Sickos of the '80s got their fix gawking at VHS tapes of "Faces of Death," a schlockmentary that spliced genuine carnage with staged executions that looked convincingly real. Hosted by a sham intellectual named Dr. Gröss — the umlaut added authority — this hodgepodge of attention-grabbing gore got passed around like a primeval viral video. It faked a dinner party of freshly cracked monkey brains. "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" aped that scene. Generations later, we've evolved stronger stomachs.

This superior update of the same title by the filmmaking duo of director Daniel Goldhaber and screenwriter Isa Mazzei has a young horror obsessive named Ryan (Aaron Holliday) explain the old mondo's cult status to his roommate, Margot (Barbie Ferreira): "It's giving 'Blockbuster manager hides it under his desk with the porno.'" In other words: How quaint. These days, the internet delivers butchery at a finger swipe.

Ferreira's Margot, the new film's gutsy, likable lead, is a content moderator for a social media site named Kino. (It's basically TikTok, if that app was pretentious enough to name itself after the German word for "cinema.") Margot's role isn't to scrub the web. It's to sanction it, clicking "Allow" on queasy footage of injuries and assaults. The reason behind her "traumatic hell job," as she and Ryan half-jokingly call it, is a violent upload that ruined her own life. She's an internet legend — and a hermit with a flip phone.

By the time the film starts, Margot has lost her enthusiasm for sanitizing Kino, until she flags another aspiring Spielberg, Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), posting his own rip-offs of "Faces of Death" with actual victims. No need to watch the dreadful first film to prepare (although clips are, of course, easy to dredge up on YouTube). But don't take my opinion on it — take Arthur's. One of his tortures is forcing his prisoners to watch it on repeat.

Arthur is a creepy dude, a generic-looking cellphone store employee with an incomprehensible plan. He might be a clout-seeking artist, or a symbol of numbed humanity? But his selection of victims — an influencer, a filmmaker, a TV newscaster — gives the impression he could also be a Jigsaw-like moral scold. The newscaster gets kidnapped a few hours after taping concurrent segments on a suicide and a puppy, a dated critique of the kind of disjunctive infotainment that's been beamed into homes for decades.

Likewise, we never quite buy that Arthur is able to morph into a nimble, ceiling-climbing assassin. (Or, even more implausibly, that he's a hemophobe — how the heck does he tidy up after his murders?) But between Montgomery's predatory screen presence and eerie costume of red contacts and a featureless white mask, he still gives us the willies, especially once the plot kicks in and he sets off to snatch Margot. It's genuinely scary how fast this hacker finds her apartment. An abduction sequence ties the audience's nerves in knots with cinematographer Isaac Bauman's athletic tracking shot loping up the stairs to Margot's apartment accompanied by Gavin Brivik's pulse-hammering score.

The movie would be plenty scary if we'd stayed in Margot's cubicle watching the atrocities she approves. (They're mostly real.) As ever, the most terrifying element in a web-based thriller isn't the people onscreen. It's the desensitized, anonymous messages in the chat box devouring the carnage. (See also: "Dashcam" and "Spree.") There are just so many ghouls and they always want more. As one here types, "So awful. Nice find!"

To be terminally online is a brain sickness and most of us have some stage of it. Goldhaber and Mazzei already made a mini-masterpiece about the disease with their knockout 2018 debut "Cam," about a sexy streamer who realizes that her fans are equally turned on by bloodshed. Eight years later, their "Faces of Death" doesn't tell us anything we don't already know and frankly, it's not trying to. This is splashy entertainment with a few sharp elbows, like when Arthur grins, saying that "the algorithm loves remakes." As a satire, it's almost too implied — the filmmakers barely bother to develop their ideas, figuring correctly that people already agree the internet is, at best, a neutral-evil. I liked it and was impatient with it in equal measure, the way a teacher feels about a lazy, gifted child.

Instead, they cut straight to showing us the effects of the cancer. The Kino offices are a cesspool with wan lighting and depraved employees who screw each other in the stairwells, presumably for a few sweaty seconds of feeling alive. Margot's stoner co-worker Gabby (Charli XCX, in a brief but memorable cameo) thinks her job is a laugh. During orientation, new hires are lectured that Kino wants to protect users from harmful images; meanwhile, their boss, Josh (Jermaine Fowler), would cut out his own spleen on camera to keep people's eyeballs on the app.

Kino's hypocrisy stems from the same swamp as the original's fictitious Dr. Gröss, whose lurid footage climaxed with a tsk-tsking screed against poverty, pollution and fascism as major contributors to the global death toll. Still, the bad guys in this "Faces of Death" aren't wrong when they claim that shock videos give the public what it wants. The only way to disagree with that is if someone served up your own brains at dinner, too. And that's the appeal of the movie itself — the reason we're cheering as Ferreira's Margot gives as vicious as she gets. I'm guilty, too. My enthusiasm for Goldhaber and Mazzei's twisted minds has had me looking forward to this buzzy revamp for ages.

I left satisfied. Given the range of their skills — they also collaborated on 2022's "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" — I suspect they'll go on to make even better movies together, hopefully ones that make more use of their wicked sense of humor. I loved the scene in which Arthur fires off a peeved response to a hater in his comments.

Meanwhile, Margot wants to prove that the strangers on the opposite side of the screen are human beings. This disgraced girl sorely needs that empathy herself. But the characters in here make such foolish decisions that they barely seem real either. By the fourth inanity, it's possible to convince yourself the script is stupid by design — that Mazzei is arguing that the web has made everyone a little dumber, including us for agreeably going along with the plotting.

"Faces of Death" is so steeped in the computer monitor's point of view that, ultimately, the internet isn't merely the defendant on trial — it's also the judge and jury. That makes it fair to enjoy this clever, playful thriller at a remove. Click "like," giggle and move on.

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'FACES OF DEATH'

MPA rating: R (for strong bloody violence and gore, sexual content, nudity, language and drug use)

Running time: 1:38

How to watch: In theaters April 10

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