People tend to overuse the term “mind-blowing” when hyping sci-fi movies, but in the case of Flying Lotus’ visually audacious “Ash,” the word feels apt. Weak on plot but pretty as a sunset (on the whole human race?), “Ash” opens with a shot of the cosmic turmoil swarming inside the brain of an astronaut far, far away from earth, then pulls back abruptly, zooming out through her pupil to reveal the look of pure panic on the face of sole survivor Riya Ortiz (Eiza González). Cue a shock-montage of all her crewmates, each with their head crushed in or blown open.

How’d they all die? Most unpleasantly. Fast-forward 90 minutes, and the final image (tucked midway into the credits, after some will have bailed) is another head-spinner. Between those extremes, “Ash” is surprisingly conventional, especially coming from the maniac who conceived 2017 Sundance disruptor “Kuso” and the scatological game-show segment “Ozzy’s Dungeon” from “V/H/S/99”: a colorful, giallo-styled homage to graphically scary extraterrestrial horror movies, from “Alien” to “Event Horizon,” whose alien adversary acts in mostly predictable (if rarely explicable) ways.

The movie’s razor-sharp visuals leave scratch marks on the back of your eyeballs, liable to burst back into your consciousness in subsequent dreams. The characters are considerably easier on the eyes, especially González’s glamorous Riya, whose cheekbones are sharper than any of the weapons she wields (butcher knife, scalpel, bonsai tree pruning scissors). Riya awakens at the beginning with a nasty gash to her temple, having forgotten all that happened, but quickly clued into the still-volatile situation by the corpses of three of her fellow crew members: Kevin (Beulah Koale), Adhi (Iko Uwais) and Davis (Flying Lotus).

As Riya surveys the scene, the research ship’s computer voice helpfully warns of “abnormal activity” (in English, while the sick-bay surgery bot communicates exclusively in Japanese). That would be Brion (Aaron Paul), who claims to be checking in from the nearest space station. Meanwhile, Kate Elliott’s Clarke (the only character called by her last name) is still missing — which means she must be the culprit, right? If you believe that, or even pretend to care, you have no business watching “Ash,” which is built more like a haunted house than a movie, with ghoulish gotcha moments constantly popping out in front of your face, while Flying Lotus supplies the beat.

The DJ-cum-director set the vibes by playing music for his cast on set, but much as this movie looks and feels like a visual concept album — which is to say, logic is incidental — the score is actually kind of a letdown: mostly jacked-up throbbing and machine static, too industrial to dance to (FlyLo’s got nothing on the RZA in that department). Still, the soundtrack is psychologically destabilizing as it pulses to a different rhythm from Bryan Shaw’s jagged editing and all the stroboscopic flashing on screen.

Five or six times, the director manages to startle us by abruptly cutting to a howling cadaver in jarring closeup — one with gory wounds and mutant features that might be fun to study later, when you can hit pause and more carefully appreciate those psychotronic designs. Here, they’re delivered like slaps. The first time, it feels like someone thrusting images from a medical textbook (gaping wounds, oozing effluvia) under your nose while you eat breakfast. But once you detect the pattern, it’s easy to anticipate when such visions will come, and the effect wears off.

Flying Lotus doesn’t have too many other tricks up his sleeve, essentially choosing to remix the most effective details from the many other films in this genre. It all builds to an indictment of mankind’s colonial impulse, but then, that’s essentially the subtext of every sci-fi movie in which earth people encounter a species that’s potentially more powerful than them: What if we find someplace we can’t dominate, and the aliens give us a taste of our own medicine? Screenwriter Jonni Remmler recycles some of the usual talking points, as when the malevolent entity taunts, “You and your species, doomed to self-detonate.”

Such clichés are tiresome, as they’ve never once inspired audiences to change their behavior (they still leave their garbage under the theater seats). But Flying Lotus has a secret weapon in DP Richard Bluck, a blockbuster veteran flexing his widescreen abilities here. “Ash” is named for the planet where everything takes place, and these explorers — whom we meet in flashback, but never truly get to know — are right to recognize the austere beauty of this planet, with its jagged rocks and active volcanoes. There’s a quieter, more philosophical way to make these points, as “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Solaris” once did, but Flying Lotus opts for a more aggressive, sensory aesthetic, borrowing more from John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”

When the creature finally does reveal itself, it’s by far the film’s weakest effect. But it fits within the director’s overall vision, which serves up all kinds of striking images: Riya standing outdoors as flakes of ash fall on her face; sleek interior rooms lit indigo and red; an angry typhoon bursting up from a borehole on a terraformed planet; a squirm-inducing, deep-cranial parasite extraction. That latter sight is a fitting metaphor. Check your brain, and you’ll be just fine.