A barren highway, a barren film

Despite its stylistic cinematography, "Jeepers Creepers" falls flat.\nIt's a jumbled mess of cliches culled from better horror films ranging from "Duel" to "Terminator." It's only redeeming qualities are its promising opening and edgy ending.\nWhile it clearly has more artistic ambition than the run-of-the-mill teen scare flick, the scariest thing about "Jeepers Creepers" is how little work went into the screenplay -- there's even a psychic to give expository dialogue that couldn't be shoehorned into the plot. \nIt opens on a stretch of highway in, a sparsely populated backwoods straight out of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre." Siblings, played by Justin Long and Gina Philips, affectionately bicker while taking the long road back from spring break.\nLong and Philips would doubtless be well-suited for an Old Navy commercial, but neither can act. They portray Darryl and Trish as annoyingly shrill and unsympathetic characters.\nAs the two verbally spar, a massive, rusty old van edges up behind them. The unseen driver maniacally honks his horn and tries to run them off the road. \nAfter a close shave, they notice the van by a dilapidated church. A figured shrouded in a trenchcoat dumps what appears to be a corpse into corrugated steel pipe. \nDarryl convinces Trish that they need to go back to see if anyone's still alive. He predictably slides down the rat-infested pipe to discover dozens of preserved corpses pinned to the walls and ceiling.\n"Jeepers Creepers" cruises so long as the audience can only imagine the bogeyman -- once it's revealed to be a winged beast, it runs out of gas. They soon find that the flesh-hungry monster can't be killed with shotgun blasts or a few tons of speeding metal.\nAs the inaugural film produced by Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope studio, "Jeepers Creepers" is especially disappointing. It's pretty standard slasher fare, even with a demonic villain who sucks tongues out of decapitated head.