HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES [Half a star]

Blecch. Running time: 88 minutes. Rated R (strong sadistic violence/gore, sexuality and language). At the AMC Empire 25, Loews 84th Street, Battery Park 16, others.

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HEAVY metal-head Rob Zombie’s “House of 1000 Corpses” kicks off as a cheap piece of retro schlock and quickly devolves into a putrid bloodbath with a thin narrative made utterly indecipherable by the first-time director’s clueless approach to filmmaking.

Zombie, the dread-locked former frontman for shock-rock band White Zombie, has reportedly been waiting three years for this piece of trash to see the light of day.

Let’s see: One day to regurgitate horror films from “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” to “Creature From the Black Lagoon” and spew them back onto the screen, and the remainder to try to find some poor sucker to release it.

In fact, the film passed through the hands of various studios, including Universal and MGM, and sat on the shelf for a year before winding up with Lions Gate.

Problems with the film’s gore content have been cited as a reason – but the reality is “Corpses” is an unwatchable mess.

Neither scary, perversely funny nor suspenseful, this demented dung heap is not even inventively gory, and the most horrifying moment comes when the realization dawns that Zombie is taking it all seriously.

He mucks around with all sorts of gimmickry – slow-motion, negative white-outs, blurry video clips and quick-cut editing – but this hall of mirrors can’t distract from the fact there’s very little at the core.

Set in the 1970s and featuring a raft of B-film stars such as Jeanne Carmen, Michael J. Pollard and Sid Haig, “Corpses” opens with a nerdy quartet stumbling upon Capt. Spaulding’s Museum of Monsters and Madmen after their car runs out of gas.

Naturally, it’s Halloween Eve in the midst of a storm.

Spaulding (Haig) tells them about a local psychopath named Dr. Satan, who used brain surgery to try to create a super race from the mentally ill, and the group decides to head off in search of the tree from which he was hung.

A trashy freak (Zombie’s real-life girlfriend Sheri Moon) lures the four to a house of horrors, where a family of gruesome psychopaths led by Mother Firefly (one-time Oscar-winner Karen Black) and a rotting piece of flesh named Otis (Bill Moseley) live in “Addams Family”-esque squalor.

One by one, the adventurers are picked off – along with, absurdly, a bunch of cheerleaders – as the ghoulish orgy of carnage moves from a torture chamber to a burial ground to an underground tomb.

“Corpses” is a sickening farrago of clichés with a single memorable shot: Zombie pulls his camera high to observe Otis pointing a gun at a policeman’s head while the soundtrack stops and the tension builds – then he pulls the trigger and we’re plunged back into the abyss.