There are sophomore slumps, and then there's Wayne Kramer's "Running Scared," the bloody, awful follow-up to his fairly engaging, terrifically performed theatrical debut, "The Cooler."

With the cops-and-mobsters tale "Running Scared," writer-director Kramer loads up on gruesome carnage, flashy, hyperkinetic cuts and other camera techniques, deafening gunfire, bad Jersey accents and enough profanity to put the boys of "Reservoir Dogs" to shame.

The result is hard on the ears and harder on the eyes, an unsightly, unrelenting instance of a filmmaker given rein to indulge whatever senseless, brutal fantasies he likes.

It's as though Kramer engaged in marathon viewings of Quentin Tarantino films and thought to himself, "I can make a bloodier, nastier movie than that," then did so, only without a shred of Tarantino's slyness or visual panache.

The filmmakers figured they were showing star Paul Walker in a new light, and his role could be scarcely more different than his cheerily bland dog-musher in the previous week's family tale "Eight Below."

In "Running Scared," Walker tears about in a meat-headed frenzy, desperately trying to recover a shiny, snub-nosed pistol one of his mob associates used to kill a crooked cop in the movie's gruesome opening barrage.

Instead of tossing the weapon away, Walker's Joey Gazelle, a Jersey family man who's a low-level thug for an Italian crime clan, stashes it at his house for his own reasons, its presence becoming a literal smoking gun that could link the gang back to the cop's death.

Neighbor kid Oleg (Cameron Bright), a friend of Joey's son (Alex Neuberger), takes the weapon and uses it to wound his abusive stepdad (Karel Roden), a sweaty louse on the outs with his Russian mob family.

From there, "Running Scared" is just a string of incoherent encounters as Joey, his wife (Vera Farmiga), their son and Oleg dash through the night, the gun changing hands and a sleazy cop (Chazz Palminteri) wandering in and out with schemes of blackmail.

The movie is rife with repugnant abuse of women and children by men who quote John Wayne and Al Pacino's mob king in "Scarface." Depraved adults abound, not just the crooks but even the few supposedly ordinary citizens who step into the action.

Walker's garish performance is an exercise in sustained hysteria, Palminteri does little more than smile sadistically and Farmiga, who was wondrous as a drug-addicted housewife in "Down to the Bone," is a one-note mob wife who seems to be doing a bad vocal impression of Edie Falco's Carmela Soprano.

Kramer likes to think he was making a perverse fairy tale for adults, but there's no magic to the images and story he tosses on screen. The movie is all twilight shadows and murky colors, the hazy palette growing monotonous after the first few minutes.

The filmmakers' little technical gimmicks -- the camera following a trajectory from a bullet's perspective, an image of a shotgun expelling a monstrous shell casing in the foreground as a man is blown away in the background -- are mostly distracting or tiresome.

And an out-of-the-blue character revelation toward the end of the movie is clumsy and puzzling more than surprising.

The occasional flashes of perverse humor are so few and feeble, they only serve as a reminder of how strange and sometimes wonderful "The Cooler" was, with its twisted sense of fate and fortune surrounding William H. Macy's sad-sack casino jinx.

"The Cooler" had its dark and disagreeable moments, but it was a real swan compared to this ugly duckling from Kramer.

"Running Scared," a New Line release, is rated R for pervasive strong brutal violence and language, sexuality and drug content. Running time: 122 minutes. One star out of four.