It’s hard to imagine any distributor touching Kevin Smith’s first drama, “Red State,” in anything like its present, woefully misshapen form. Smith has vowed to do an end-run by distribbing the flim himself, taking it on the road to campuses and concert halls and whatnot to sell a premium-priced ticket that will include admission to the movie and exposure to Smith in person, doing one of his popular Q & A appearances. This strikes me as a highly labor intensive way to try to make back the cost of the movie (which reportedly cost $4 million). Distributors were apparently unaware going into the screening last night that the film wasn’t really for sale, that Smith’s promised “live auction” of distribbing rights would be a sham, and they seem to be angry.

The problem with showing the movie in one town at a time: Word of mouth. It’s going to be devastating. You couldn’t assemble a more ideal crowd for a Smith film than the one that packed the Library Theater this morning to see the second screening of “Red State.” Much of the audience looked like Smith, and Sundance made his name. However, Smith possesses only one skill — the ability to write raunchy, profane, often very funny dialogue. He turns his back on this talent in “Red State,” in which there is so little funny dialog that you could fit it all on one page.

Instead, the movie begins as a typical teen horror flick, then morphs into an indictment of the ATF’s assault on the Branch Davidians. Three horny teens (these apparent protagonists get only a few minutes of screen time, as does a fourth protagonist who shows up late in the first hour) respond to a personal ad hoping to take part in an orgy with an older woman. Instead, they find themselves prisoners of an evil religious cult that tortures and murders gay people in a little rural church in a deep South state.

The crowd was clearly expecting a horror-comedy at the expense of antigay fundamentalists like the Westboro Baptist Church (which, obligingly, mounted a small protest of maybe 20 souls at the “Red State” premiere last night; a counter demonstration whipped up by Smith drew about three times as many). But the movie goes seriously awry with a nearly 15-minute rant by Michael Parks as the church’s pastor. Parks, who has something of the folksy gravitas of Kris Kristofferson, speaks very slowly about how gays are sinners and need to be exterminated. But we already know all about his hateful motives before this scene, which serves no purpose. The story of the three teens is pushed to the background and by the time Smith gets back to it, all the air has gone out of the room and he seems barely interested in the fates of the threey boys anyway. We hardly see them again, though there is an okay chase scene shot with hand-held cameras.

The movie then restarts with the story of a hard-assed ATF agent (John Goodman) who leads a heavily-armed stakeout at the wacky church’s compound, which contains lots of assault rifles. It becomes clear that, though the character is somewhat sympathetic, he is also bent on killing everyone in the church, including women and children.

I agree with Smith’s two main political messages of gay tolerance and of disgust for the federal government’s actions in indiscriminately attacking everyone inside the Branch Davidian compound near Waco in the early 90s; the federales, whose actions resulted in the deaths of everyone inside including women and children, subsequently made the preposterous case that they mainly were trying to help while the cultists killed themselves.

Yet Smith delivers his politics ineptly– in long, long chunks of dialogue. He has absolutely no ability to create suspense, to stage a shootout in an involving way or even to establish where his characters are in relation to one another. The staging of the siege isn’t remotely convincing; hours after it begins, there are still only half a dozen or so officers trying to take down the entire compound, though I’ve seen that many law enforcment officials respond to a fender bender. There also isn’t anyone for the audience to root for as the climax involves a (typically talky and inert) confrontation between a partially repellent character and a wholly repellent one.

In the final act, the movie both takes a weird turn and evaporates in a wisp of nothingness, with an anticlimactic court scene that ends the film with so little impact that, as the credits began to roll, the audience sat in stunned silence, trying to figure out what it had just seen. Over the closing credits, Smith delivers yet another static and pointless scene, this one involving one guy standing alone singing a song. Smith’s fans, and everyone else, are going to be baffled by this movie.