Many an aspiring filmmaker looks to horror as her or his way of launching a career in Hollywood. Get your hands on a generic script, finance a thriller on the cheap, deliver a shock or two and show’em what you’ve got.

Of course, not every filmmaker taking that first shot has A Magic Surname like Spielberg. Whatever “nepo babies” complain about being labeled thus for following a parent into show business, the leg-up they get in a brutally competitive profession is undeniable. Doors are opened and “name actors” are lured in, because there’s always a chance Daddy or Mommy will appreciate that and remember those names when a bigger project they have in mind comes along.

“Please Don’t Eat the Children” is a post-apocalyptic cannibalism thriller directed by sometime actress/first-time director Destry Allyn Spielberg. It is a competently filmed but utterly unsurprising tale of a group of imperiled kids trying to make it south, across the border to escape their fate in an America that hates, fears and imprisons them for either spreading the “cannibal virus” or for reminding them of the promise the surviving adults once had to live normal lives, with family, meaningful careers and the like.

Generic unoriginality aside, the picture features “Downton Abbey” star Michelle Dockery as the villain, someone whose clutches these Lost Boys and Girls fall into, and Giancarlo Esposito, one of the most accomplished character actors of his generation as a lawman.

That’s what “Spielberg” will get you. The skill, talent, flash and watchability you have to come up with on your own.

Zoe Colletti is Mary, a haunted teen fleeing the authorities as she makes her way south. She has nightmares about the kid sister she couldn’t protect. Deep in the southwest, she throws in with a blustering tween (Dean Scott Vasquez), a self-described “master thief” who drags her into his “Oliver Twist” gang of artful dodgers.

But with soldiers and law enforcement hunting kids like them, the others (Regan Aliyah, Andrew Liner, Emma Meisel and Joshua Melnick) are beyond wary at what this new face, new unwanted attention from the authorities and new mouth to feed represents.

Sure enough, they have to flee their production designed to death hideout/clubhouse and hit the road. And that’s how they come upon that big, remote farmhouse and Clara (Dockery), the guarded and untrusting “nurse” when tends to one’s wounds but proves to have her own agenda.

“I’m not supposed to take in children,” she protests in the sketchiest manner possible. Sure, she drugs them. And when one of their ranks doesn’t wake up locked in the basement with them, “Where’s Seth?” earns the stock, not-that-cagey reply.

“You’ll be joining him soon.”

Colletti’s Mary is the ostensible “star” here, but whatever the script and occasionally the direction do to verify that, she comes off as too passive to carry that weight. The other kids are so thinly drawn as to barely register as “stock types.”

The work-the-problem elements of the script are lazy to the point of half-baked. And the shocks only serve to remind us of what set off this apocalypse in the first place.

There’s little flair to the compositions and shot selection and little that the editing and the acting — Dockery turns it up when necessary — can do to cover up that.

Did filming this 2022-23 movie earn Dockery a role in Spielberg pal Robert Zemeckis’s “Here?” That didn’t really pay off either, did it?

I wasn’t going to dwell on the “famous” named filmmaker element of this picture. But nothing else about it merits discussion.

With so little to recommend this outing, the real nepo baby test will come if Destry Rides — and directs — again. Most first-time directors get only one shot at proving they’ve got the goods.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Michelle Dockery, Zoe Colletti, Regan Aliyah, Andrew Liner, Dean Scott Vasquez, Emma Meisel, Joshua Melnick and Giancarlo Esposito.

Credits: Directed by Destry Allyn Spielberg, scripted by Paul Bertino. A “Tubi Original” on Tubi.

Running time: 1: