Heed my words, good people, about Tortilla Heaven: sitting through this movie is about as far from Heaven as a live soul can get. If “the Lord works in mysterious ways,” a line that is repeated over and over throughout the film, typically to gloss over plot holes, then surely Tortilla Heaven writer/director Judy Hecht Dumontet works in unskilled, unremarkable, mind-numbingly incompetent ways.

The story surrounds Isidor (José Zúñiga, who comes across as a kind of Raul Julia Lite), a non-church-going owner of a small restaurant in a tiny New Mexico town. The town has a population of only 73 and its roads aren’t even paved. Everyone knows everyone else in town and they all know that the best place to eat at is Isidor’s restaurant, Tortilla Heaven. Then one day, Jesus’ visage appears in a tortilla and suddenly everything goes crazy in this no-longer sleepy little town.

That storyline is the springboard into an excruciatingly inept film that appears like either a grossly overblown student film or a Hallmark movie of the week that just happens to feature swearing and nudity. Watching the story progress is like following the edge of a tortilla around in a circle; it just keeps going and going, never really gets anywhere and never ends up the least bit interesting.

The film not only insults the intelligence of the audience every step of the way (even the revealing of Jesus’ image in the tortilla is intercut with shots of a painting of Jesus — I guess the filmmakers thought we could use some help figuring out who’s face that was), but the sheer stupidity of the words uttered by the characters belies some sort of enraged hatred towards them by Dumontet. It’s supposed to be a town full of eccentric characters, yet not a single one of them is anything but a bland two-dimensional shell for basic dialogue. For example, the mayor likes golf, so almost every line he has relates to wanting to build a golf course. Sheesh, Bumblebee Man and Disco Stu on The Simpsons sport more character development that any of these half-assed, tortilla-thin, cut-out characters. And if you’re expecting any one of their go-nowhere side stories to reach anything remotely approaching a conclusion, or at the very least any sort of follow-up to their initial set-ups, you’re just plain out of luck.