When three hot-blooded college kids get an internet invitation from a nubile cougar for a bit of slap’n’tickle in her trailer they think it’s too good to be true.

It is.

Instead of receiving bawdy lessons of love from a rural Mrs Robinson they wind up drugged, trussed and at the mercy – if that’s what it could be called – of hellfire preacher Abin Cooper (Parks), a Fred Phelps-style religious mentalist and his baying congregation of God-fearing rednecks.

We’re firmly in Westboro Baptist Church (the baying 'God Hates Fags' mob) territory in director Kevin Smith’s bloodily slapstick satire of twisted religious belief in a diabolic community of in-breeding and simple-minded, eye-for-an-eye justice.

Cooped up in wire cages and stunned with electric cattle prods, the three youngsters await the fate of a previous unfortunate who – after Cooper had given a rambling Old Testament justification – is trussed up in cling film and shot in the head. Well, mercy me.

Fortunately, His Unholiness’s murderous sermon is interrupted by a passing patrolman who is looking for a station wagon that sideswiped the sheriff’s saloon (while the lawman was inside receiving the oral attentions of some young chap).

One of the kids takes the opportunity to escape (after sawing through his bonds with a corpse’s jagged bone) and – after discovering an arsenal of automatic weapons beneath the church – makes for the boundary...only to be shot dead by the closeted cop beyond the wire.

Realising that this S.N.A.F.U is going to reflect badly on the ATF agents led by John Goodman’s sympathetic boss, orders come down from on high that nobody – including the remaining hostages and child church members – is to be left alive.

It’s a long way from the slacker days of Clerks but Smith again displays a keen ear for teen dialogue and best sequences in the film occur early with the trio of randy kids winding each other up before the big event. Goodman is also good value as the lugubrious fed.

However, Smith’s heavy-handed send-up of church and state excess smacks of one of his more hysterical Twitter rants and it is only the quality of the acting – from youngsters Angarano and Gallner – that save this from blundering into cinematic purgatory.

It’s a bit of a mess but there’s enough inspired writing and outrageous plot twists to keep you from heading for the exit.

Tim Evans