or even 19th movie.

The stunts are unreal, but very fun to watch, and while I mentioned they are completely impossible, you still get a kick wondering how they did such a feat. While I don’t think a motocross bike can base jump over a 20 foot fence, or that it can fly over a huge warehouse with a jump off of a trailer, they are still cool things to see. The biggest disappointment was the drastic under use of the spy car. Most of the trailers hyped the card to include tons of weapons and gadgets (wait till you see the dash), but when the time comes the only thing they use are two rockets and a harpoon gun. Yippee! Exciting to say the least.

The movie is the mindless fun we came to expected from Rob Cohen, director of The Fast and the Furious, it has no real plot, events that happen don’t make much sense, but it sure is a cool movie to watch, and watch it you will.

So here we are five days after the release of Men in Black II and I’m just finally getting out of the house to see it. Why did it take me so long to get off my lazy ass an off to the theatre? Because I’m beginning to hate going to the movies on opening day and getting trampled by people who just got off of the “net” and read some “reviews” and can tell me every plot point before it finally happens. See I don’t need someone to tell me because those of us with brains bigger than a dog’s left-nut can figure out movies for ourselves. Anyway, I’m becoming skewed…

Men in Black II is the latest and supposedly greatest in the line of summer movies, I even predicted it would be the biggest movie of the summer, but who really expected Spider-Man to destroy records like it did, I sure didn’t. The movie stars Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith as agents of the top secret organization that polices alien activity on the planet earth. When seeing the first movie five years ago you wondered how they would get Agent K back into the line-up and in the movie, and how they would get agent L to drop out (which was done very stupidly by the way).

Anyway when a mysterious light is hidden on earth and the universe’s biggest bad-ass-lingerie-model comes looking for it, things get heated and the only man who knows how to stop it had his memory erased five years earlier. After bringing K back, the movie really picks up because of the on-screen duo between Smith and Jones.

What directory Barry Sonnenfeld seemed like he was doing for the the sequel was take the best parts of the first movie and give them bigger parts in the second. The highlight of the movie is Frank the Pug, who is giving a much elongated part in this sequel compared to his two minutes of screen time in the first. But, unfortunately, along with some of the better characters that are broadened, some of the same old jokes are returned and reversed to either A) try them again or B) see if anyone remembers. For the most part they clicked, but some, most the regurgitated stuff from before, didn’t work out so well and seemed to fall flat.

I was a bit concerned when I saw the initial trailer for the movie because it lacked the outstanding humor of the first, but I’m safe in saying that, while not as funny as the first, Men in Black II is a very funny movie and is the perfect mix between action and comedy.

My only complaint? The movie is over way to quickly. We got through five trailers, the movie, and half of the credits in under two hours which is far too short for a movie competing this summer for attention with so many dynamic movies, and those who already downloaded them from net (but that is another story). While I may have been very presumptuous when I stated this would be the biggest movie of the summer, it did break some records for a July 4th opening, and just may very well stay around to make a whole lot of money, but in the end it still can’t compare to the original, and not many things do.

I went into Reign of Fire not knowing what to expect from the movie. I had read several reviews, both mixed, so I really wasn’t sure what kind of movie this was going to be. To be perfectly honest, up until about two months before the film was released last Friday, I had not idea it even existed, which isn’t necessarily a case of bad marketing, just maybe some bad exposure to the consumer. Besides all of the trivial, “What was it going to be like?” questions, I wondered if it could come out from behind Men in Black II’s shadow and hopefully stomp on Tom Hanks’ Road to Perdition.

Reign of Fire was an excellent movie, and one wonders why it didn’t beat out the two movies listed above in the box office, but as my friend Thomas Porter said to me during our screening of the movie on Sunday, “This is sure to be a cult classic.”

So does Reign of Fire have the ability to join the ranks of Pulp Fiction and Army of Darkness as one of the great cult fiction movies of our generation? Yes, in many ways.

