OOPS, BRITNEY

Take a fork - and stick it in her. Running time: 94 minutes. Rated PG-13 (sexual suggestiveness). At the E-Walk, the Lincoln Square, the 64th and Second, others.

THE phenomenon that is Britney Spears enters a new arena with "Crossroads" - a movie so pathetically lame that hopefully even her most ardent young fans will give this stinker a big thumbs down.

At least Mariah Carey's acting debut in "Glitter" was unintentionally hilarious. Though Britney's uncertain stabs at emoting drew a few titters at a preview screening the other night, mostly she's just unbearably stiff, awkward - and remarkably bored for someone making her film debut.

A more apt comparison than Carey would be Britney's role model, Madonna - another hardened blond bombshell who has appeared in an unending series of flops.

"Crossroads" actually opens with Britney singing along with Madonna's "Open Your Heart" - the first of many, many appearances in her underwear.

Indeed, the screenplay attributed to Shonda Rhimes often seems like little more than a litany of excuses for Britney to bare her midriff and shake her booty.

This determination to pander to her fans undercuts what little credibility she might have given Lucy, a Georgia valedictorian and good girl who undertakes a road trip to find the mother who abandoned her as a child - and, it often seems, to discover her inner tramp.

Lucy's companions are two childhood friends, Kit (Zoe Saldana), pregnant trailer trash; and Mimi (Taryn Manning), a somewhat haughty black teenager. For no explicable reason, they allow themselves to be chauffeured in a '73 Buick convertible by aspiring rock star Ben (Anson Mount) - even though the girls believe he did time for killing a man.

Their adventures comprise every girl-power cliché in the book, including a karaoke-bar rendition of "I Love Rock 'N' Roll" - and the first use in many years of the pregnant-woman-falling-down-the-stairs scene, brought in to provide a limp climax for the shapeless narrative.

Britney is the black hole at the center of this tiny universe. Her line readings are so atrocious and her scenes so curiously edited that you get the feeling director Tamra Davis ("Guncrazy") labored many hours in the cutting room to make something (barely) releasable.

Just watch Britney when another character is talking - rather than listening, she looks as if her mind is somewhere else, perhaps thinking about last night's grosses.

She's about as vulnerable and spontaneous as a 16-wheeler - 21 going on 40 - and utterly self-absorbed.

Just about the only response to her character saying "Why don't I do something for me, for once?" is to laugh derisively, as the preview audience did.

Dan Aykroyd soldiers bravely through a couple of scenes as Lucy's dad, but mostly you wonder how they managed to find young actors with skills so modest they didn't act Britney off the screen.

The movie's one clever touch is to cast "Sex and the City" vixen Kim Cattrall as Lucy's mom; she actually looks the part. But their confrontation lasts literally seconds - one suspects because Britney couldn't hold up her end of the scene.

"Crossroads" is so mind-numbingly awful that you hope Britney won't do it one more time, as far as movies are concerned. She's one pop tart who's been left in the toaster too long.