Somewhere in the assembly-line green-lighting of summer sequels to every movie that made even a couple of dollars at the box office, somebody gave the go-ahead to Jeepers Creepers 2.

Probably about five minutes later, writer-director Victor Salva wrote the "script."

Maybe a week later they finished shooting the "film." This isn't true, of course, but you'd never know it from the finished product.

Salva, who also wrote and directed the first Jeepers Creepers, sets this one on a broken-down school bus on a desolate highway, where the high school students onboard are accosted by a deadly flying bat-thing -- officially credited as "The Creeper" that feeds on humans.

This actually sounds like a cool premise, I think, if Salva had bothered to create characters that weren't ciphers or morons.

Rather, his screenwriting technique is to assign a maximum of one personality quirk per character and stop there.

So every time the star quarterback speaks, we know he's going to say something selfish or bull-headed and every time something goes wrong, we know the equipment manager will freak out and whine like a high school-aged Bill Paxton.

Because of their appallingly predictable nature, I grew tired of these stereotyped characters immediately and longed for the Creeper to kill them all.

Unfortunately, this movie is fickle with its bloodshed and the Creeper is one of those movie bad guys of the Michael Myers ilk who prefers to screw around, fall over stuff and kill-time on the clock rather than actually kill people.

Instead, we are subjected to a solid hour of watching these brats bickering with one another and screaming frightened obscenities before somebody finally gets decapitated. Which is actually a relief.

I don't know who decided that the more slimy and sluggish a creature is, the scarier he is, but this Golden Rule of American horror movies should be amended as soon as possible.

At first, when it was flying around at supersonic speed, the Creeper looked pretty horrifying, but after a while it stopped doing that as much and was resigned to hovering around aimlessly, snarling grumpily like an aerodynamic Nick Nolte.

Then we learn the monster eats on a strict diet, gorging itself on humans for 23 straight days and then sleeping for the next 23 years, and only eating the kids who are consumed by fear.

Having all of these provisos diminishes the Creeper's creepiness, however, and makes me long for Freddy and Jason.

These horror icons are not as particular about slaughtering people and don't have as severe a case of obsessive compulsive disorder about killing people.

So I went from wishing the Creeper would kill the students to wishing the students would kill the Creeper to finally just wishing someone would kill the filmmakers. I doubt the film makers had this puzzle in mind.

Salva should take a hint from Danny Boyle's zombie film, 28 Days Later, a much better summer horror movie.

That gem remembered what this one did not.

The most engaging aspect of any good monster flick is not the monster(s), but the people.