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"Jeepers Creepers" composers Johnny Mercer and Harry Warren must have been spinning in their graves with the release of Jeepers Creepers (*1/2), an absurd horror yarn in which a cannibalistic winged demon goes on a murderous rampage whenever he hears the title tune (personally, Phil Collins' "Sussudio" is the only song that could make me take a hatchet to someone's head, but never mind). Adding a slick contempo sheen to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre template (thereby ignoring the grimy, low-budget look that made that 1974 classic so disturbing), this finds two college-age siblings (well-played by Gina Philips and Justin Long), stranded in the middle of Nowhere, USA, stopping to investigate when they spot a menacing figure dropping bodies down a pipe (their reasons for not calling the police are witless even beyond the low-ebb demands of the slasher genre). They find a basement full of corpses, but, even worse, they learn that the Creeper (a cross between Freddy Krueger and the Creature from the Black Lagoon) is now after them. Lapses in plotting and logic are tossed out at such a breakneck speed, you wonder if writer-director Victor Salva (Powder) was going for some sort of world record. (My favorites: Why does a being with the ability to fly at incredible speeds spend most of his time driving around in a beat-up truck? And how on earth did he acquire a personalized license plate?) The sick ending, by the way, exists only to justify the title and sets things up for a sequel I'll be sure to avoid. DVD features include audio commentary by Salva, six making-of shorts, and deleted scenes.
As far as campy melodramas set during World War II are concerned, The Man Who Cried (*1/2) is almost on a par with 1992's Shining Through the one in which secretary Melanie Griffith joins the war effort by letting spy Michael Douglas taste her strudel. Christina Ricci, almost as badly miscast as Griffith was in that earlier effort, stars as a Jewish girl who, after being separated from her father at a young age, tries to hook up with him years later in America. For now, she's stranded in Paris, where she hangs out with a gold-digging Russian (Cate Blanchett), verbally spars with an egocentric opera star (John Turturro), and falls in love with a sensitive gypsy (Johnny Depp, apparently unable to shake the identical character he played in Chocolat). Writer-director Sally Potter's reach clearly exceeds her grasp here: Striving to fashion an epic love story against the backdrop of a major world event, she instead ends up with a gnat of a film that feels about as intimate as an episode of Wheel of Fortune. This is the sort of movie in which shots of jackbooted Germans pounding on people are interspersed with peaceful moments of a singer belting out a haunting aria; such visual cliches can be found throughout the picture, serving to fuel the story's cornball developments. The title, incidentally, might refer to either one of a couple of different characters, although I imagine it ultimately should be applied to Christopher Sheppard: He's the poor guy who produced this financial sinkhole. DVD features include theatrical trailer.
Must-See DVDs
Ocean's Eleven Actually, it's not my must-see, but those who enjoyed Steven Soderbergh's current star-packed remake might be interested to learn that the 1960 original just came out on DVD. Instead of George, Brad, Matt and Julia, you get Rat Pack players Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford, joshing their way through an inconsequential lark about a group of former World War II paratroopers who plot to simultaneously knock off five Las Vegas casinos. The large cast also includes George Raft, Angie Dickinson, Norman Fell (way before his stint as Mr. Roper on Three's Company) and an unbilled Shirley MacLaine, but except for an amusing twist ending (which was unwisely scrapped in the remake), this is about as fluffy and forgettable as movies get. DVD features include audio commentaries with Dickinson and Frank Sinatra Jr., a making-of short, an interactive map of Vegas, and archived photos and footage of Sinatra.
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