Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers” has been launched on a wave of trailers and posters that emphasize the nubility of its four bikini-clad hotties, their entanglement during the annual Florida orgy with a gonzo rapper-hustler played by James Franco, and the writer-director’s effervescent Day-Glo aesthetic. Under the sheeny flesh of this exploitative crossover provocation, gorgeously lensed by Gaspar Noé's cinematographer Benoît Debie, is a freak show as disturbing as such Korine-ian depictions of underclass squalor as “Gummo,” “Julien Donkey-Boy,” and “Trash Humpers.”

Bored out of their skulls with college, where the educational experience has been denatured judging by the sterile sci-fi ambience of a high-tech classroom, Faith (Selena Gomez) and her less fragile but equally naïve friends Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), and Cotty (Rachel Korine, the director’s wife) yearn for deliverance. “I’m so tired of seeing the same things every single day,” Faith complains. “Everyone’s miserable here because everyone sees the same things. They wake up in the same bed; the same houses; the same depressing streetlights.”

The answer is… “Spring break, bitches!” After an interlude of lolling around and literally climbing up the walls, three of the girls put on balaclavas, rob a diner for its takers, and head for the sun, sand, and lewdness of St. Petersburg in Tampa Bay. Korine took his actresses there and filmed them amid the partying.

He sustains the idyll for a long time. From the girls’ perspective, spring break is initially the paradise they hoped it would be. Yet they're scarcely sexual, these pleasure-seekers. Though they pose and preen like glamour models, Cotty alone seems interested in men. It’s noticeable that they’re happiest cavorting on the beach at dusk, away from the baying, swaying hordes and the testosterone overload.

Like all good fairy tales, “Spring Breakers” has its monster – the return of the repressed. Busted for snorting coke at a party, the girls are bailed by Franco’s Alien, a pimp-styled demiurge with silver choppers who has fulfilled his version of the American dream by amassing a collection of guns… and a drawer-full of "shorts in every fucking color." His admiration for the balladic side of Britney Spears reveals his inner squishiness.

Nonetheless, the religious-minded Faith is spooked by him and goes home. She’s soon followed by Cotty, leaving Candy (the "nastiest" of the girls) and Brit (the blandest) to accompany Alien on a crime spree and a violent revenge mission that deliberately leads the movie up a blind alleyway.  

The sensationalistic pop-art voluptuousness of Korine's images can't help but elicit moral judgement of the saturnalia they depict. Some are as degrading as anything he has filmed, with or without cockroaches. The documentary-like montage that includes the spectacle of boys feigning ejaculation as they pour beer over the faces and breasts of willing half-naked girls during an organized beach game may indicate that Korine is serving up the sequence for “American Pie” (or “Porky’s”) fans, or indulging “Girls Gone Wild” debauchery. More likely, its goal is to amaze and appall, while slyly reflecting back to teens and twentysomethings in the audience the unnaturalness of porn-mediated behavior.

The polemic, intended or not, is underscored by constant ironic simulations of fellatio, as first demonstrated by Candy in the classroom. This reaches critical mass when, romping on a money-strewn bed with Candy and Brit, Alien goes down on his guns, eliciting Candy’s sexual contempt. Such is expected from the button-pushing Franco, but men in the audience who fancy themselves playas might squirm with recognition. As borderline pathetic as Korine's Julien or Mister Lonely, Alien is well-named.

“Spring Breakers” (opening in New York and Los Angeles on Friday) is being distributed by the indie company A24, which will follow it in June with Sofia Coppola’s “The Bling Ring,” based on a factual Vanity Fair article about a bunch of L.A. high-schoolers (a boy and four girls, one played by Emma Watson) who burglarized the Hollywood Hills homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom and Miranda Kerr, Rachel Bilson, and other celebrities. Echoing Korine’s quartet, the young felonists describe themselves, post-modernly, as “bitches” – the ironic co-opting of the word barely mitigating their self-lacerating spite. The currents of amorality, vacuity, materialism, and decadence coursing through these films don't amount to a national teen crisis, but they do show the perils of entitlement and unalleviated sybaritism. Who would have thought that a nervous Christian virgin played by Selina Gomez, the movie's ambiguously presented conscience, would point the way to spiritual salvation?