The Hagstone Demon

Still sporting that roadie hair and specs from the Judah Friedlander collection, Borchardt plays Douglas Elmore, a socially stiff apartment building super, grieving widower, and hard drinker. When he’s fit for work, he keeps getting sidetracked by all manner of annoyances: chatty old ladies, a creepy squatter chick named Mary Anne (Nadine Gross), and gruesomely murdered tenants. The police suspect Douglas, but he knows Mary Anne is somehow behind the killings. (She owns a hairless cat, for pity’s sake.) What Douglas and his clergyman brother-in-law (Sasha Andreev) also know - and give up slowly - is that there’s a supernatural explanation for what’s going down, one that involves Douglas’s dead wife.

You can feel Springer striving, admirably, to get creative, from a laugh-out-loud interrogation room exchange to an aesthetic choice to make Douglas’s dreams the only scenes shot in color. But there’s far more that takes you out of the movie than ever gets you caught up in it. Gross’s looks and wild-eyed kookiness inadvertently play like Amy Poehler trying horror, and Borchardt’s frequent voice-over bits are all Midwestern flatness - Michael Moore narration slapped onto a whole other sort of sideshow.

The movie’s only genuine scares are the fun-but-cheap kind: It’s the killer! No, wait, it’s only a kitchen appliance. But there’s also an occasional element from the scary-bizarre category, at least, to break up the amateur-hour tedium. Hallucinatory satanic ritual scenes feature a surprising number of everyday folk (friends of the filmmakers, one guesses) in the altogether, like some “Body Beautiful’’ art photography book come awkwardly to life. And Borchardt gets a “Lethal Weapon’’ thoughts-of-suicide moment - a payoff, such as it is, for keeping those “American Movie’’ dreams alive.