Seriously?!

GET OUT (C) - Neither funny nor suspenseful, this genre mashup must have seemed like a great idea on paper. But in the hands of a first-time director, and with a dull cast, this morality play about how blacks are treated in a white world is just slow-paced and confounding.

Maybe I missed the wink to black viewers and to sensitive liberals about how Important this film is. And it certainly has a worthwhile message to convey -- everyday life inside the white power structure can seem like a literal horror story for even the most mild and acquiescent of black men. In the end, they are deemed less than human.

Got it. But "Get Out" is not the vehicle for successfully conveying that message. Here, very funny Jordan Peele ("Keanu," TV's "Key & Peele") debuts as writer-director, with clunky results. He follows Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and his white girlfriend Rose (a tedious Allison Williams from HBO's "Girls") as they head upstate to meet her parents and brother. Leave it to Peele to misuse Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford as Rose's parents. Most of the actors here are either miscast or wasted, with little sense of an ensemble effort. No one expects Williams to bring much to the show, but Keener is an alchemist, and she looks almost embarrassed to be a part of this.

The gimmick here is Peele's use of horror and zombie tropes to turn Chris' experience into a hellish nightmare. Seemingly innocuous or familiar standard-issue-polite racism, delivered by a smiling Obama voter, turns horrific. The problem is that Peele has the white actors deliver all of their lines in a way that is ham-handed and clunky. I know he is going for an automaton effect at some point, but it doesn't work. He is a rookie trying to produce a modern "Rosemary's Baby," building dread minute by minute, but he ends up in "Scary Movie" territory. He wants to be an auteur, but he doesn't have the voice or the chops yet.

You see, all is not as it seems at first. Or maybe it is. The first half hour of set up is dreadfully slow. An opening scene involves a young black man (Lakeith Stanfield from "Short Term 12") being plucked from the streets for Walking While Black; he'll turn up later. Cut to the cozy urban apartment of Chris and Rose, two people devoid of chemistry, which makes you wonder why Chris would agree to visit her parents or put up with them and her overtly racist brother for more than an hour before exiting gracefully back to the city.

But this is a movie, so we go along with it. At a party, each of the family's white friends is issued a preciously awkward line to throw at Chris, in order to exhibit their obvious latent racism. We won't spoil the rest of the gimmicky plot, but rest assured that inherent evil lurks in the hearts of Chris' jovial tormentors. When true torment eventually ensues, it comes out of left field and has a B-movie gore that would make Vincent Price roll his eyes.

The saving grace here is LilRel Howery (TV's "The Carmichael Show") as Chris' pal Rod, an uber-proud TSA apparatchik who is constantly warning his buddy by phone about the obvious trap that has been set up. Howery brings actual energy and genuine comedic skills to a surprisingly underwhelming farce, playing the ironic role of the black observer yelling at the hero to "Get Out." It's the only clever bit in the film. (As a whole, there is a shocking dearth of funny lines.)

Not as lucky are Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel as the family's servants, seemingly lobotomized, docile domestics whose characterizations are more odd and confusing than, as intended, ominous. Like Chris, they are victims here of an errant production and a poorly thought-out polemic.