Long ago, at the beginning of the century, my cousin Max somehow convinced me that the canceled-after-six-episodes, aired on squeamish network television out of order, and oh yeah it’s a cartoon “Clerks: The Animated Series” would be a riotous, semi-absurd, semi-slapstick giggle fest. He was right.

This week, he showed me “Red State,” promising it would blow my perceptions of Kevin Smith to, well, smithereens.

It kind of did, but not in the way he intended. The weirdly smooth gray-and-yellow paletted movie follows three dull white boys you can hardly tell apart as they go to an older woman’s trailer expecting a gangbang. She drugs them and turns out to be an operative for a hateful, violent, one-dimensionally brainwashed Christian cult of

hillbillies. When the boys try to escape, the other hateful, violent, one-dimensionally bloodthirsty hillbillies, who work incompetently for law enforcement, show up just hyperventilating to shoot their weapons. The Christians perform ritual murders and keep hostages in burlap-covered cages and have a trapdoor in their floor for bodies and a charismatic leader who drones on in a monologue straight out of a high schooler’s student directing project: “Y’all know about that World Wide Web?” he growls. The cops couldn’t find a crime scene if it were injected into their jelly donuts — when rolling up on the cult compound, a deputy’s toughest question for the cult leader is about when he was protesting a pope’s funeral: “Is Italy nice?”

All the groups mentioned are able to engage in complicated gun battle when necessary, complete with shaky handheld camera, Smith’s first foray outside still, mid-distance shots.

John Goodman, bless his heart, is the only character I wanted to like. He’s an ATF agent with a hint of complexity and morals, even if Smith perplexingly has him attempt a hostage negotiation reading from a script, like he just started tactical work the week before.

But overall, I was the one who ended up feeling squeamish, and uninterested, and especially disappointed when an idiotic pot joke/deus ex machina — which, honestly, could have been straight out of “Clerks: The Animated Series” — saves the day in the end. I wanted to boo. I wanted to say, “Wake up, Lunchbox! It’s not you switching genres that’s ticking me off, but why switch to sexy, mediocre horror? Why are you producing something straight out of the CW Network’s trashcan?”

It turns out, according to interviews of late, that Kevin Smith has some superstition that he’s going to die around his 10th movie and was thinking about death when he made this movie. Not the fear of it, the force that drives many fine horror movies. His own. That’s something no one wants, but when you hear Smith, live, mutter as he paces back and forth on a stage about how he should be eating better and slim down, it seems like the threat of mortality is what’s weighing him down. And instead of using that, tapping into that, Smith retreated from a deeper treatment of the topic and instead decided, in “Red State,” “You know what? Death for everybody. Kill ALL THE THINGS.” The teens. The cult members. The law. Smith’s order? They can all just burn.

The worst part is that, as an audience member, I didn’t care. Kill ‘em all. Let Smith’s deus ex machina sort them out.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore.