Entertainment

BLOOD AND BRAINS

THE relentlessly chilling spine- rattler “The Last House on the Left” underlines (in blood, of course) everything horror movies – such as last month’s rethink of “Friday the 13th” – have been doing wrong for years.

The original 1972 “Last House,” although inferior to its drive-in

double-bill mate “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” used necessity-driven minimalism (its budget was $100,000) to create suspense as visceral as a rusty hatchet blade.

The remake is much glossier but also takes place mostly in real time, using long takes, genuinely disturbing violence and stretches with no dialogue to pin you to the story. These days, most entries in the genre cling to quick-cutting, loud noises and camera tricks to throw utterly unsurprising “shocks” this way and that.

A college-age girl (Sara Paxton) staying at an isolated lake house with her parents (Tony Goldwyn, Monica Potter) wanders out for some fun with a friend (Martha MacIsaac). What happens to them after they innocently express interest in some pot offered by a total stranger gives the movie a sneaky little moral. That element also underlay the first film, the debut of a former humanities professor named Wes Craven whose inspiration was Ingmar Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring.”

A gang of killers roams the land, their leader Krug (a terrific Garret Dillahunt – unrecognizable, but he was Tommy Lee Jones’ comic-relief sidekick in “No Country for Old Men”) having escaped from the cops. For company, he’s got his less-intelligent brother, a psycho wench and a useless, mumbling son.

The killers, the girls and the parents are in for a long evening.

In his first American film, Greece’s Dennis Iliadis takes time out for arty moments, lingering on a red wall or the motion of a girl swimming. When things get brutal, Iliadis takes a casual, matter-of-fact approach that multiplies the horror to an almost unbearable level. Other, more frantic movies miss the basic facts captured so starkly by this one – such as how painful it would be to get stabbed. (In the final moments, though, Iliadis takes a bizarre misstep, which seems pasted in from some other flick.)

A warning: One scene in the middle is almost outrageously cruel and graphic. If you’re the type of person who has to be reminded, “It’s only a movie,” stay away. This is the most depraved and dreadful piece of screen horror since last year’s “Funny Games.”

Like the married couple in that film, the one here seems to have committed the sin of success. Confronted with the band of thugs, they offer to make cocoa and even invite their new friends to stay, making sure to lend them lots of Pottery Barn candles in case a storm should cut off the electricity. The nicer these citizens are, the more you feel the unspoken rage of the killers, greasy have-nots to whom middle-class comfort is an insult.

The home furnishings the couple has gathered with such care have become a threat. Even a photo on a refrigerator can be deadly. Gradually, these two must unlearn who they are – one of them, an ER doctor, is used to pulling people back from the brink, not tossing them over it. They have to reconsider their housewares with the eyes of savages. Everything can be a weapon, including the kitchen sink.

Yet the desperate unlikeliness of their ability to match what they’re up against is palpable when the husband tries to prepare his wife for battle: “We’re going to do this. You and me. We’re going to do it.”

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT Minimalist mastery. Running time: 109 minutes. Rated R (sadistic, brutal violence including rape, profanity, nudity, drug use). At the 84th Street, the Kips Bay, the Orpheum, others.