The movie is chock full of clichés that have all been done before and done better.

Sean Patrick Flanery plays Jacob Greyman, a demon hunter. He's a loner (like Clint Eastwood's Man-With-No-Name except not nearly as good), a half-breed who sides with humanity (like Wesley Snipes in the Blade trilogy) to hunt down and kill demons (like Hellboy). See where I'm going with this?

Although the Catholic Church needs him, they don't trust him. They assign a nun (Colleen Porch) to be his moral compass (like Chrono Crusade).

Their target: the fallen angel Asmodeus, the living embodiment of Lust. (Played by Billy Drago of all people! I'll complain about that more in a minute.) Asmodeus is aided by an uncharacteristically faithful servant, an unamed succubus (Tania Deighton).

This movie seemed to have the right idea story wise, but was completely and utterly botched in its execution.

Clichés aside, I do enjoy movies about demon hunters and exorcists, especially when the Catholic Church hierarchy is presented as a military organization fighting a war against the supernatural. To me, that's part of what makes Warrior Nun Areala so good. (Sex appeal is the other part.)

Demon Hunter just doesn't get it.

In the opening scene, Jake is portrayed as a "clean up man" for when exorcisms fail. In a scene ripped straight from the 1973 Exorcist, a priest is trying to save the soul of a possessed girl. When he fails, and is killed, Jake marches in and kicks the crap out of her.

The justification for this violence is that her soul has been "consumed," but this isn't accurate. Souls aren't "consumed" like firewood. They are pushed to the side and a demon takes over. TV's Supernatural does a much better job of portraying exorcisms and conveying compassion for the souls of the people whose bodies are being used.

In the "behind the scenes" featurette, the screenwriters boast about having read the Bible and how thoroughly they are acquainted with it, but in the Bible, possessed people were never beaten or killed. The demons were driven out and the people returned to their normal lives. The screenwriters may have read the Bible, but they either didn't absorb what they read or they ignored it.

So the lack of compassion, the un-Christianlike manner in which the hero is portrayed, and this strange deviation from the traditional exorcist movie convention are the first sign that this movie is headed in the wrong direction.

Since the Church doesn't trust Jake, they team him up with a nun, Sister Sarah, setting us up for some sexual tension a la X-Files, a la Revelations, etc. etc.

Casting Colleen Porch as a nun was certainly no mistake. She's hot, yet innocent at the same time. She's tempting, yet unavailable. However, we only get a glimpse of her in the habit. To top it off, it's a pre-Vatican II habit that nuns haven't worn since the 1960s.

She shows up at Jake's door with that sexy-secretary look, dressed in a business suit and mini skirt. Hot! "It's hard to be incognito when you're wearing a habit," she explains.

But there's never any sexual tension. Jake isn't remotely interested in her, although he does seem to have a thing for the succubus.

So Jake and Sister Sarah are hot on the trail of Asmodeus. Tell me something, when you think hot, steamy, demon sex, when you thnk of LUST what is the first male image that comes to mind? Whatever it is, I am absolutely certain that not a single person in the world thinks of 57-year-old Billy Drago dressed head to toe in about three layers of leather. Leather shirt, leather pants, long leather trench coat, leather boots. He's wearing more layers than an eskimo and he's about as sexy as one,too.

Originally, the script called for a towering, muscle-bound adonis to play the living embodiment of lust, but producer Stephen J. Cannel claims they couldn't find an actor who fit the role. To me, this says that the script sucks, the pay sucks, or their casting director sucks. At no time does it say, "Cast the most asexual person you can think of."

And dreadfully asexual he is. This guy is supposed to be a fallen angel whose goal is to impregnate as many women as possible to spread his demon seed. Yet he's wearing enough clothes to survive a month in Siberia and he looks like the ladies would pay him good money to keep him that way. Sorry, Grandpa (and yes, he is an actual grandfather -- his grandson, William Franklin Burrows, was born in 1994!) but "living embodiment of lust" and AARP just don't go together.

