A couple of hard and fast rules of the cinema are proven again in “Adventures of the Naked Umbrella,” a dark screwball conspiracy thriller set along California’s wildly eccentric Salton Sea “coast.”

One rule says you should never ever set out to make a “cult film.” Those almost always just happen. Some fringe audience latches onto a movie and the cast can live their days doing autograph shows and conventions, if they’re lucky. Trying to write, cast and film one is like counting on a LOTTO ticket for financing.

And another rule is that true screen debacles are rarely the actors’ fault. Even if Tom Arnold is one of them.

Both are borne out in this tone deaf farce that begins with dousing live pigs with gasoline and torching them (not seen) and doesn’t end any lighter.

Whatever writer-director Gerald Brunskill (“It’s Gawd! was his) was going for when he eventually gets around to showing us what he’s going for wasn’t worth going for in the first place.

Whatever promise casting “Spanking the Monkey” and “Saving Private Ryan” star Jeremy Davies as a scrawny, mullet-haired pyromaniac and conspiracy podcaster named Samson married to religious-fanatic and trailer-mate Irene, played by “Hustle & Flow” alumna Taryn Manning, is frittered away.

And whatever happens in in Brunskill’s half-based UFO nut meets a UFO pilot narrative, while dodging his parole officer (Darnell Rhea) and taking “care” of his pet pig “Kevin,” who happens to be made of porcelein, it’s safe to say I didn’t respond to any of it.

Samson is on probation for being a firebug who torches 5G cell towers. He hosts a podast ” The Naked Umbrella” show from “my little slice of Hades,” their single-wide, where he panders to “patriots and Deep Statists, Communists and Tea Baggers” with his deranged theories, accusations and pronouncements.

All Irene cares about is that he not take “the Lord’s name in vain.” All his probie, Yolanda (Rhea) gives a damn about is that the podcast (theoretically) allows her to keep track of him without having to drive by and spy on him.

Yolanda assumes he’s fulminating “live.”

Then Sam’s generator blows out, and when he heads out to fix it, the trailer explodes. He and Irene run off to drug-addict/COVID cure hustler Granny (character actor Richard Riehle in drag), hoping against hope that this “CIA hit” Samson’s sure was intended for him isn’t blamed on him, an arsonist with a record.

Arnold plays the ready-to-retire police chief who likes dressing as Santa and singing off-color tunes (“Santa’s got a package”) at the department Christmas party.

And Bert Retundo plays a “cop who cares” who hasn’t come back to work, having just lost his daughter to COVID “during quarantine.”

As we’ve seen the abusive father who inexplicably made his boy torch a herd of swine, we can see the origins of Samson’s mania. Another flashback recreates his wacky wedding.

And there’s a saucer floating around the Salton Sea, which is handy, because Samson isn’t the only local who’s seen such spacecraft.

Movie buffs can pick up on the origins of some of the undigested ideas Brunskill tries to get a movie out of here, the “mad prophet of the airwaves” doing his shtick on that screenwriter’s favorite medium at the moment — podcasts.

Dropping that part of the plot to focus on the cops, Samson’s granny, and literally anything else acid-washes what little promise this picture had right out of it.

Davies could have been filmed in more conventional “madman at the mike” shots, and any pretense of taking this story in serious directions could have been abandoned. Though admittedly, when you start with a pig immolation, that’s a hard pivot to “comedy and nothing but” pull of.

The Salton Sea settings are a novelty, and the picture could have used more of that off-the-grid community’s eccentricity. The characters we meet aren’t all nuts, and the nutty ones aren’t nutty enough.

There’s not a laugh in here, not a whit of suspense to any of this and no third act twists can pull this pig out of the fire.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Jeremy Davies, Taryn Manning, Darnell Rhea, Richard Riehle, Bert Retundo and Tom Arnold.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gerald Brunskill. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:42