Teenagers today are not like the teenagers of yesterday. So says everyone. Kids today are detached, unemotional, and do not understand responsibility or commitment. So says everyone. The problem is, “everyone” can’t decide on what to do about it.

The conservative, rightwing establishment wants a return to the way things were “back in the day”. They say children need authoritative parents who can dispense discipline and choose a path for them. The liberal, leftwing establishment sees our children’s salvation in staying out of the way, letting them “find their own place” in the world, and above all never disciplining. Both sides can make sense, depending on how militant the spokesman is, but neither sees the whole picture. I don’t pretend to know the answer, but I know neither side is wholly right or wrong.

I do believe that the experts and psychologists are right about one thing: today’s kids are indeed bored. Bored enough with life that taking drugs, getting stoned and having sex with a near-stranger isn’t strange to them. It’s just a way to pass the summer. Director Larry Clark wants the world to see this behaviour. He wants parents, oblivious to the sex, drugs and delinquency of their children, to wake up. His first film, Kids, featured some startling material and never flinched from showing the dirty stuff. His Kids were cold, lifeless and mostly ignorant of the consequences of their actions. It was a stunning picture, and promised great things to come.

Come they have in the form of Bully, Clark’s follow-up picture. So what, I wondered, would Clark take on this time? What would he open my eyes to today? Unfortunately, the subject is. . . the way today’s kids are bored, uninspired and experimenting in startling behaviour. Clark has essentially remade Kids, with a dash of The River’s Edge thrown in.

Bully features another group of aimless teenagers. Some obviously look like “troublemakers”; there’s Heather (Kelli Garner) with the green streaks in her hair and fresh out of rehab, Donny (Michael Pitt), the poster boy for Perpetually Stoned Magazine, and Ali (Bijou Phillips), who opens the film wearing a shirt so short the bottoms of her breasts are showing. But most look like clean-cut, “normal” kids; Lisa (Rachel Minor) looks like the girl next door and Marty and Bobby (Brad Renfro and Nick Stahl) are good-looking surfers.

The group spends all day trying different sexual partners, dropping acid, and staring into space. When they realize that Bobby treats Marty like dirt, the group decides to kill Marty. At first it is a joke, but one by one they slowly warm to the idea, until the night comes to actually do the deed. I won’t say whether they go through with the act or not, but it largely does not matter. What matters is that these teenagers contemplate killing one of their own for being a bully, with no emotion whatsoever. The River’s Edge dealt with similar issues years ago, but there is a vast difference between the two films.

River’s Edge was able to get its message across with dialogue and strong performances. Larry Clark needs to use exploitation. Bully is literally filled to bursting with sex. In the first ten scenes, at least 7 feature a naked teenager, and the count hits at least 18 by the film’s end. At first, there is a point being made; namely that these teenagers are having unprotected sex with multiple partners, getting pregnant and shrugging it off, and simply not thinking about their actions. But after the third or fourth consecutive shot of Ali “going down” on a guy, or Lisa trying out different guys, the point is lost. Bully becomes an ode to pornography, with Clark finding numerous excuses, anything, to get a nipple into each scene. There’s a shot of a naked girl peeing and then walking out of the room. What does it prove? That Rachel Minor is willing to let America see her private parts.

I don’t want to come off as a prude. Nudity has an important role in cinema, especially in a film like Bully. But so much time is spent coupling the characters that we are roughly halfway through the film before the “maybe we could Bobby” story even starts. Clark’s cast is capable enough in their roles that we’re with him much sooner than that. Maybe he didn’t trust that we would get it?

Some time is spent showing parents nodding complacently as they watch their children leave to go party. They ask textbook questions “You kids goin’ out tonight? Okay, don’t be too late. . .” That kind of thing. The suggestion that parents are out of touch with the actions of their children may well be on the money, but the film offers nothing else as being to blame, which I find a bit much. Blaming parents is a cop-out, it is too easy.

Much of what made Kids so strong a picture returns in Bully. Clark’s direction is a bit more controlled and slick this time, and once again there is a great soundtrack backing things up. There is an occasional laugh, most coming from Donny the stoner, and several moments in the film are powerful, especially when it is time to decide whether everyone is serious or not about the plan to murder Bobby. Also powerful is the film’s treatment of the characters’ emotions, or lack of them. This was Clark’s forte in Kids, and he has not lost his touch.

Ultimately, I think our kids will be okay. I think North America has been in a satisfied funk for years, enjoying the fruits of democracy and losing sight of the hardened children of other countries, who are capable of killing without a thought by age ten. But the horrific events of the very recent past will go a long way to opening the eyes of our youth. The difficulties of life are about to be forced into their faces, and maybe now they will realize that life is about more than smoking weed and getting drunk every night.

