Wes Craven’s name has lured me to watch bad films before. “They” was intriguing and suspenseful until it ended right at (what felt like) the start of the third act. And he had a few other clunkers like “Red Eye” and “Dracula 2000”. (That said, I love “Nightmare on Elm Street”, and both versions of “The Last House on the Left.”)

So, it was with was trepidation that I fired up “The Girl in the Photographs”, the last film with a Craven production credit. Admittedly, it’s an executive producer credit, so the extent of his involvement was probably just signing some checks.

The plot: a young woman, played by Claudia Lee, keeps coming across photographs of tortured and disfigured women. (Or was it just one woman? I never could tell.) She suspects that a serial killer is operating in her small South Dakota town, though the cops refuse to believe her. Wouldn’t be much of a movie otherwise. 

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a nihilistic professional photographer played by Kal Penn decides he will take his entourage of models and assistants to this small town to imbue his aesthetic with some of this freaky serial killin’ energy. (I know—it doesn’t really make sense, but that’s the gist.)

“The Girl in the Photographs” feels like it could have been a good film, though I can’t figure out exactly how. As it is, it just kind of wanders. It’s not really a slow burn—stuff does happen, but I couldn’t bring myself to care when it did.

The movie seems to think it’s saying something profound about how photography can immortalize people in a particular moment, but it never does much with the idea.

Are the actors bad, or just struggling with bad dialogue? Hard to tell. Kal Penn had a couple of funny lines ruminating on whether he could be compared to a PC (old and outdated) or a Mac (fresh and hip.)Anyway, skip this one.