According to Mexican folklore, La Llorona is the ghost of a woman who drowned her two children years ago in a rage. Now, she wanders the land, weeping, searching for the souls of her youngsters – and any others she might find.

Doesn’t that have the ingredients for a great horror movie? Unfortunately, “The Curse of La Llorona” (★★½ out of four) is not that film. Instead, it merely uses La Llorona as window dressing for what turns out to be a routine entry in “The Conjuring” franchise.

La Llorona winds up latching on to the family of Anna (a slumming Linda Cardellini), the widow of an LAPD cop. She’s a social worker whose client has just lost her two sons to La Llorona, but that’s not enough for greedy La-Llo: She now wants the souls of Anna’s two young kids.

The film is set in 1973, which is presented as a literal kind of dark ages in which people rarely turned on the lights at home. That apparently was a prerequisite for director Michael Chaves so he can stage increasingly tiresome jump scares, as La-Llo continually comes screeching into the frame, like some kind of malevolent Jack-in-the-box in a wedding dress.

A kindly priest (Tony Amendola) declines to help Anna, because he once got involved with evil himself through a frightening doll called – wait for it – Annabelle. (Now you see how this ties into "The Conjuring" universe.) He instead sends Anna to a wisecracking ex-priest (Raymond Cruz) who has turned curandero to battle the supernatural. It leads to a climactic showdown which is loud, but not particularly scary.

One reason the film feels so blah is that there's so little to grab onto. The characters are wafer-thin, so we never wind up invested in their fates. There is no sense of dread or impending doom; instead it's just one jolt after another. It's like having someone jump out at you every five minutes, and about as much fun.