“Borderline” is an awful, amateurish “psychosexual thriller” that lurches between straight-up sexual exploitation and heavy-handed downward-spiral-of-drug-addiction cliches.

There have been good pictures with this common title, so don’t confuse them. Rich Mallery is the writer-director of this leering “let no starlet be un-ogled, let no young woman in the cast keep her top on” trash, a picture that somehow manages to wallow and stumble at the same time.

Charli, our heroine, is introduced with a flourish — a screeching, threatening, pleading and name-calling tirade through her mother’s locked bedroom door. Charli has problems, debts, mental disorders and addictions. Right now, he needs $300 or she’ll go out and sell her body for the cash.

She gets it and promptly blows it on more pills, causing her to “hook up” with her roomie and best-friend Zee (Kylee Michael, let’s hope that’s a stage name).

Charli is credited as Emma Jade in the film, with IMDb saying the actress is Kate Lý Johnston (this is an…interesting filmography). Seeing the film, one totally understands the name change.

Charli, we quickly figure out, is manic and prone to self-injury. She is delusional, fleeing her escalating problems and debts with more drugs. “Bipolar Disorder” is the official diagnosis. Her treatment meds for that make her sick, so she won’t take them. Instead, she’s self-medicating, stumbling from pill to pill, lashing out in paranoid rages and using Zee, her “boyfriend” (Irmon Hill) and anyone else she can think of to score more Oxy, Molly or what have you.

Oh, and she’s a nurse. Her kinkiest drug connection might be the doctor (Quentin Boyer) who trades drugs for fetishist favors at the office, with the promise of more to come if she joins him for “dinner.”

It’s the sort of no-budget film where background sound effects, a table with two beer bottles on it and a wall passes for “a bar,” and similar tricks are used to avoid showing us “the club” or “the mother.”

The acting isn’t anything to single out as a positive or negative. But the plot and inattention to details are straight out of low budget porn. Charli shows up for a dealer who doesn’t know her, is made to strip (of course) to prove she’s “not a cop,” is photographed and gets her drugs. But no money changes hands. Whoops. The foreshadowing “Lemme borrow your taser” pays off with a medically-indefensible reaction by one character to being tased.

Another scene has the shapely drug dealer (uncredited) strip for reasons only the leering film crew can explain. Maybe.

The “serious” scene has Charli try to describe her illness to her roomie/bestie-with-benefits.

“I don’t know what’s real, sometimes.” She always thinks “people are lying to me.” “What I think doesn’t line up with reality.”

Everything else in this movie from the writer-director of “Felines” and “Maid Droid” is just icky exploitation. Watch the camera track down to bare or near bare bottoms or up to naked breasts, because the script has so many “reasons” for its attractive young cast to um, change clothes or just strip.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast: Kate Lý Johnston, Kylee Michael and Irmon Hill.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Rich Mallery. A Cinema Epoch release.

Running time: 1:41