I believe that kids today have simply had no reason to worry about life, because democracy provides everything they need at cheap prices. Maybe now they can learn to appreciate what they have and put it to good use. They will never stop drinking or smoking, nor should they, but they will recognize these actions as the diversions they are, not a way of life. At least, we can hope they will. It is just too bad that such a catastrophe was needed to accomplish such a needed feat.

Grade: C-

Tim Chandler

“Jeepers creepers… where’d you get those peepers?”

Somewhere in that classic song line, our protagonists are supposed to discover the secret behind the ghoulish bad guy stalking them. Thirty minutes into the film, after four or five moderately frightening scenes, a mysterious phone call explains this to them, and it is at that point that the audience ceases to give a damn and waiters appear asking: “Cheese anyone?”

You see Darius and Trish, brother and sister, are riding across the country when, in the quiet rural wasteland that Deliverance ruined forever, they nearly get run off of the road by the crazed driver of a freaky rusted-out truck. The road rage poster boy eventually moves on, but they spy him later, parked at an old abandoned church; he is dumping what looks like bodies wrapped in sheets down a pipe into the basement of the church. Naturally, after spotting him drive off the two decide to investigate. What they find in the church leads to a whole lot of stupid country bumpkins getting killed by something the press kit calls The Creeper but that goes nameless in the movie. Along the way, the siblings survive several near misses with death and try to figure out what the hell is going on.

Jeepers Creepers actually starts off with promise. The siblings, who playfully insult each other every ten seconds, are annoying from the start, but the appearance of the big, bad truck behind them is sufficiently frightening to forget that for awhile. We have absolutely no clue why this raging rust-bucket is capable of high speeds (it is never explained, and really doesn’t matter) or why it is so obviously trying to intimidate the siblings (this is explained, but again doesn’t matter) but the ability to see ourselves in the siblings’ place makes the scene a true scare. The subsequent church scene also contains some quick frights, though they are cheap and pointless. But for a monster movie like this to be successful, it has to offer a story that is at least partly interesting. The story behind The Creeper is anything but.

The second half of the movie alternates between Darius and Trish fighting The Creeper, running from The Creeper, and trying to convince others that the Creeper is out there. The film has the consistency of a later Friday The Thirteenth sequel, with this silly monster standing around taking bullets to the chest to no effect, eating people’s limbs, drooling and just looking like a castoff from Gargoyles.The either-psychic-or-crazy-or-both woman, who throws out random nuggets of info that she says she dreamed, is the only means the audience is given to follow the plot. Without her, there are only pointless killings. Unfortunately, most of her help seems to have been left on the cutting room floor; she hints that there is some clue in the license plate of the Creeper’s truck, but there isn’t, and she says something about “every 23 springs for 23 days it has to feed” but never goes any farther.

The siblings, played by Gina Philips and Justin Long, are classic horror protagonists. Always one step away from becoming victims of the beast, they bicker, they argue, and of course, they don’t believe a thing. Trish in particular is a caricature of Dana Scully; even after looking right at this hideous man-beast with wings, she refuses to believe the psychic’s exclamation that it isn’t human. It hurts the film that we don’t give a damn about these two whiny siblings; Philips and Long are simply awful actors and manage to elicit only titters fro the audience with their performances. Long in particular has a hilarious “scared face” that makes him look like a patient in Awakenings as he sits there stunned and nearly drooling. The acting is only outdone by Victor Silva’s screenplay (he also directed the film). There is a whole scene involving an old woman who lives with dozens of cats that has no purpose unless Silva simply had to have an old woman cries out “I’ll blow your head off, f’er!” in his movie. That the old woman is played by Eileen Brennan, who was great as Mrs. Peacock in Clue, saddens me.

Jeepers Creepers is a typical bad Hollywood production in that someone with no talent as a director and holding a horrid script was given several million dollars to make a movie. No one in Hollywood who even half-heartedly perused the screenplay could possibly have thought “quality stuff!” There should be laws against making films this bad, if only because the average filmgoer can only afford one movie a month and many will blow their budget on this dreck. It worries me that this was produced partly by Francis Ford Coppola’s production company, and that he is listed as a producer. Has the creator of Apocalypse Now fallen so low?

I said it in my review of The Others; it is scarier to give us a hint of something that might be there, than a man wearing a monster suit. Jeepers Creepers proves me right. Ugh.

Grade: D

Tim Chandler