The movie focuses on the awakening of a pre-historic dragon species that every couple of thousand years comes out of their slumber to reek havoc upon the world. They caused the extinction of the Dinosaurs, they caused the Ice Ages with the ash that plagued the sky and cooled the planet, they help evolution along in some ways. But when a young boy named Quinn awakens the dominant male of the species it only takes a matter of years before the cities of the Earth are in ruins, and the human species could be the next on the Endangered Species List.

Still many would hear the plot, and think this is your typical post-apocalyptic movie with humans struggling to survive after a nuclear explosion/deadly plague/or undiscovered species (pick one). This isn’t no Waterworld, and Matthew McConaughey is one bad-ass in this movie as Van Zan the leader of an American troop of soldiers who have killed hundreds of these flying beasts. When they learn that it all started in London, they set out on a mission to destroy the dominant male and the species, for good.

While most plot points are predictable, and several overly used theatrical elements are present (like killing a main character), the movie excels past them, and is amazing in the visual department of a very grey, dark world where fire has consumed the planet. Luckily, the use of the dragon special effects were never overused, and there is only a few instances where you actually get a good look at one, and boy do they look pretty.

Reign of Fire is a popcorn movie, but after seeing Men in Black II last week and having some time to reflect upon it, I would have much rather have seen Reign because of the fact this movie has nothing to prove, it is just good story telling and good direction. Excellent movie, excellent cast, makes for an excellent time. Don’t’ miss this one.

Mr. Deeds was a great movie, and there was heated debate on the way out of the theatre if it can top Happy Gilmore as Adam Sandler’s best performance, and best movie, while Mr. Sandler may never win any awards, at the very least he isn’t trying to hard to break from his comedy roots to do drama (cough Jim Carrey cough cough Will Smith cough cough). Man there must be something in the air around here.

Mr. Deeds is a remake of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The movie features on Sandler’s character, Longfellow Deeds, who inherits $40 Billion dollars from his rich, dead Great Uncle. It seems though the CEO of this company that Deeds’ Great Uncle owns wants to take full control and sell it off in little bits and pieces. While rather predictable (right down to the way Deeds’ reconciles with his love) the movie is enjoyable for a good show, and trying to pick out instances when it looks like Winona Rider is picking Sandler’s pocket.

What works so well with the movie is Adam Sandler himself, he is such a charismatic and great actor, it is no wonder he can come back from a stink-bomb like Little Nicky and still be welcome to take money for our tickets. Any other actor would be scrubbing the crap stains off of the toilets in the restroom rather than starring in a movie playing in one of the biggest theatres in the joint.

And then there was Winona Rider trying to steal things, or we presume.

Oh, yes, Miss Rider whom has had some very troubling conflicts with the law up until this movie does a decent job as Deeds’ love interest, and keeping us on our toes to see what she is stealing from the set, we half expected her to be shown walking off holding all the props she could in one hand while shoving smaller objects in her handbag, and, well other places.

The star of the entire movie falls upon the foot-fetish butler, Emilo, whom has a “sneakiness” way to him and seems to be faster than light when he wants to appear in places. It becomes increasingly funny as the movie goes on to see just how he can move around so much, as well as Winona Rider stealing things (will this ever get old…hmmmm…No).

Mr. Deeds ranks right up there with Sandler’s best performances, but not quite the very best (which still belongs to Happy Gilmore). If you are looking for a good way to waste a couple of hours and don’t want to see Sandler in one of those annoying “accent-driven roles,” go out and see Mr. Deeds, but if you were alive for the original release, be sure to bring extra colostomy bags, because this is one funny movie.

And we get to watch Winona Rider…well you know…

Minority Report features two of Hollywood’s biggest stars looking to grasp back on to the greatness they once held. Steven Spielberg is looking to make up for the horrible A.I. Artificial Intelligence (I don’t care what you all think, it sucked) and Tom Cruise is looking to make up for the god-awful Cameron Crowe soaked Vanilla Sky that stunk up the box office during the holiday season. Luckily for both of them, Minority Report (although having little to do with the actual title) is one of the greatest movies of the year, and while it may never break records like Spider-Man, it is sure to become a classic in it’s own right.

