Ever since The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby and The Omen scared the living snot of of me as a kid (we're talking early '80s here), I've been a huge fan of "occult" or "religious" thrillers. From the tackiest Italian knock-offs (The Antichrist, Beyond the Door, etc.) to the goofiest American re-treads (Audrey Rose, Abby, etc.), I scoured the video shelves and the cable channels, always hungry for just another small taste of what those three movies delivered. Heck, I even snuck into a forbidden matinee of The Seventh Sign back in '88 -- so obviously we're talking about a kid who really wanted to find a few new religio-thrillers to enjoy.

But nowadays, after more than two decades searching for another Exorcist or Omen, I think I've been officially cured of my affections for this particular sub-genre. I blame the filmmakers, frankly, for hewing too closely to established formula and aiming to ape "the big three" without ever forging any new or exciting ground. (If you want to get more specific, I believe it was somewhere between End of Days, Stigmata, Bless the Child and The Exorcism of Emily Rose that I truly gave up -- and last year's remake of The Omen acted as a sign that I'd made the right move.) But don't think I walked into The Reaping with my mind already made up. Hope springs eternal for the ardent horror fan, and every new movie that comes down the pike offers a small promise of something special. Or if not something special, then perhaps something slick and creepy and therefore appealing.

It took less than 20 minutes of Stephen Hopkins' aimlessly stupid The Reaping before I was ready to close the casket on the occult thriller forever. Not so much blatantly inept as it is plain old dreary and dull, The Reaping feels like a used car that was cobbled together out of spare parts stolen from Sleepy Hollow, The Wicker Man, Silent Hill, The Omen and (yes) The Seventh Sign -- with just a few little bits of CSI tossed in there to please the housewives. The Reaping is an aggressively silly affair, and one made all the more humorous for all the effort it makes to be serious. Suffice to say that the leading lady makes less of an impression than do her wide array of tank tops and perpetually in-focus cleavage.

The Next Karate Kid is no longer the embarrassing thing on Hilary Swank's resume. The Reaping is a movie that skates close to total incompetence, neither following its own rules, or seeming to care one way or the other. It focuses on the adventures of Katherine Winter, (Swank) who is something of a gymrat Amazing Randi, turning up at sites where local yokels think they've witnessed a miracle and spoon-feeding them some good old fashioned, God-hating science. When a Southern Caricature named Doug (David Morrissey) asks Amazing Hilary to come down to his town because, um, they're undergoing the ten biblical plagues down there, she doesn't snare him in a butterfly net but happily packs her bags. Let me stop here and mention that, having never seen or heard of actor David Morrissey before this film, I wrote in my notes: "If this guy is Southern, why the English accent?" When I got home, I looked up Morrissey's IMDB page and saw that he was, in fact, English. That's how much The Reaping cares about its details.

Once arrived in Mississippi Burningville, Swank and her overtly-religious partner, played by Idris Elba, begin to take notice of a local family that is being shunned by polite society because of a hazy perception that they are devil-worshippers, and have caused the local river to turn red. The little girl of the family, Loren (AnnaSophia Robb) is so feared by the local rubes, in fact, that at one point they are ready to set off in pickups to kill her. Swank and Co. must set about rowing through the river, colored a convincing shade of red through impressive special effects, in order to determine the scientific reason for the discoloration and calm down the God-fearing populace. At one point a few frogs also plop down from the sky into the river, but I couldn't figure out if that was supposed to count as a separate plague or the same one. And by the way, if a biblical plague is town-specific, which it apparently is, can't you just move one town over?