One of the main reasons I enjoy doing monthly movie themes is that it pushes me to watch movies I might not otherwise watch and to discover films I’ve never heard of before. Let Us Prey falls into the latter category.

It starts out pretty strong. It has an interesting story with convincing lead actors, but then it falls down a hole of ridiculousness.

PC Rachel Heggie (Pollyanna McIntosh) has been reassigned from the big city to a tiny little town in Scotland. On her way to her first day of work, she witnesses a speeding car smash into a man walking on the street. The driver is Caesar (Brian Vernel Sargison), and he is both panicked and belligerent. The man he hit has disappeared. Rachel arrests Caesar even though he says that without a victim there is no crime.

She takes him to the station, where she meets Sgt. Jim MacReady (Douglas Russell), a laid-back man who is exactly the kind of police boss you meet in stories like this, where bad things are about to happen in places where bad things don’t usually happen. Rachel tells him the story of Caesar and how the guy he hid has vanished. He calls in to PC Jack Warnock (Bryan Larkin) and PC Jennifer Mundie (Hanna Stanbridge) to be on the lookout for a wounded man. We meet them as they are having sex in the patrol car.

Caesar is thrown into the slammer next to a cell occupied by Ralph Beswick (Jonathan Watson), Caesar’s former teacher and intellectual who likes to beat on his wife.

Warnock and Mundie do find the injured man (Liam Cunningham), except he’s not all that injured. But he is strange and prone to making prophetic proclamations. He also seems to have some supernatural powers.

Things will get weird, and dark, and scary from there.

It is a pretty great setup. I love small-town stories where strange and horrible things occur. I like Liam Cunningham, and Pollyanna McIntosh is good. But the film’s second half turns into one big action/horror stew that’s mostly really stupid.

There is a character who shows up wearing a bunch of barbed wire fencing wrapped around his torso. That’s about the point I rolled my eyes and decided things were just going to go downhill from there.