Pretty disappointing. I was actually enjoying the first 45 minutes to an hour of this, but then it just went completely off the rails IMO. For starters, it is so damn obvious that they didn't have much a budget for this one anyways, and while I can understand that their are still plenty of ways Salva could have gotten around it by at least trying to be a bit more creative. I just don't understand why he even attempted to do these elaborate action sequences knowing he didn't have enough money to do it properly. All it leads to is some really horrendous Greenscreen/CGI fuckery that looks absolutely ridiculous, and takes you out of the scenes completely.

If they do make a fourth I really hope they can get more funding, and if that means ditching Salva all together than by all means have at it. I'd definitely watch another movie though, because Johnathan Breck is still as menacing as ever as The Creeper, and as fans we deserve the sequel we've been waiting for this whole time.

C

As a person with a huge amount of nostalgia for the first film in this franchise (the first 45 or so minutes still unnerve me), this belated third film is...not much after fourteen years. I do not hate it, though. Broadly, I believe it tries to be a proper sequel, faithful to the iconography and mythology-expanding. It does not feel lazy or ambivalently conceived on paper. And the Creeper is still a striking, grotesque movie monster. There are a few modestly fun and gory action sequences, too. (I am going to accept the Creeper's imposing, rusted vehicle now being this 007-style ride with bombs and booby traps. Why not?)

But the clearly lower budget is a hindrance in general. The computer-generated imagery at times is so bad as to be cringe-worthy. The African American sheriff, who I guess is the nominal protagonist alongside an underdeveloped "final girl," registers as a variation on Ray Wise's out-for-vengeance father from the second film, but without the fiery emotional charge Wise brought to his role.

The attempts at connective tissue with the prior films are a mixed bag. (This entry of course, decides to slightly oddly set itself between numbers one and two rather than showing the Creeper's fate twenty-three years later...despite fourteen years elapsing in the real world.) Opening right after the assault on the prison from the first film is neat, but Gina Philips' much-hyped return is merely an anticlimactic cameo, and it is almost hilarious how the film shoehorns in the basketball team from the second.

C+, maybe a C

That is the only good part. The rest of the film, and the second, are trash.