Renny Harlin does not make intelligent movies. Loud? Yes. Obnoxious? Sure. Hyperactive? You bet. Plotlines crafted for nincompoops? Without a doubt. From “A Nightmare on Elm Street IV” in 1988, to “Cliffhanger” in 1993, all the way up to his last film “Mindhunters” in 2005, Harlin has amassed a filmography second to none in both idiotic main characters and photographically resplendent pyrotechnics.

Sometimes this works (1990’s “Die Hard 2,” 1997’s “The Long Kiss Goodnight”). Most times it does not (1995’s “Cutthroat Island,” 2001’s “Driven,” 2004’s “Exorcist: The Beginning”). And, every now and then, sometimes they just end up in-between as giddily self-indulgent guilty pleasures (1999’s “Deep Blue Sea”).

The gothic teenage action-suspense yarn “The Covenant” falls into that latter category. The movie is as deep as that muddy puddle sitting outside my apartment’s front door after it rains. It is as subtle as the reaction I have when I step into it wearing my brand new Sketchers. But it is still kind of fun in a box of rocks sort of way (which, now that I think about it, is almost embarrassing to admit), and as long as you check your brain at the door (and don’t pay full price) the darn thing is actually marginally entertaining.

Don’t take that as a major recommendation. Writer J.S. Cardone’s (“The Forsaken”) is as silly as it is inept. The whole thing revolves around a quartet of New England prep school students led by the dashing Caleb (Steven Strait, “Sky High”) who all just happen to be powerful warlocks. What more, on each boy’s eighteenth birthday their powers magnify to unimaginable heights none of them can remotely fathom.

But this magical ability comes with a price. Each time they use their skills it causes them to prematurely age. Worse, like the most destructive drug using their power is monstrously addictive. The more spells they cast, the more intoxicating it becomes, the magic destroying their bodies to even as their powers significantly increase.

Into this world, and just a few short days before Caleb’s birthday, two strangers find a way to become connected to the quartet. The first is a sexy student named Sarah (Laura Ramsey, “She’s the Man,” a fresh-faced talent I’m really starting to like) transferring in from a Boston public school. The second is the mysteriously confident Chase (Sebastian Stan, “The Architect”), a well-to-do orphan whose foster parents died tragically in an auto accident right on his own eighteenth birthday.

What happens next isn’t exactly a surprise. No two ways about it, “The Covenant” is dumb right from the start. Super dumb, and beginning with an idiotic car chase (that stretches a few thousand feet above the ground) to a silly one-on-one face-off near the end the level of idiocy is almost mind-blowing. There is, without any sort of doubt, an unabashedly juvenile familiarity to all of this that’s breathtaking. It’s like we’ve seen this movie before, many times, and with elements here cribbed from flicks as diverse as the original “Star Wars,” “The Matrix,” “Underworld,” “The Craft” and “The Lost Boys” there isn’t one single bit of it that’s not at least a partial cliché.

Harlan realizes this of course and, apparently, doesn’t remotely care. After a flurry of misfires he throws this one off with the same wild devil-may-care abandon he brought to “Deep Blue Sea.” Cars explode and reassemble with the driver sill inside, kids duke it out hurling puffy clouds of liquid air at one another like fireballs shot from a cannon and bodies crash this way and that without a single bone being broken or bruise being catalogued. There’s even a creepily unsettling bit with a sea of eight-legged extras the likes of which haven’t been seen since Frank Marshall went all spider crazy with “Arachnophobia.”

It’s all furiously supercilious idiotic fluff, and maybe I was just in a freakishly forgiving mood when I saw it but for some insane reason I found “The Covenant” to be gloriously kitschy B-movie entertainment. Which, granted, probably means I’m going to go to the seventh layer of film critic purgatory for saying so. But that still doesn’t change the fact I still had fun, and if that doesn’t sound like a glowing recommendation it probably isn’t meant as one. It’s just a personal statement of fact, and whether or not you use that statement as a reason to go watch Harlin’s latest at the multiplex is entirely up to you.