While hacking and slashing his way through body parts in this summer's next-to-last horror film, the creature in Jeepers Creepers passes the time by whistling a little 1938 ditty by the same name.

Better, both acoustically and to raise the fright factor, would have been to choose a song from a later era, say, Strangers in the Night. After all, things that go bump in the dark are definitely scarier than things that go bump in the middle of the day.

In fact for half the movie filmmaker Victor Salva does a pretty good job of proving that point, despite writing a script that uses every cliche modern-horror technique in the book -- including the standard stupid college students heading home for spring break.

In this case, Gina Philips and Justin Long play the sibling stupid college students who find themselves driving along a deserted stretch of road that urban legend has it was the site where a pair of high school lovers were decapitated years earlier.

The pair witness a shadowy figure in the distance dumping what appears to be bodies down a metal pipe on the grounds of an old, abandoned church. Realizing the jig is up, the creepy looking figure climbs into an even creepier looking truck and runs the kids off the road before driving off into the distance.

Of course this is the point in the film where the kids head to the nearest farmhouse and call police, right? Not on your life. Remember, these are college students and they do the only natural thing -- head right back to the church and climb down the metal tube where they think they saw bodies being dumped.

What they end up uncovering is like something out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre with the thought the pyscho killer is still out there and he knows what they're driving.

So far so good. While not an original take on the genre, Philips and Long deliver credible performances while Salva uses the fear of the unknown and an effective score to create some seat-squirming moments.

But then for some unexplained reason Salva stops the fun by turning up the lights and driving away all the shadows. Instead of maintaining the visceral terror, the director chooses instead to take the easy way out by showing the gore in detail and letting the body count, instead of the tension, rise.

Worse yet is the introduction of a psychic who wraps up the mystery of the killer in a neat little package that was obviously designed for easy teenage consumption. How can there be any fear of the unknown if the audience is provided with too much information?

It really is a shame given Jeepers Creepers at least appeared to be headed down the right road at the start. Unfortunately, like the film's heroes, it got too badly sidetracked to ever fully recover.

(This film is rated R)

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