Jeepers Creepers 3 (2017)

Jeepers Creepers 3 arrives as a direct interquel, wedged into the twenty-three day gap between the first two installments, and it carries itself with the grim duty of a film that knows exactly how little it has to say. A task force of relatives, a farming community, a booby-trapped truck, a disembodied hand: the pieces are assembled with the patience of a man building a shed no one requested. The Creeper still works the rural highway. The rest of the cast mostly dies on it.

The production does cast Stan Shaw as Sheriff Tashtego, a Black actor given genuine authority and screen time, and Joyce Giraud appears as well. The film makes no comment on any of it. Addison, the young woman who survives the Creeper's truck through luck and a well-aimed pipe, is allowed to fight back, but the screenplay never pauses to congratulate itself for this. There is no sermon about gender, no lesson about race, no environmental lament, no critique of the wealthy plantation owners hiding beneath their cars. The movie is interested in one thing, which is a winged man eating people.

That narrowness is, in its way, honest. The film's real controversies lie elsewhere: the director's criminal history, and a line about a young victim that was cut before release. Those are matters for courts and for critics of a different discipline. As a cultural document, this is a horror sequel that wants nothing more than to be a horror sequel, and it achieves that with a twenty percent approval rating and a two-day theatrical run. There is something almost restful about a film with no ambitions beyond the next kill.