THOSE parents who prefer their children not to dress like crack whores could be forgiven for approaching Bratz: The Movie with some caution.

This atrocious film is inspired by a legion of notorious plastic dolls whose insubstantial clothing and accommodating expressions suggest a tendency towards irresponsible overfriendliness. Hit the moral-panic button.

Well, strange to relate, the movie, far from cramming teenagers into hot pants, concerns itself primarily with four middle-aged women who go about in clothes that would not draw comment at an Amish funeral. A key scene finds one of the girls (the Asian-American one) progressing grumpily to school in the dull twin-set her parents prefer. Once inside the quadrangle, she divests herself of the drab threads and strides forth covered from head to toe in a hessian yashmak.

Well, I exaggerate slightly. The cast are, in fact, all around 19 or 20, and the garment sported by Janel Parrish is closer to the wrappings Boris Karloff wore in The Mummy, but Bratz: The Movie is just about the most scrupulously moral entertainment you are likely to encounter outside a Sunday school play.

The girls' ultimate aim is to secure a scholarship so the least wealthy of their gang can go to college. Along the way, one romances a homely looking deaf fellow, another helps out in her mom's catering business and they all campaign against the cliques that stifle self- expression in their high school. There is a brief, perfunctory outbreak of shopping, but the film's most insistent theme concerns the desirability of being oneself.

Mum and dad can, thus, take the little ones to Bratz without any fear they will be lured into a life of vice. Sadly, the film is so sanctimonious, so worthy and so compromised in its intentions - the little plastic hookers do still exist, remember - that it ends up being no fun whatsoever.

"Mummy. Why have you taken me to see a film about old ladies?"