The story of MR is very well developed, and the plot is a fresh blast in the face from the cookie-cutter plot points (and holes) used in a lot of the movies this summer. Tom Cruise is Detective John Anderton, head of Washington D.C.’s Precrime division which can catch murderers and prevent their crime from even happening using the skills of three “people” called the Pre-Cogs. When Anderton is accused of a murder on a man he has never met, he goes on the run and tries to seek his Minority Report which could prove his innocence.

This movie is a  special effects laden broadcast of the greatest proportions. From the cops on jetpacks to the awesome cars of the future, everything about this movie screams style and cinematic eye-candy. Spielberg does a wonderful job bringing the year 2054 to life in a way that could be taken as fact. During the movie Greg Elliott leaned over to me and whispered, “I can totally see this in fifty years.” While I whole-heartily agree with our resident short-person, there are some far-fetched points we may never see in our lifetimes.

Cruise does an excellent job as John Anderton, his character lost his son six years ago, just before the institution of Precrime, and has dedicated his life to the enforcement of the laws to keep what happen to his son from ever happening to anyone again. He is a drug addict, addicted to his work, and is so engrossed that it costs him his wife and a happy life together after the death of their son. Many parallels have been drawn to Johnny Depp’s character in From Hell, but the solving of the crime isn’t necessarily Anderton’s undoing.

Spielberg’s direction shows that the man has the pills to do another sci-fi movie after the A.I. fiasco. Camera angles are very cinematic in nature and bring out the different aspects of the movie very well. From the wide angle shots of the ships dropping cops, to the slightly humorous shots of Anderton having some delicious food from the refrigerator, that is something they won’t show you in the trailers.

All in all, I really, really enjoyed Minority Report, it may not be the biggest blockbuster of the season, but opening up against stiff competition in the way of Disney’s Lilo & Stitch it holds it’s own very well. While the movie’s only shortfall is a very weak, weak ending, it does manage to keep you entertained for it’s two-and-a-half-hour runtime. Go see Minority Report, you won’t be sorry.

Even with lackluster reviews, previous to our own, and opening up against Windtalkers and Scooby Doo and with Spider-Man and Star Wars still at the box office, The Bourne Identity still managed to haul in close to $30 million dollars in it’s opening weekend.

While Identity falls into the cliché following of James Bond and other action spy movies, serious or not, it still manages to make a name for itself for a number of reasons.

The biggest draw to the movie is the fact that it has been a highly successful novel for sometime. Updated for the big screen, Bourne Identity features Matt Damon, sans Ben Affleck, as Jason Bourne a covert-ops agent who has lost most of his memory and is found floating in the Mediterranean Sea just off the coast of Europe. The movie focuses on Jason’s employers attempts to capture and subdue what they believe to be a rogue in the system.

While the movie tries to bring Matt Damon into the role of an action hero, leaving behind chose rolls in independent films, he is never really that believable, but it still works for Universal for the women. Besides the off-color attempt to bring Damon into new roles, Bourne doesn’t really fail terrible on any levels. The biggest problem is the fact that the plot is very loose, and seems almost too open ended, like the director and screenwriter want the audience to figure out what is going on, rather than telling you, the problem with this is, they never give you enough information to figure it out on your own.

Two standing achievements shouldn’t be missed, and one is worth the price of admission alone. The fight sequences are some of the very best seen on the big screen, they totally rock. While the sound effects may seem as far fetched as they come, it adds to the atmosphere of the movie.

The second achievement, the one worth admission, is the car chase scene halfway through the movie. Seeing Matt Damon pilot a manual POS through the streets of Paris was amazing. The abuse this car took, corners at 90 degrees, going the wrong way on an express way, it was amazing, it took my breath away, it made the movie for me. Although I have a hard time picturing Julia Stiles as a covert agent, let alone know how to even use a computer.

So in the end, The Bourne Identity managed to steal some of my hard earned money for the weekend, and I’m glad I decided not to give it to Scooby Doo. If you want something to hold you over till Die Another Day, Bourne Identity will surely do.