WHAT does "coyote ugly" mean? Answer: should your latest one-night stand turn out to have the face of a Picasso Cubist portrait, you would prefer a coyote to munch through your arm to effect your escape rather than wake last night's bovine bounty.

It has nothing to do with Coyote Ugly, the latest trashy, flashy exploitation movie from the Jerry Bruckheimer production house.

This dippy, empty-headed New York romantic comedy has New Jersey girl Violet (Piper Perabo) leaving behind her widowed father (John Goodman) to chase her American dream, moving to the Big Apple to kick-start her songwriting career

Soon burgled, duped, rejected and broke, the innocent and shy heroine accidentally stumbles into a bar job at the... Coyote Ugly. She may be a shrinking Violet when it comes to singing her own compositions, but ask her to swivel her naked navel and holler a karaoke Blondie hit, and she will strut to the max alongside her fellow flesh-flashing, bar-straddling Coyote barmaids.

This path to self-confidence and girl-power attitude is not without hiccoughs involving her tough boss (Maria Bello), her overweening, disapproving dad and her streetwise Australian love interest (Adam Garcia). But as she shakes off her stage fright, she changes from Coyote ugly duckling to graceful swan (although this is hardly a radical transformation as new face Perabo is instant eye candy in the Britney mould and has Leann Rymes to sing her dubbed songs for her!).

Coyote Ugly, the bar, is one of those absurdly wild, sweaty, testosterone-fuelled New York joints stuffed to the gills with rowdy hedonists, a constant raucous party where Cocktail meets Flashdance with the desperation of Showgirls, and drinks never touch the glass, instead spilling over customers, bar and female chests alike. Hardly sensible in the drink trade you would think, and what about the electrics?

Coyote Ugly, the movie, is all mixed up, at once cynically manipulative yet playing the fairy tale innocent too. Director David McNally, who has graduated from commercials, appears to be directing a send-up; Goodman is in on the joke but Perabo takes herself as seriously as an Alanis Morissette or Tori Amos or Jewel.

Daft fun, but only in a hapless SpiceWorld kind of way.