“Gay Fever?” “Sex-ay Forever?” Place your bets, folks – place your bets.

__Jeepers Creepers is one of those movies that fell through the horror world’s cracks, so to speak. In the midst of a glut of Scream knock-offs and wannabes, who had time for yet another movie about wisecracking kids up against certain death? One that doesn’t star any of the crazy-sexy-cool supermodel kids?

Lame pun in 5…4…3…2…

But Jeepers Creepers is a cut above the competition.

Roger, ground control, we have visual contact. The cheesy pun has landed.

“Maybe I should drive. You have that hit-between-the-eyes-with-a-mallet look.”

The fun begins when Trish and Darry, a brother and sister duo, are on their way home from college for spring break. They’re just two normal college kids, bickering like normal college-age siblings, who have opted to take the long way home in Trish’s beat-up “classic” car. On a narrow two-lane strip they’re nearly run off the road by a bizarre, rusted-out clunker of a truck with the license plate “BEATNGU”. Later, they spot the car parked outside an abandoned house where the driver is dumping something down a large pipe. Something wrapped in a sheet, tied with ropes, and displaying large red stains.

“We’ve replaced Joey’s liver with Folger’s Coffee Crystals. Let’s see if he notices.”

The thing about Jeepers Creepers is that it shuns the examples of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. If anything it owes more to Evil Dead than to any of the glut of teen-cast slashers in the past decade. Director/Screenwriter Victor Salva understands what the movie is about. It’s about scaring people.

To that end, the audience is spared the chit-chat so common to recent horror flicks. The actors engage in typical sibling behavior, but without the hipper-than-thou undertones that so many writers use in their vain attempt to show kids that they are “with it,” “hep,” or “down wit da dawgs, yo.” The scares start early, and they keep coming. It’s kept simple at all times – this is a monster movie, and it has no aspirations to be anything else.

Is there anything in the history of film that makes you think this could end well?

Surprisingly, it’s this level of simplicity that puts it on a plateau along with the king-daddy of the modern horror film, the bad-boy Scream itself. But while Scream was a clever send-up of slasher flicks of old that reveled in cleverly-overdone writing, Jeepers Creepers is a genuine thrill-ride that clips along on its sheer economy of language. What little exposition is done is done quickly and gotten over with, so you can get right back to the edge of your seat.

And trust me, that’s where you’ll want to stay.