Despite a whiffy premise that put me in mind of Christine, and not in a good way, I wanted to like The Entity more than I did. It just isn’t scary enough.

The entity in question repeatedly rapes and beats up single mom and self-improvement hopeful Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey). It — or “he” (and occasionally “they”) — is invisible, and while her children and friends eventually can detect it at times, initially Carla struggles to get anyone to believe her. Dr. Sneiderman (Ron Silver), the shrink she consults in desperation when she thinks maybe she is losing it, can’t quite get past the assumption that it’s not a malevolent supernatural force, but some sort of Freudian self-abuse.

And that’s pretty interesting, because Carla is drawn in an unusual way. She’s got kids by a couple of different fathers, she ran away from home at 16 to escape her own abusive father, and she’s taking night classes so she can get a better job now that the latest boyfriend has made his exit. None of that is remarkable per se, except that, usually, when a character has that background, that background is the point of the movie. True, Sneiderman attaches great import to these experiences, believing Carla has issues with sex and self-esteem that may explain the incidents and point to her self-harming, but the audience is meant to understand that the entity is external and real.

Again, though, the entity itself isn’t that scary. The assault scenes are disturbing (although the urgent Van-Halen-esque power chords that accompany them and signal the entity’s presence are faintly ridiculous), and in a couple of scenes, when you sense the entity or its location before Carla does, it’s mildly creepy — but it’s not frightening. (Not as frightening as Carla Doing It with new boyf Moe Greene. …Fine, his name is actually Jerry, but it is Alex Rocco.)

The idea that a violent sexual assault by a demon will inevitably get blown off with a hysteria diagnosis is somewhat chilling (or…fitting, I guess, depending on your point of view?), but the film spends far longer than it needs to in conference rooms at the hospital, where doctors discuss Carla’s case ad nauseam and Sneiderman sort of posits she’s telling the truth but then doesn’t believe her some more, like, dude, just make out with her, which we all know you want to do, and then help her find a medium who can help, which ditto.

Carla does end up teaming with the university’s beleaguered parapsychology department, whose solution is a novel one — but it takes forever to set up expositionally, and it fails to work, so then we get a second ending even less satisfying than the first. It’s not a horror movie with satisfying drama, and it’s not a drama with satisfying horror elements; the acting is pretty good, and it has promise in both directions, but doesn’t gel as either.

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