Entertainment

FROM FEAR TO MATERNITY

THE horror flick “The Uninvited” is not unclever – but it is unoriginal.

The movie lifted its title from a 2003 Korean horror flick (and a lot of other movies) and its story from a different 2003 Korean horror flick (“A Tale of Two Sisters”) that itself stuffed its pockets with ideas ripped off from American movies. There will be a kind of rough justice when the circle of theft is completed and pirated DVDs of this movie turn up on the street.

Teen actress Emily Browning (she was in that “Lemony Snicket” movie) plays Anna, a vacant young humanoid who has just been released from a mental hospital. She returns home to the lake house where her writer dad (an irrelevant David Strathairn, who is essentially the linoleum floor beneath the gynocentric proceedings) is mourning the death of his wife in a mysterious fire. He isn’t over-mourning, though; he’s got Rachel (Elizabeth Banks), his wife’s former nurse, who is “helping him cope. Three times a night.”

That line, and all of the other wisecracks, are brightly delivered by an alert and charismatic young beauty, Arielle Kebbel, as Anna’s cagey older sister, Alex. The sibs don’t much care for their soon-to-be stepmom, who announces to Anna that, in the last year or so, “I repainted the kitchen, tossed your favorite chalkboard in the attic and killed your mother.”

She doesn’t really say that last part, but Alex and Anna find her behavior plenty suspicious. Rachel’s got needles full of tranquilizers in her equipment bag, she wears a string of expensive pearls that she claims she got from a previous patient, and she seems unsentimental about her last patient’s death.

Rachel reveals that the chief benefit of her job is knowing that her charges “will be dead very, very soon.” Alex does some checking around to see if there’s more to the nurse’s story, telling someone on the phone that her dad’s girlfriend’s surname is spelled “S-U-M-M – as in mother – E-R-S – as in Satan.”

Anna is also getting visits from the crispy ghost-corpse of her mother, who tends to turn up late at night during crackling thunderstorms to skitter along the baseboards and issue plaintive cries of murder – although considering the condition she’s in, she might be better advised to cry, “Moisturizer!”

Serving as assistant ghosts are three scary spirits of departed children who follow Anna everywhere. Once, one of them drops a glass of milk and it turns to blood as it hits the floor. And what’s up with Anna’s boyfriend? He has something urgent to tell her about the night her mother died but is interrupted every time he tries to pass along the info, the way Tom Cruise could never get it on with anyone in “Eyes Wide Shut.”

The story line is more crafted than it at first appears, but a big finish doesn’t always make up for everything that came before. Until then, “The Uninvited” is basically 80 minutes of things jumping out and making loud noises.

kyle.smith@nypost.com

THE UNINVITED

Unexceptional.

Running time: 87 minutes. Rated PG-13 (violent images, profanity, sexual references, teen drinking). At the 84th Street, the 34th Street, the Kips Bay, others.