Hello folks, and welcome on back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am in an exceedingly good mood, as not only will I be hosting a session of Dungeons & Dragons later, but this particular session will open with the doling out of treasures and reputation boosts the party has earned for their recent adventures. You know those chapters of One Piece where Big News Morgans reports on how awesome the Straw Hats have been lately? Yeah, I love that shit, so I’ve cribbed it wholesale for my party’s quest to form an alliance across the various countries of my campaign setting. One of the great pleasures of DnD is seeing how your choices create a lattice of secondary consequences spiraling out around you, and I’m eager to dazzle my party with a full report on what they’ve accomplished. But don’t worry, my manic production of DnD materials has done little to interfere with our movie screenings, with this week’s viewings offering both classics and creepers of varying caliber. Let’s run down the Week in Review!

Our first screening of the week was Serpico, a ‘70s crime drama starring Al Pacino, based on the real-life story of a New York police officer who attempted to clean up the rampant corruption in the city’s police force. Sidney Lumet is one of Hollywood’s most confident sculptors of high-minded human drama, and Serpico sees him and Pacino collaborating in collective top form. The film is handsome and gripping; in spite of Serpico’s professional career largely being characterized by a series of betrayals and setbacks, Lumet and Pacino construct a propulsive narrative out of his attempts to bring justice against the very instruments of the law.

The secret to this, as in many of Lumet’s best films, is that the film’s larger narrative and thematic thrust is always subservient to the central character story. Serpico is realized with uncommon nuance across his journey; rather than getting tied up in the procedural specifics of engaging with this or that department, the film focuses primarily on Serpico as a man trying to live an honest life while being constantly persecuted for that honesty.

From a fresh-faced recruit with dreams of cleaning up his city, he transforms into a strung-out ghost, his various street costumes seemingly more designed as camouflage against cops than criminals. His various personal relations are presented without adornment; I loved the honest simplicity of his first romance fading through simple differences of ambition, while his second is undone by his own core conviction. Merely learning that this institution is corrupt is one thing; watching Serpico stress-test every angle of that corruption, his eyes hollowing out and cheeks stretching all the while, is quite another. A fantastic crime drama, and an even better character story.

Next up was Jeepers Creepers, an ‘01 horror film starring Justin Long and Gina Phillips as siblings who run afoul of a creature that’s hungry for spare parts. The first half of this film is frankly terrible, forcing audiences through the grueling experience of spending forty minutes trapped in a car with Justin Long. I don’t know if they intentionally wrote his character to be as annoying as possible or if he just can’t help himself, but his character here has one of the most obnoxious personalities of any horror lead I’ve seen, making me newly thankful his star has long since faded.

Beyond Long’s insufferable presence, Jeepers Creepers also suffers from some of the most aggressive make-conflict writing I’ve witnessed. Generally, conflicts should emerge naturally from the base variables of the situation as presented: we can often see the pitfalls coming, but they still feel like natural consequences of the characters’ beliefs and narrative momentum. Not so in Jeepers Creepers, where Justin Long pretty much insists on getting himself stuck in a horror movie, at length and repeatedly. It’s difficult to feel much sense of anticipation or dread when a character keeps willfully sticking their head in a woodchipper.

Fortunately, things pick up considerably in the second half, when the film’s monster gets to come out and play. In spite of a weak script and worse cast, Jeepers Creepers actually possesses a phenomenally designed central horror, with a nice built-in mythology and proclivities that lend themselves to some haunting visual setpieces. The film’s monster is such a good concept that in spite of considering this film pretty bad on the whole, I’m actually quite interested in continuing the series, so long as they get rid of Long and the scriptwriter. I’m always appreciative of good horror in low places, and Jeepers Creepers’ beasty is some solid horror.

Given everything I disliked about the original Jeepers Creepers had to do with its cast and script, while the concept actually seemed quite strong, it felt worth pursuing the franchise further with Jeepers Creepers 2. And boy am I happy I did – not only does the sequel dispense with aggressive sources of irritation like Justin Long, it also makes far better use of its central monster, ultimately standing as one of the strongest creature features of the ‘00s.

From the very start, Jeepers Creepers 2 bases its horror in fundamentally stronger concepts than “Justin Long can’t help but investigate the spooky murder hole.” The film’s opening scene sees the Creeper posing as a lonely scarecrow, luring a boy in and then dragging him off into the sky. Half living scarecrow, half wendigo, this take-no-prisoners Creeper bears little resemblance to the ambiguous cloaked man of its predecessor’s first half. His first abduction sets the boy’s father and brother on a mission of revenge, introducing an Ahab element that pays off brilliantly in the film’s last act.

In the meantime, the Creeper’s got victims to slay and not much time to slay ‘em. Rather than the paltry two siblings of its predecessors, Creepers 2 offers us an entire busload of football players, cheerleaders, and associated staff, whose bus gets derailed by the Creeper’s bone shuriken (yes, bone shuriken) on the ride home from a game. What follows is an hour-plus of bus invasion madness, ruthless betrayals, and regular visits by the Creeper, who seems to be having the time of his life admiring his buffet of victims. Every ounce of potential the original film wasted is here exploited with relish, as hapless teens do their best to fight off a seemingly invincible bat-monster.

In the film’s last act, Ahab returns on the back of a harpoon-mounted pickup truck, instigating an anti-Creeper rally that would bring a tear to a Tremors or Gremlins fan’s eye. Buses crash, cars explode, and harpoons are fired across the blood-streaked landscape, as humanity clashes with a creature of incomparable hunger and resilience. Jeepers Creepers 2 offers everything I could possibly hope for from an indulgent creature feature, with its only failing being that it’s the successor to a far inferior film. Don’t let that stop you – nothing about the “lore” of the first film is particularly necessary to enjoy this one, and this is a film that deserves to be enjoyed.

My housemates then clamored for us to watch the goddamn Uncharted movie, so that was indeed next. The film is roughly as hollow as you’d expect it to be, though it at least doesn’t simply retread the wafer-thin plot of the games. Instead, this film serves as something of an origin story, charting Nathan Drake’s early forays into relic hunting, and establishing his initial relationship with Sully.

That confident reframing choice is sadly the only note of interest here. The only things less convincing than Tom Holland as an action lead are this film’s atrocious backgrounds and action scenes, which collectively rob it of any sense of adventure, atmosphere, or excitement. The joy of exploring an ancient tomb with Indy comes not just from Harrison Ford’s substantial charisma, but also from the tactile feeling of exploring an ancient tomb. With all the sets replaced by obvious CG backdrops, and all the stunts replaced by noodle-limbed game character models, Uncharted is an action movie with no clothes, prompting more watch-checking than seat-gripping. Tom Holland seems like a nice guy, but he is not a movie star, and this is barely a movie.