Horror movies have a right to be tacky. Good taste really shouldn't cross anybody's mind while determining the swift arc of an ax or a cool trajectory for blood to spray. But if you're looking for groundbreaking badness, you needn't look much further than the new "Exorcist" prequel, which is one interminably grisly waste.

"Exorcist: The Beginning," which Warner Bros. has been trying to release for a year, drags us to a Kenyan village just after World War II where the excavation of a church is underway and an unspeakable force is driving the locals batty. To retrieve an artifact from the church and to do a lot of sulking, Father Lancaster Merrin (Stellan Skarsgard) arrives to sort out the whole mess. The movie's entire thrust is to get the faithless Merrin to do one preliminary exorcism before famously going gown-to-gown with Linda Blair in the William Friedkin original. Free to be unchaste, Merrin also starts flirting with the anonymous blond doctor (Izabella Scorupco) who, frankly, just seems happy to see another European face.

Presumably, Merrin wins this gig because he looks a lot like Indiana Jones. Skarsgard gets the assignment because fellow Swede Max von Sydow had the good sense not to reprise his role from the original and its 1977 sequel. Skarsgard is the only person more disgusted than we are about being here. To be fair, it looks like he took the job when Paul Schrader was still in charge. Schrader, in addition to having written "Taxi Driver" and directed movies such as "Affliction" and "Auto Focus," is also the author of an astute book on transcendentalism in the work of three non-American directors. Needless to say, the studio eventually nixed Schrader's version of this prequel, which I imagine was heavy on the academic ideas and low on scenes shot through the holes in half-eaten corpses.

To correct this, the so-so action director Renny Harlin ("Die Hard 2," "Cutthroat Island") was brought in for a total overhaul. One can only assume we have him to thank for the pack of hyenas that tear up a Kenyan boy and the obligatory shower sequence for our pert blond medic, who eventually runs around in darkness, dripping wet, in a towel, holding a phony-looking candle.

What separates "Exorcist: The Beginning" from just any small-time scare-athon is the total absence of scares. A lot of the movie feels like "gotcha" night at your local haunted house. Harlin prefers to blast out shots that make no sense but are designed to make the people in the front row jump. What, for instance, is the randy, racist Brit with the bad skin doing in the doctor's bed? The movie even pays a desperate tribute to Blair in its potty-mouthed, brain-dead finale. The movie misses the underlying point of the original (divorce will turn your 'tweener Satanic!) and even seems to miss its own point. Remind me again why there's an anticolonial uprising by the Kenyans against the British in the middle of all this would-be scary business? (I'm all for a sovereign people, but the devil-fearing Africans' priorities are screwy. The British aren't satanic, they're just British.)

As it happens, equating the colonial overlords with the devil is the least of the movie's offenses. This prequel has something to appall everybody. You might wonder why we really need a flashback to a Nazi shooting a little Jewish girl replayed three times. You might be curious why a black actor would take a part that requires him to act subhumanly confused. And, finally, will the lady playing the Kenyan who gives birth to carrion actually put this movie on her resume?

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com