EVERYTHING ”Mascara” writer-director Linda Kandel knows about life she learned from reading Cosmopolitan.

That’s the only conclusion that makes sense after seeing this dreadful paean to female bonding, in which three excruciatingly vapid Los Angeles women rely on their friendship to carry them through various appalling crises. Imagine ”Melrose Place” without the irony, the moral seriousness and the dramaturgical finesse.

Our heroines are horrified at the prospect of – oh, the humanity – aging. Sweet-faced Laura (”Like Water for Chocolate’s” Lumi Cavazos) marries a jerk (Steve Schub) so she won’t hit the big three-oh alone. Free-spirited Rebecca (Ione Skye) has second thoughts about her wrinkly live-in boyfriend (former Sex Pistol Steve Jones), and glammy sot Jennifer (Amanda de Cadenet) retreats into the bottle and cheap affairs to escape her unhappy marriage.

With the possible exception of Laura, none of these needy, self-centered ditzes are the least bit likable, though in the absence of anything else to engage one’s attention, there’s something to be said for Rebecca and Jennifer’s compulsion to take off their tops at the slightest provocation.

But the dialogue sounds like it came gift-wrapped from Hickory Farms. Here’s dipso dingbat Jennifer, in mid-canoodle with a Spanish boy:

”Where did we meet?”

”Outside my high school, remember?”

”Rico, I can’t stay with you in this motel any longer!”

Oy. We hear a dancer described as liking to ”boogie,” and a swank beau – pointedly not meant to be a figure of fun – chatting up Jennifer with, ”Are you a Pisces?” Later, when one of these floozies meets a shaggable hunk, she whips her shirt off and coos, ”Do you want to make it?”

Yeah, baby! In a non-Austin Powers context, this is only slightly less dated and ridiculous a come-on line than, ”Do you like pina coladas?” But what do you expect from a movie whose idea of a moment of truth comes when one character confesses to her friends that her husband was the only man with whom she’d ever had an orgasm? And they say feminism’s dead.