On its twenty-second day of feeding, The Creeper disguised as a scarecrow abducts young Billy Taggart in front of his father Jack, and older brother Jack Jr. The next day, a school bus carrying a high school basketball team and cheerleaders suffers a blowout, after one of the tires is hit by a hand-crafted shuriken made of bone fragments. Later, cheerleader Minxie Hayes has a vision of Billy Taggart and Darry Jenner, another victim of the Creeper, who attempt to warn her about The Creeper, before he blows out another tire, disabling the bus. With the team stranded, The Creeper abducts bus driver Betty Borman and Coach Charlie Hanna; Coach Dwayne Barnes attempts to flee back into the bus, but is taken by The Creeper when Scotty Braddock confronts him and refuses to let him in. When he returns, he singles out five of the students: Dante Belasco, Jake Spencer, Scotty, Andy “Bucky” Buck, and Deaundre “Double D” Davis. Minxie has another vision in which Darry says The Creeper emerges every twenty-third spring, for twenty-three days to eat humans, and she tells the other students. After hearing several police reports, the Taggarts go hunting for The Creeper and soon make radio contact with the school bus. The Creeper attacks Bucky, but Rhonda stabs it through the head with a javelin. Dante begins prodding the Creeper’s wing, only for it to grab and decapitate him. The Creeper tears off its injured head and uses Dante’s severed head to replace its own. The students decide to leave the bus to find help, but the Creeper returns and chases them into a field, where The Creeper kills Jake and takes Scotty. When The Creeper attacks Bucky on the bus again, the Taggarts arrive and Jack shoots it with a home-made harpoon, but The Creeper fights him off and manages to escape after flipping over the bus. Rhonda, Izzy Cohen, and Double D find a truck and attempt to escape but are chased by the Creeper again. Izzy pushes Rhonda out of the truck before causing the vehicle to crash, injuring both Double D and the Creeper, who loses an arm, a leg, and a wing, although Izzy crawls from the wreckage before the truck explodes. The Creeper continues to pursue Double D by leaping towards him and, when it has Double D pinned down, Jack shows up and shoots the Creeper in the head with the harpoon. He repeatedly stabs the Creeper in the chest but it goes into a hibernation state before it can die. 23 years later, a group of teenagers drive to the Taggart farm, where the Creeper is a sideshow attraction, called "The Bat Out of Hell". They see an elderly Jack watching it with the harpoon at his side, and when they ask him if he is waiting for something, he looks up at the Creeper and says: “about three more days, give or take a day or two".
, a review aggregator, reports that 23% of 122 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating is 4.2/10. The site's consensus reads: "Jeepers Creepers 2 is competently made, but it doesn't have the scares of the original." Metacritic rated it 36/100 based on 29 reviews. Andy Klein of Variety wrote, "Few things are scarier than a sequel to a bad movie, but, in fact, Jeepers Creepers 2 is substantially better than its predecessor, even while staying strictly within the genre's well-defined boundaries." Michael Rechtshaffen of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "The sequel has got the creepy bits down cold but lacks a fair share of scares." Roger Ebert, writing for The Chicago Sun-Times, rated the film one out of four stars and said, "Victor Salva's Jeepers Creepers 2 supplies us with a first-class creature, a fourth-rate story, and dialogue possibly created by feeding the screenplay into a pasta maker." In The New York Times, Dave Kehr wrote that creature lacks personality when the concept is retooled into a film series. Gene Seymour of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the sequel lacks the mood of the first film, and the teen protagonists are too annoying to draw much of the audience's sympathy. However, Seymour praised Wise's performance. In a positive review, Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club called it "the rare sequel that's not only bigger than its predecessor, but also better". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale.
Box office
Jeepers Creepers 2 opened in 3,124 theaters and had a U.S. domestic gross of US$ 35,667,218. Other international takings were $27,435,448, and the worldwide gross was $63,102,666, slightly higher than the original. It displaced its predecessor, Jeepers Creepers, to become the new record holder for the highest ever Labor Day opening weekend four-day gross, holding the record until the 2005 release of Transporter 2. After the 2015 Labor Day weekend, Jeepers Creepers 2 still holds the #5 spot with the #7 spot still held by Jeepers Creepers. Allowing for films that had been released prior to Labor Day, Jeepers Creepers 2 holds the #9 spot after the 2015 Labor Day four-day weekend.
In September 2015, Jeepers Creepers 3 was officially greenlit. The film was slated to begin filming in April 2016 until production was halted when Victor Salva was boycotted from filming in Canada for his criminal past. The film was eventually released in a one-night-only showing on September 26, 2017, 14 years after the release of Jeepers Creepers 2. It grossed $2.3 million in theaters.
