Writer-director David Helling introduces and adds a filmed postscript to his first feature film, “His Only Son,” something not wholly unheard of in mainstream cinema, but not that unusual in faith-based films.

He talks down the film’s budget and talks up the crowd-sourced wide release efforts of this account of the moment when Abraham became the father of the Chosen People, tested by the “new” god Jehovah who ordered him to make a blood sacrifice of Abraham’s “Only Son,” Isaac.

Whenever I’ve seen this sort of huxtering done with a Hollywood film, it smacks of “let’s change the subject,” as in “Let me talk about this movie’s earnest intent rather than its quality.” For faith-based films, it’s prostheltyizing, urging the faithful to rally to a movie as a cause. In Helling’s case here, there’s a bit of both in play.

Yes, churches and donor “angels” got the movie into thousands of theaters. And alas yes, the actual film is strictly straight-to-video quality — not amateurish, but somewhat cut-rate, and more importantly, flatly scripted and acted, a 100 minute cure for insomnia.

Helling got his movie cast and made, and chose that little-touched corner of desert California that generations of Hollywood Bible films have conditioned us to accept as the Ancient Middle East.

So it looks right, if malnourished, a narrow story requiring little more than a handful of actors (less than two-handfuls), a donkey, a couple of horses and robes and military gear that can easily pass for that of assorted states of pre-Roman Palestine.

But the story is boiled down to tedium, its action beats limited and its finale pre-ordained and thus under even more of a burden to produce something that the preceding 95 minutes have not.

Abraham (Nicholas Mouawad) is a very old man when we meet him, someone with a military background, it is suggested (Helling makes sure to mention his own Iraq service altar call), and someone who hasn’t heard the voice promising him that he would father a great nation and great people in a new land in a very long time.

When he first heard that voice, he was known as Abram, descendent of Noah. And his very complicated (half-sister, possibly already-married) wife Sarah (Sara Seyed) was named Sarai.

But that was ages ago, something something Sarah reminds him of this when he starts talking about that Covenant that Jehovah promised, and going north to the mountains of Moriah to offer a sacrifice, as Jehovah has instructed. Sarah, who had so much trouble conceiving that she supposedly suggested Abraham father a child with their Egyptian handmaiden, can’t be told what or who is to be sacrificed. And she can’t come along.

“Isaac,” their son, “and I will go alone,” Abraham decrees. “Because the Lord commands it.”

Son and very old father set out on the quest, with a couple of traveling companions. They’re on foot, with a donkey loaded with everything they’ll need for a blood sacrifice — save for the lamb usually used in such offerings. It’s a slow journey, allowing much time for flashbacks, to when Abram and Sarai were young, the earlier tests of “This god has led you iright into a famine, into ” a “barren land” where his wife fears she, too is “barren.”

Soldiers are encountered on the way, and a victim of the soldiers’ predations is met. Injuries are suffered, but Abraham — taking his time with good reason — and Isaac eventually make it to their destination, build an altar and you know the rest.

That’s one thing that would hang over this movie, even if it had a big budget and “name” actors who set off sparks on camera. As we know where it’s going, we need things to enliven the journey and spice up the proceedings, and Helling finds that impossible to achieve with this rather bland cast.

Impatience is sure to set in, with this being one of the most famous stories from the Bible and thus well-known throughout the Western world for millenia.

There are modest effects achieved with lighting (Daniel da Silva is The Lord) and ancient cities and battlements are added to the scenery through the haze (Digitally? Optically, with painted glass camera backdrops or miniatures?).

But by the climax, you realize why the filmmaker was cheerleading his finished film at the opening, and promising a”story by story” series of tales from the Old Testament. This is weak tea indeed. Helling’s begging us to grade it on the curve, as it were.

It’s great that Helling was able to spearhead a self-funded/crowd-funded theatrical release, something only Billy Graham was able to do with movies produced under his banner in an earlier era. No doubt “His Only Son” will be make a profit in fairly short order, especially as Helling makes the connection between Abraham’s planned sacrifice and that of Jesus 2000 years later overt, and just in time for Easter.

But the movie is what it is, and what it is isn’t very good, very engrossing, involving, enlightening or entertaining. One should never make a Biblical epic without remembering the Bible’s great hook as literature. The stories in it, passed from generation to generation, have drama and pathos and hope and triumph rising out of despair and hardship.

There’s a reason others have filmed the Abraham/Isaac story, but always left it as merely a chapter in the larger narrative of “The Bible…In the Beginning” or “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” It’s just a vivid but short anecdote, not material for an epic.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: Nicolas Mouawad, Sara Seyed, Edaan Moskowitz and Daniel da Silva

Credits: Scripted and directed by David Helling. An Angel Studios release.

Running time: 1:43