Blood and a whole lot more on the bayou

How many dead bodies would you have to drain to fill a two-mile stretch of river with blood? In “The Reaping,” there is a guy who can give you those figures right off the top of his head. He doesn’t even use a pocket calculator, or one of those height-to-pints conversion charts. You say “river of blood,” and he’s all, Oh yeah, 700,000 to 800,000 bodies oughta do it. Like it’s no big thing.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but this crimson tide doesn’t necessarily have to come from dead bodies. When you’re out there jet skiing on it, blood’s blood.

This is particularly pertinent in Haven, a town in the middle of the Louisiana bayou where nobody ever seems to do much but go to church and form vigilante mobs. It is one of the demonically cheerful moms in Haven who brings up what a bummer the whole river of blood thing has been for local jet skiers, including her son. She points out the boy to Katherine Winter (Hilary Swank), who has come to Haven to test the waters for corpuscles, and he stares back sullenly, twitching like a finger on the trigger of a gun.

A river of blood is but the first of what many in the town seem to fear will be a full blown set of 10 biblical plagues, matching those inflicted upon Egypt in the Book of Exodus.

And they aren’t wrong, although there’s a lot about this supernatural horror picture that is. Personally, I lost track of the plagues at eight, which is either fire raining from the sky or English actor David Morrissey’s unfortunate affectation of a Southern accent. “The Reaping” may deliver on its full quota of plagues, but I’m not sure the people who made it can be trusted to count all the way to 10.

Before the movie finally is consumed by its own plague of cheeseball computer-generated effects, it does have a few genuinely scary moments. But those are preceded by a long, slow setup about Katherine’s former work as a minister in Sudan – where her 12-year-old daughter and husband were murdered – and her current career as a debunker of miracles and religious manifestations.

She teaches at Louisiana State University, where apparently it’s possible to major in, and even be flunking, debunking. Katherine is the Indiana Jones of miracle busters. Wherever there are ignorant, impoverished people scraping some shred of meaning from weeping madonnas and bleeding walls, she shows up to debunk the hell out of them. Before leaving for Haven, she boasts to her college class that she has investigated 48 cases of religious manifestations, and come up with 48 scientific explanations.

But she’s about to go 48-1.

This turnabout follows a visit from Doug Blackwell (Morrissey), Haven’s hunky emissary and someone toward whom Katherine would no doubt feel a lot less attracted if she had seen “Basic Instinct 2.” He explains that the mysterious death of a local boy has turned the river red, which has given rise to fears that soon it will be raining frogs in the bayou.

Just try jet skiing through that.

Meanwhile, there is a demon child living out there in that swamp, with hard, beady little eyes like a possum, which she cleverly uses to make everybody in town want to kill her. When Katherine goes near the little girl (AnnaSophia Robb), she gets visions of her own daughter right before she died.

Whenever a herd of cattle drops dead, or maggots and flies swarm the fish fry she’s attending, Katherine offers up some increasingly dubious scientific explanation. But it never seems to occur to her to question her own visions, including one fever dream in which she’s back in the desert and then awakens with sand on her feet.

Katherine is one of those confounding young women who insists on going up every darkened staircase asking, “Is anyone there?” There is no demon child’s house she won’t let herself into when nobody answers her knock at the door, and no demon child’s mother with whom she won’t stand there casually shooting the breeze after being asked, “Are you gonna kill my baby girl?”

Skipping ahead a few plagues, some kids get head lice, and then some other people who probably have it coming get boils, lots of them. And there’s a pretty impressive plague of locusts, which I’m pleased to report brings about a significant reduction in the local jet-skiing population.

“The Reaping” isn’t quite bad enough, or even New Testament enough, to qualify as a sign of the impending apocalypse. But by the time it’s over, you know you’re getting close.

`The Reaping’

Rated R (violence, disturbing images, some sexuality)

Cast Hilary Swank, Idris Elba, David Morrissey, AnnaSophia Robb, Stephen Rea

Director Stephen Hopkins

Writers Carey W. Hayes, Chad Hayes

Running time 1 hour, 36 minutes