While the original Jeepers Creepers seems to be remembered as something of a Blair Witch Project-style success out of nowhere, the truth seems to be a little different.  Its main claims to fame are that its budget - while modest, nothing like as low as you might imagine - was eclipsed by its box office grosses - though to put them in perspective, they're about equal to the ridiculed Ghost Ship - that it was produced by Francis Ford Coppola, and that learned scribes like Harry Knowles were incredibly turned-on by it.  Anyway, despite being just another slasher movie with a very silly name, by Hollywood's definition it was a success (ie it turned a profit) and so a sequel, with a bigger budget and worse script, was inevitable.  And along it came.

To director Victor Salva's credit, the bigger budget did not tempt him to go with a "name" composer, and he decided to stick with the original movie's Bennett Salvay, who has scored a few things in his time but nothing most people will have heard of.  And, this being a score by a less-than-A-list composer (meant in a realistic, not derogatory, way) for a less-than-good horror film, Varese Sarabande jumped at the chance to release it (Fear dot Com anyone?)

In truth, the remainder of my review could be cut and paste from words used to describe all the other Varese releases of scores like this, focusing as it does on endless orchestral suspense with occasional very loud brass interjections when something scary happens on-screen.  There's little that makes it substantially better or worse than all the rest of them, though in fairness Salvay keeps everything musical and never resorts to electronic meandering to substitute for having to bother writing anything proper.  The best track is "Big Battle", and tellingly it's the one where suspense is absent and it's action all the way through.

I'm not sure why it now seems that teen slasher movies are the entry-point-of-choice for composers trying to make their name, but after the success of Scream, which brought Marco Beltrami to the fore, it appears to be the way to go.  But similarly, after Scream, the quality of music in horror movies seems to have nosedived.  Remember the days when a score for a horror movie tended to mean something really special?  Can I mention Goldsmith scores like The Omen or Poltergeist or Alien?  Or Christopher Young's music for the first two Hellraiser movies?  It seems like back then, the horror genre in particular inspired composers to really try to write something interesting and different, which makes it all the more ironic that today it's the one genre where film music has truly reached an all-time-high of genericism.  

Jeepers Creepers 2 is by no means the worst score for a film like this - short listens to recent efforts like Elia Cmiral's unutterably dire Wrong Turn confirm that in an instant - and indeed, it's arguably among the best - which makes the fact that it's still so generic and generally limp all the more worrisome.  Where are all the film composers coming through who are willing to experiment, try new things, bring a fresh approach?  We can't rely on Messrs Newman (T), Goldenthal and Davis doing it by themselves forever.

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