There's a cameo by Justin Long, the hapless victim from the first movie, in her dream sequence. Adding a peculiar element is cheerleader Minxie (Nicki Lynn Aycox), who goes into trances where she learns everything about the Creeper. He picks his victims out like dim sum and slowly picks them off.
You never see them in the first movie, after that, they are everywhere. The Creeper makes his ugly face highly visible, a classic problem with horror sequels. You pretty much lose that with all of the kids stuck inside the bus.
Part of what made the first Jeepers Creepers movie work was the chase. At that point, it becomes feeding time, with the Creeper picking off his meals like he was at the buffet at the Bellagio Hotel. The They soldier on until another tire is blown, stranding the team in the night.
The blown tire was hit with a shuriken-like weapon made of human bone, much to the shock of the driver and coaches. However, the first one was set in central Florida and there is a reference to a building from the first movie, so you have to figure this is also set in the Sunshine State. It starts to boil over when their bus blows a tire on a country road so completely empty of traffic you'd think it was in Kansas somewhere. We've got a homophobe and a racist among the batch, trouble between black and white players and tension between one player and his girlfriend.
It's the last day of the Creeper's 23-day feast, and it's about to gorge itself on a school bus full of teenagers just back from winning a state basketball championship. In her place is Taggart (Ray Wise), the morose father of a young victim of the Creeper, who doesn't enter the scene until almost the end. Gone is the feisty Patricia Jenner, who fearlessly stood up to the monster that was hell-bent to make a meal of her brother. What was a unique, scary film has become a generic teen chop-em-up. The Movie Salva should have taken his own advice and not done a sequel. A bit of a monkey wrench was thrown when Gina Philips, who starred in the first film and was quite a revelation for her fearless performance, declined to do the sequel. Could have been day one, for all we knew. The first movie never made it clear what day it was during the 23-day feeding cycle. Well, now, if they could kill Ripley and bring her back for Alien Resurrection, then you know his solution will be easily to get around. Writer/director Victor Salva created a unique beast that fed for 23 days every 23 years, so he figured this would help him avoid sequelitis. It was, no pun intended, creepy, less focused on body count and more driven by fright. This look at how people handle the pressure of a terrible situation, and how their prejudices eventually become weapons against each other rather than their supernatural foe, elevates Jeepers Creepers 2 from standard horror fare.When Jeepers Creepers hit theaters in 2001, it was a minor hit at the box office and won acclaim for doing something different with the chronically formulaic horror genre. One character angrily refers to an African-American team-mate as “Bro” in a condescending fashion and another supposedly gay character named Izzy, nicknamed “Izzy or isn’t he?,” is treated as a threat.
While the varsity team struggles to stay alive, many of the team members are forced to confront their own prejudices about race and sexual preference. The Creeper is far from the only evil at work.
The confinement works because this sequel delves into the demon within all of us. The situation on the bus is similarly taut because it is handled in an appropriately claustrophobic manner. This revenge story is involving because Wise uses the worst kind of emotional pain imaginable to drive forward his actions. The father whose son was stolen from him, a farmer named Taggart (Ray Wise), holds an unstoppable thirst for revenge. Either story on its own is not broad enough to hold together an entire a film, especially since any smart viewer would have to question how much action can be circled around the broken-down bus. These two seemingly unconnected storylines are united by the hate and fear that the Creeper evokes in its victims.