It’s a lucky thing that the thriller “The Fostered” is so risibly bad almost no one will see it and fewer will take it seriously.

If this abomination had been a hit, with competent writing and direction and compelling acting, it might have ended America’s admittedly broken foster care system overnight. Not replaced it with something better or fixed, but just ended it.

The men depicted here are drunken, cheating, abusive or mentally ill menaces and aspiring foster moms are naive at best. And the kids? Childhood trauma is a great shortcut for grooming monsters.

They don’t have to make mention of the state money changing hands part of the equation or poor state oversight pretty much nationwide legitimate problems to condemn everybody involved.

Writer-director Gunnar Garrett’s film opens with an effective if clumsily-staged crazy-dad-kills-mom-and-shoots-one-tween-twin in a Filipino-American family. Dad (Robert Adamson) had refused his pills and was literally listening to a devil in his rear view mirror (himself) as he drunkenly lashed-out against his wife (Rinabeth Apostol) and kids.

It’s no wonder the twelve-year-olds (Serena Perey and Savina Perey) are wary of the California farm they’re fostered out to.

“Reminds me of a horror film” one blurts out, basically on principle.

Farm wife Amy (Brittany Underwood) has wanted children for years, anything to take her mind off the children’s novel she’s been writing. For years.

Farmer Kevin (Robert Palmer Watkins) is indifferent to the idea, something his farm pal Matt (Casey Webb) has picked up on. Kevin’s had a fling with Amy’s “book club” bestie Heather (Jodie Garrett, the writer-director’s wife), an on-the-make femme fatale of the Jessica Rabbit school — painted on party dress, the works.

The warier twin warns “The closer you get to these people, the better the chance that they’ll hurt you!”

The “Abigail doll” toting other twelve-year old is too busy kissing up to the fosters to listen.

Or is she?

“Foreshadowing” here comes in the form of an open well Kevin never got around to sealing and a butcher knife that the girls take an early and unnatural interest in.

“Where do I put this?”

“In KEVIN!”

There are more unintentional laughs than intentional or unintentional frights. But it’d be mean to go into much detail about how they’re achieved and who achieves them.

“The Fostered” looks and sounds like what it is, a self-financed fiasco that couldn’t attract a distributor anybody had ever heard of, and with good reason.

Rating: TV 16+, violence, suicide

Cast: Brittany Underwood, Robert Palmer Watkins, Jodie Garrett, Casey Webb, and Savina Perey, Serena Perey.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gunnar Garrett. A One Tree Enterainment release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:17