“Nobel Son.” Elevator pitch? An arrogant chemistry professor (Alan Rickman, Harry Potter’s evil professor extraordinaire), dismissive of the son (Bryan Greenberg) intrigued only by “cannibalism and Game Boy,” wins the Nobel Prize — and finds his son’s been kidnapped. The ‘napper demands the Nobel money as ransom and thinks, quite reasonably, that any father would make such a sacrifice for his only child.

Unfortunately, the movie is a trap, and not just for bit-characters Danny DeVito, Ted Danson, Mary Steenburgen and Bill Pullman. There are warnings within the first minute of the movie that it will be “House of Wax” with half-baked voice-over references to Montaigne, just about when the son is mumbling “there’s times I’d give a thumb for a little benevolence” as we watch five different angles of someone getting their thumb brutally hacked off.

The rest of the movie is sort of a trash soup of jarring and unremarkable dance music — the kind of stuff you’d only suffer to stay awake and uncomfortable driving across, say, Texas overnight — and the cheap bedroom eyes of Eliza Dushku, the son’s lust interest. Dushku, playing a nympho slam poet with far too much invested in “art therapy,” is a soulless simulacrum of exhibitionist raunch. She’s any girl who thinks a father who burned her journals and poetry when she was 15 wasn’t doing her a favor.

“Nobel Son” doesn’t deserve over-thinking. At one point, a detective (Pullman) notes that “there were four thumb-related crimes in L.A. in the last three weeks.” This leap of law enforcement funding fantasy doesn’t even go anywhere. Oh, and the movie’s got a “hospital for the criminally insane” in it. It’s that bad. If anything, at least Potter fans get to learn what Severus Snape’s fourth Unforgivable Curse is — Excremento Horribilis.