As Oscar-winners go, only Halle Berry and Cuba Gooding Jr can claim to have a better eye for a bad script than Hilary Swank.

One day, she’s a million dollar baby, the next she’s knee-deep in the sort of supernatural hogwash that corrodes careers faster than a Best Actress gong in battery acid.

Swank plays Katherine, an ordained minister who lost her faith when a crazed medicine man butchered her husband and daughter on her first mission in Africa.

Now a devout atheist, Katherine trots the globe using hard science to investigate religious phenomena with her assistant Ben (Idris Elba of TV’s The Wire), who – must keep some perspective here - is a believer.

She has never found a ‘miracle’ that she couldn’t disprove... until she is approached by Doug, a schoolteacher from Louisiana whose accent was evidently the least of Liverpudlian David Morrissey’s worries. His last film was Basic Instinct 2; now this.

Seems the God-fearin’ folks of Haven are mighty perturbed that their river has run with blood since they pulled a local boy’s body from it. And they’re convinced it’s the doing of his creepy little sister Loren (AnnaSophia Robb).

Like everyone else, Katherine begins to get jumpy - and it’s not just down to the rantings of dial-a-priest Stephen Rea. Frogs fall from the sky. Cows go mad. A barbecue turns maggoty.

But Katherine is convinced that Loren is no demon child. Either way, God is not happy.

In the same way that those cocky Egyptians were dealt with way back when, the Almighty has unleashed His ten favourite plagues on Haven. Darkness, boils, locusts, death of first-born children, the full wrathful works.

This at least ought to provide some spectacle. Alas, one can only surmise that director Stephen Hopkins had less cash to work with than on any of his episodes of 24. The CG effects are a letdown of biblical proportions.

No matter how many startles and murky flashbacks Hopkins throws in, nothing can save The Reaping from the plague of clichés and CG crumminess.

Not so much The Omen as The Oh-no-men.

Elliott Noble