The biggest names in the indie horror flick “A Hard Place” are Bai Ling from “The Crow” and Glenn Plummer, who attained screen immortality with his turn in “Showgirls.” So it’s fitting that they get off easy.

They’re the recognizable faces from “The Dead Hour,” a splatter film within the film in this Godawful “Evil Dead” knockoff, glimpsed on the screen of the Dixie Twin drive-in and later watched on TV by a couple of mouth-breathers. Unlike “A Hard Place,” “The Dead Hour” is supposed to be awful.

Alas, neither movie is bad enough to be fun. The “story” is derivative, dumb and dull, about some extended Appalachian “family” protecting and protected by these humanoid briar-and-bramble zombie creatures, with dialogue generated by AI that some bubba spilt his beer on.

“What in the horror movie hell ARE those things?” “This here is Heathcliffe. He don’t move much.”

Shot in the wintry, woodsy corner of Ohio where the real Dixie Twin exists because Dixie is a local state of mind — with snow-covered scenes don’t match those with no snow left — it begins with a heist at the nearly empty (it’s winter, remember) Dixie Twin that turns murderous.

We’ve got a gang of six on the lam with an old lady gang leader (Lynn Lowery of “Shivers,” “The Crazies” and “Attack of the Corn Zombies”) telling them she knows “just the place” for them to “lay low” and go “off the grid.”

That’s how they end up on a farm, where shoot-first gang member Candy (Jennifer Stone) shoots the owner (Felissa Rose), who survives thanks to the interventions of Fish (Rachel Amanda Bryant) and for some reason tries to help them escape the fate she knows they’ve stumbled into.

The woods are alive. And hungry. And wearing wigs.

There are maybe a couple of intentional laughs in this, with sexist Hurt (Kevin Caliber) cracking that he’s got “no problem with women. I’m an ALLY!” And then there’s a random skull bounced off a barn door that’s worth a chuckle.

But director, co-writer and self-distributor Jason “J.” Horton (“Craving,” assorted other C-movies) set out to make an “Evil Dead” without Sam Raimi’s flair for humor and “gotchas,” without his gift for story and ear for zingers and without Bruce Campbell as everybody’s favorite horror anti-hero.

All Horton seems adept with is splatter as he puts a cast playing yokel stereotypes through shootings, chewings and bloody dismemberments at the hands of moaning monsters from the “I am Groot” family.

At least Plummer and Ling got in and out in a day, in scenes from an even worse horror movie probably shot over a day or two in L.A.

Rating: unrated, bloody, gory and graphic violence

Cast: Lynn Lowry, Rachel Amanda Bryant, Felissa Rose, Kevin Caliber and Jennifer Stone, with Glenn Plummer and Bai Ling

Credits: Directed by J. Horton, scripted by Michael J. Epstein and J. Horton. A Gianetti Films release.

Running time: 1:28