so many jocks...

"Just let me get all the way in!"

Assessing the decade past, there are some sparkling diamonds worth noting. Unquestionably, the gayest and most original bubblegum monster movie of this or any other season also may be our most problematic - Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers (2001): aka Gay Road Trip, aka The Eyes of Justin Long. 

A boy and his sister go on a road trip together. They sing songs and talk about lots of queer shit until they wind up being stalked by a big gay monster who gets off on sniffing Justin’s dirty panties. This is not me being funny, this actually happens. Does the monster make-out with the disembodied skull of a relatively attractive policeman? Yes, he does. Does the monster have absolutely no interest in Justin’s sister and only want to eat body parts of nubile young boys? Yes, he does. Moving along at a clip, this whole film plays like the first act of a much larger story. Despite the presence of Eileen Brennan as a crazy, shotgun wielding catlady, Jeepers Creepers is a day at the hockey rink compared to the unadulterated homosexuality on display in Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003), aka: The Main Course!

"A gay bar, bro"

That bitchy Creeper with terrible skin is back and preying on innocent young men, swooping them up with his faggoty wings.  

This time around, a bus full of dumb-as-dirt shirtless boys replaces Justin Long.  The more the merrier! These boys are so slow that they can’t figure out how to open a window on a school bus. They’re alleged to be a sports team of some sort but they really may as well be coming back from an Atlantis Cruise-lines production of South Pacific.  

This 12 pack of hotdogs inadvertently wind up trapped inside the bus, left to wait for the monster to eat them up one by one. There's an even a black character and a psychic lesbian named Minxy on board this go around, alongside a legendary character actress, the beastly Diane Delano.  

But, get this: there’s an openly gay one (he’s not even subtextually gay) named Izzy.  Izzy isn’t a threat to the ab-boys, some could say he’s a protagonist. 

We’ve come a long way, baby!

Is Jeepers Creepers 2 a good film? Heavens to Betsy, no.  Absolutely not! 

The first film was an original story well told; the sequel tries to tell an expanded story and winds up looking cheap, sloppy, nonsensical, and boring. The gay storyline goes absolutely nowhere and it was written and directed by a pedophile, but at this point in horror history, we were taking whatever scraps we could get. Accordingly, we were willing to overlook the mess to finally have secondary gay characters who doesn’t wind up dying tragically or end up being the maniacal killer in the third act. Baby steps. 

While guilty pleasures at best, these are the perfect films to watch when you’re home alone drinking egg nog spiked coffee out of an oversized mug on a Sunday afternoon in bed.

Please note: The Jeepers Creepers franchise was produced by Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope.  Victor Salva is gross.  I think the most important lesson I have learned during my tenure here in Los Angeles is that we have to judge the art and not the artist.  Unfortunately, the fact that Victor is such a skeeze is what gives these movies their queer bent, whether consciously or not.

It is what it is.

Another decade is screeching to a halt. We had a bad war and a good president, Elizabeth Taylor's still going strong… but digging through my DVD closet, it was one of the most anemic decades in horror history. The aughts was a decade of photocopy remakes. These lifeless re-hashings of our most sacred texts (Friday the 13th, Amityville Horror, Nightmare on Elm Street) were ushered in by the success of the 2003 remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Now, you can hate on me like Miss Jill Scott, but I am giving it my #5 spot in my FaggotyAss Top 5 of the 2000s.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake took every genre standard that was established in the 1980s (horny teens, virginal final girls, stoner road trips gone terribly wrong, the implacable urbanite fear of rednecks) and mashed them together in a hyper-stylized post-MTV Bouillabaisse.

The director of photography from the original Texas Chainsaw, Daniel Pearl, is a master of smoked-out shafts of light streaming through redwoods and wide-angle lenses.  Everyone looks amazing. Who can resist kids with amazing bodies covered in sweat and dirt wearing properly fitted denim? Just because I’m a gay doesn’t mean that I’m incapable of appreciating a flawless tracking shot of Jessica Beil’s ass in lowrise jeans. Jessica has never looked better than in this film, she's toned but still supple and third-wave feminist and her raspy screaming throughout the third act rivals that of any scream queen prior.  

It's easy to forget that movies didn't look like this before 2003 because the Texas Chainsaw model has become so firmly ingrained in look of every other horror movie that came after it.  I'm a sucker for gorgeous photography and this movie was remarkably shot. Excessive and broad as any Michael Bay film, there is something joyful about the world of this movie. It feels like summer, it feels like Texas, it feels dirty and hot.  All the characters in this movie have a backstory and are there for a reason - this cannot be said for any of the remakes that proceeded. Erica Leerhsen and Jonathan Tucker emote their asses off, I don’t think I've ever seen actors playing and maintaining pure terror to such indulgent extremities before or since.

"That's not your baby, you stole her!"

Love it or loathe it, this movie works.  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake cost very little and made a killing in the box office and thus garnered in an entire era of garbage.  Did one slick, music video inspired remake merit an entire decade of boring, scene by scene, toneless retellings of stories that were just meant to be camp, amusement park ride to begin with? No, but I'm sure glad it exists.

Gus Van Sant proved with Psycho (1998) that you couldn't simply recreate shots and scenes and expect to have the same end product.  Movies have a life of their own.  Unfortunately, no one saw Psycho (1998) and the result is the disappearance of original stories and good, old-fashioned horror fun.  There are, however, always exceptions...