Perhaps there is an audience out there somewhere for Emo the Musical, the feature film debut of Australian writer/director Neil Triffett. But I’ll be jiggered if I know who they are (surely not Christians or emos, two groups the film-maker mocks by pointing out endless base-level stereotypes), or what kind of strange, subterranean vernacular they might speak.

Triffett’s film is a 95-minute expansion of his well-received 2014 short film of the same name. It has a slight, if one-trick, pull-my-finger, charm to it and a memorable core message about tolerance. But boy, seeing this padded out into an hour and a half is something else: a tough assignment to sit through, full of knowingly wishy-washy songs that are bad-bad rather than funny-bad.

Bible-bashing teenagers with shampoo commercial smiles gather on school lawns and sing songs with lyrics such as “come to church with me”, looking like kids plucked from daggy 90s professional family photographs. Doom-and-gloom emos smoke cigarettes, apply dark eyeliner and plan their next self-harming session.

After being expelled from school following an incident with a noose, Ethan (Benson Jack Anthony) starts at the run-down Seymour High, a supposedly dilapidated setting – it actually looks in pretty good nick – funded by a pharmaceutical company flogging antidepressants.

The protagonist joins emo group Worst Day Ever after impressing the band by singing about how he doesn’t want to join their stupid band. Bass player Roz (Lucy Barrett) takes a fancy, but Ethan pursues a secret romantic relationship with devout Christian singer Trinity (Jordan Hare), who is constantly talking about the Good Book and trying to get him along to youth group.

The script expends virtually no effort explaining why the pair might be fond of each other; the point is that this is a Montague and Capulet situation. Except with schoolyard politics, pashing in the library and the trite, stale addition of a band competition at the end, judged by the most emo emo of them all (Dylan Lewis) – a guy who once kissed a man for seven hours, while crying.

The fresh-faced young cast show pluck, verve, splash and charm. Their energy is infectious at times, but the songs are a big problem: babyish and basic, with gallingly obvious rhymes and cut-and-paste structures, they scale back the spirit of the film when it needs it most.

Musical parody is a tough gig. Comedy is subjective at the best of times, without even allowing for the skills required to construct a good, catchy, lyrical song that also serves a function in the narrative. But when lyrics remain at the standard of “One time it will all become clear, that dating you was a bad idea” and “I’ll follow everywhere you go … Antarctica, New Mexico”, it’s hard to feel much of anything – except perhaps a growing desire to be somewhere else.

At the talent comp, one sad sack sings: “Sally I’m sorry, I’ll stop sleeping with your friends if you forgive me”. The song is meant to be terrible – as the host of the show observes, it totally sucks balls. The problem with using it as a punchline, though, is that the quality of the songs in the film more broadly aren’t much better, and they’re geared towards the same kind of reaction.

Triffett seems to want us to laugh at how bad they are, but the film doesn’t carry the overload of camp or kitsch that would push them into “so bad it’s good” territory. A couple of flat songs in musicals are expected, perhaps even par for the course, but there’s an awful lot of them here and the showstoppers never come.

This critic is almost certainly not the film’s target audience, but then again, who is? Much of the humour in Emo the Musical derives from an adult perspective. Jokes about Christian prejudice against people who are gay, for example, or the school’s funding, or the underlining observation (though not much is done with it) that society tends to put people in boxes. But the tone and execution is pretty infantile, suggesting something too childish for adults or even teenagers, with an intellectual context too serious for kids.

Of course, maybe I’m wrong; maybe there’s a subterranean crew of someone-or-others huddled somewhere right now, reciting the lyrics and laughing at the jokes.