On the plus side, the FX were well done and the fights were well choreographed, but the characters were so hollow and wooden, that all that effort was lost.

There is never, at any point, a time when you fear that Jake will be tempted or will turn against the Church. There's no time where there's any sense of tension or danger. There is no change in Jake's character, he ends the film the way he starts it, alone and outcast.

The movie, like its characters, is shallow and pointless.

Demon Hunter was completely inept from beginning to end. The film makers didn't know how to make it sexy, they didn't know how to make it scary and they certainly didn't know how to make it Catholic. (At one point, Sister Sarah calls Jake a "soulless bastard" with little provocation. Hardly something I'd expect to hear from a nun, an nothing about her thus far in the film leads the viewer to believe her prone to such a profane outburst.)

If you were to see this film, it at least has beautiful women and decent FX so you probably won't walk away thinking it was a total waste of time and money, but what kind of praise is that? Who wants to see a film that is merely adequate? That's the highest level Demon Hunter aspires to. It's mediocre and poorly executed through and through.

Half-man, half-demon dude goes around offing demons and laying the smackdown on possessed people who simply don't respect the bible. He's been raised by priests to fight for good, but he's also struggling with his own inner demons. (Weak pun intended.) Paired up with a chaste (yet inevitably sexy) young nun, our kinda-hero tangles with a boss demon who sweats a lot and rambles on and on to whichever undead minion happens to be within earshot.

So the concept basically sounds like Constantine meets Hellboy meets the first five minutes of Scary Movie 3, only imagine that concoction stripped of all energy, excitement, creativity, style, intensity, thrills, chills, gore, and half-decent special effects.

That's Demon Hunter in a nutshell, one of the driest, dumbest, and most consistently derivative knock-offs since that E.T. rip-off about the alien who loved McDonalds. (You know the one I mean.) What could have been a mindlessly exciting b-level retread is instead a ponderously uneventful yawnfest laden with overwhelming amounts of lengthy exposition rants, circuitous backstories, and dialogue barrages that border on the unjustifiably painful. The action bits are fairly few and far between, but you'll know 'em when you see 'em, because you won't be able to help but notice that the main characters have somehow managed to stop yammering for 11 consecutive seconds.

Not only does Demon Hunter pilfer from four or five painfully obvious sources, but it doesn't even bother to take the borrowed foundations and build something semi-creative on top of it. It's all familiar themes, endless conversations, goofy FX work, oh, and a sweaty Billy Drago in a series of hotel room scenes in which he gropes a devil-woman with glue-on horns. If this flick were just a little more awful, it'd probably be hysterical.

Don't believe me?

Screenwriter/stunt coordinator Mitch Gould and DTV hack Scott Ziehl* may go on to much bigger and better things, and I'll be here to give 'em a second shot when that happens, but what they've put together here is equal parts boring, silly, and downright stolen.

(*To be fair, Ziehl also directed Earth vs. the Spider, which is a perfectly, stupidly enjoyable b-movie, just so everyone knows I'm not just gunning for the little guys. He also did Cruel Intentions 3, which I somehow missed, and he's presently working on something called Road House 2: Last Call, which stars Jake Busey, Will Patton, William Ragsdale, and Johnathon Schaech, and which (no lie) I cannot wait to see.)

Final Thoughts: A dreary and overly familiar DTV occult thriller is, of course, nothing new. But what's interesting here is that Demon Hunter was produced by Stephen J. Cannell, a name familiar to anyone who's seen The Rockford Files, The Greatest American Hero, The A-Team, Hunter, Riptide, 21 Jump Street, Wise Guy, or The Commish. These days Mr. Cannell is producing movies called Demon Hunter, The Tooth Fairy, and It Waits, two of which I've seen, both of which are destined for the $1.99 bin by the end of 2006. Hollywood's a nutty place.

Regarding Demon Hunter -- stolen plots, stupid stories, and silly monsters I can take, but there's no damn reason a 75-minute movie should feel like 275.