Starring Max Thieriot, Nick Lashaway, and Emily Meade. Rated 14A.

For his latest horror outing, writer-director Wes Craven tried to inject elements from his two best slasher flicks, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, but something went terribly wrong along the way. What he wound up with was a witless stab-the-teen time-waster that could be his worst film ever. And considering 2005’s wretched Cursed, that’s pretty bad.

In the wee burgh of Riverton, Massachusetts, a family man with a split personality comes to realize that he might be the serial killer known as the Riverton Ripper. He makes a desperate late-night call to his shrink, but his evil persona takes over before help can arrive, and he kills his pregnant wife and various hapless others before disappearing, possibly drowning in a lake. His unborn son survives the rampage, though, so the movie flashes forward 16 years later to see how the kid’s doing.

Not that well, as it turns out. He’s developed into a timid outsider named Bug (Max Thieriot) who spends most of his time thinking about carrion-eating California condors and trying to avoid the school bully, who takes punching orders from a ruthless bitch named Fang (Emily Meade). That’s not Bug’s only problem, though. Local legend has it that, when the Ripper disappeared and/or died, parts of his soul were transferred to Bug and six other babies prematurely born in Riverton Hospital that very day. Thanks to that hokey premise we get to watch a knife-wielding maniac who looks like Rob Zombie in concert and talks like Jigsaw in Saw chase generic teens through the woods and stab them.

There was absolutely no point in releasing this thing in 3-D because not once does it make valid depth-of-field use of the format. Clearly the filmmakers only had one goal in mind: to charge suckers like us extra to view this crap through plastic glasses.

Now that’s what I call horrifying.