Spring BreakersThe art house equivalent of a Girls Gone Wild video, bad-boy auteur Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers offers a mock-morality tale disguised edgy nihilism, albeit one hobbled with an anemic narrative and mind-numbing repetition.

That it’s generated as much pre-release buzz as it has is due to its two gimmicks: James Franco’s performance as a Svengali-esque gangsta/wannabe rapper (more on that below), and the casting of former Disney starlets Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens as two of a quartet of college girls who run amok during Spring Break in Florida — and then some.

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Gomez plays the devout Faith, who hangs back when her friends Candy (Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), and Cotty (the director’s wife Rachel Korine) don ski masks and rob an all-night diner to finance their trip to St. Petersburg. She has no such hesitations about tagging along for the sun-, booze-, and drug-soaked beach party, which inevitably lands the four of them in jail within 24 hours.

Enter Alien (Franco), a leering, skeezy drug dealer and aspiring rapper (for lack of a better word) who bails them out and immediately sets them up in his beachfront mansion (