Don't pick up the hitchhiker. It's a simple horror picture "don't." It's like, "Don't answer the door. Don't go in the house. Don't follow that naked ..."

In The Forsaken, Sean (Kerr Smith) picks up a hitchhiker -- natch -- and then very dark and stylish vampire bloodsuckin' heck breaks loose to the beat of some snappy rock tunes. Highway To Hell is not one of them.

Also missing? No camping during the "vamping" in this J. S. Cardone terror production. But there are serious amounts of vampire letting, and some unintentional chuckles.

And bare breasts attached to various females. There are breasts dripping blood, in fact. And there are breasts floating in a bathtub, breasts heaving, breasts flashing. It's like breasts are a pointless sub-plot.

Which brings us back to The Forsaken story and to Sean's journey from L.A. to Miami. His mission is to deliver a vintage Mercedes and attend his sister's wedding, sort of a two-for-one deal.

Along the way, he's persuaded in a really lame way to give a serious sloth-like slacker (Brendan Fehr) a ride down a lonely, spooky road.

As we discover, this mysterious dude turns out to be a vampire hunter, and before long, the duo find themselves confronting the head fang (Johnathon Schaech) and his gang as they continuously run amok in plasmatic gunk.

The deal is both of these good-guy hunks end up infected with the vampire virus and are racing -- can a race go this slowly? -- against time to kill the vamp leader, which will be their cure.

So, before we get to the showdown, there are many things to experience besides the gore and the breasts.

There is some anemic dialogue, highlighted by an explanation that the usual vampire stuff is bogus and that the vampires actually come from surviving medieval French knights who may or may not think Jerry Lewis is funny.

Uh-huh. The cast, all funnier than Jerry Lewis, is from the B-team of the-young-and-the-happening.

Kerr Smith, the star and driver that shouldn't but did, is one of the Dawson's Creek-ers. He's just about right as the debonair doofus. He also buddies up easily with Fehr, who is the vampire slayer.

Fehr, by way of New Westminster and Winnipeg, doesn't say "sorry" or "eh" once, and more or less maintains his status as one of "the cool kids" from the TV series Roswell.

In the parallel universe department, there is a fetching Phina Oruche from the syndicated Buffy The Vampire Slayer. She's the fang leader's scary but fetching ghoulie-girl side-kick.

Even the veteran in this group of young and restless players -- Schaech as the master vampire -- gets by with little in the way of assistance from the filmmakers.

He might ask himself now, "What was I thinking?" but he accomplishes what he might've intended. Schaech makes us forget his charming portrayal of That Thing You Do! guitarist.

This thing he does in The Forsaken is define evil without the trendy winking. He also chews more scenery than he does necks in the name of eerie entertainment.

Never has so much been given, and so little received.

That's The Forsaken and its own law of diminishing returns: The bigger it gets, the less you receive.

And get this. At the conclusion, there are hints of a sequel, proving that, in some cases, less is more.

(This film is rated R)

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