Daily News from New York, New York • 427

to mm movies ,5 1 7 A' -r I it--. I 5 mw-- t. 6- WHEN YOU SQUISfH UPON A STAR: In Paul Vertioeven's high-tech, schfi "Starship Toopers," an intergalactic army of warriors fights off swarms of huge bugs and hopes to wipe -them out in a giant act of insect-icide. 'Sttairsyip9 Wages UGu Uair Crawling with violence 'Troopers' offers the pest that money can buy After training sequences that make "G.I. Jane" look like Mafia Princess Week at the Golden Door, Johnny and his fellow troopers are shipped to a distant, desolate planet, where the landscape heavily suggests the scene of the Gulf War, and the bugs attack with a number and ferocity that seems to suggest fanatical hordes.

(There are strong traces here of Verhoeven's long delayed "Crusades" project, as well as colonial adventures like "Four Feathers" and "Gunga As we don't need to be told, they deserve what they're getting. Verhoeven may think he is scoring satirical points by tracing the evolution of his characters from innocent high schoolers to bloodthirsty militarists, but such subtleties will almost certainly be lost on the film's adolescent target audience. What the kids are Hkely to take away is something else a sense of combat as something glamorous, sexy and rebellious. (R: Splatter violence, nudity, adult situations.) STARSHIP TROOPERS. Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards.

Directed by Paul Verhoeven. At area theaters. Running time: 129 mins. Rated R. CYNICAL AND SADISTIC, "Starship Troopers" is also, thanks to director Paul Ver-hoeven's technical proficiency and a host of spectacular computer-generated effects, a massively nerve-jangling experience which may be enough to make this nasty bit of work a hit As he did in 1987's "RoboCop," the Dutch-born Verhoeven (also the director of "Showgirls" and "Basic satirizes a certain school of Hollywood violence while merrily providing all the visceral thrills that go with it.

The spindly heavies of this space opera, inspired by the novel by Robert A Heinlein, are literal subhumans giant bugs from another galaxy who are introducing their soulless, buzzing colonies into uninhabited corners of our solar system. Here are villains designed to be blasted away without qualm or Rico (played by the eerily Aryan Casper Van Dien) defies his hopelessly square parents by enlisting in the in- tergalactjc army. Though his classmates are joining for patriotic reasons, Johnny is merely following his sweetheart, Carmen (Denise Richards), who dreams of becoming a fighter pilot in the new, nonsex- ist armed forces with its co-ed showers. Dizzy Flores (Dina Meyer), a tomboy with a crush on Johnny, joins up, too, as does Carl Jenkins Howser's" Neil Patrick the class brain. (He later becomes a kind of Goebbels figure, striding around in his long coat.) IS A GROWN WOMAN'S of things past, specifically was 10.

That, she informs pi DAVE KEHR their parents to have out to voodoo Actress directorial hurts and moss canopy Newcomer prize of conscience, and at its most frenzied that is, for most of its running time "Starship Troopers" revels in the mangling, plucking and gooshing of these creatures with the same cruel zeal a little boy might apply to torturing beetles in a suburban back yard. Of course, the bugs do their share of gooshing, too. Verhoeven's grisly special effects are based on the uncomfortable notion that human bodies can be snapped, dismembered and squished as effectively as insects can be. The most popular boy at his Buenos Aires high school (though in this pan-national future, everyone speaks American English), Johnny Ktoo's fE5ayDQ0f? FVefity Fine Drama of long-ago summer has a 'Mockingbird' feel By JAMI BERNARD Daily News Movie Critic EVE'S BAYOU. Samuel L.

Jackson. Jumee Smollett, Diahann Carroll, Vondie Curtis-Hall. Directed by Kasi Lemmons. At area theaters. Running time: 109 mins.

Rated R. VE'S BAYOU remembrance i from when she (Lynn Whitfield plays Eve's gorgeous, distant mama). When her daddy seems crossed an unforgivable line, Eve sets destroy him the bayou way through the that they do so well. Kasi Lemmons makes a self-assured debut that illuminates the joys, mysteries of a girlhood set under the of the Louisiana bayou. Jurnee Smollett as Eve is the the movie, an entrancing, playful child who is as believable plotting murder as running in terror from her older sister.

Vondie Curtis-Hall shows up in flying gray locks like something out of an overheated ro- mance novel, a role he already played in "Passion Fish." His jarring appearance is not so unusual in a movie that suddenly springs Diahann Carroll in whiteface as a witchy, though accurate, fortuneteller. (R: Adult situations.) in Ul O) cr 2 us in voiceover narration, was the summer she killed her father. With its focus on a small-town Southern black family in the '60s, and a girl's crush on her daddy, "Eve's Bayou" has an antecedent in "To Kill a Mockingbird." Instead of Gregory Peck's upstanding lawyer, there's Samuel L. Jackson's charming, philandering doctor who makes one too many house calls after hours. Eve Batiste is a precocious child who suffers when her siblings get too much attention from LA.

CONFIDENTIAL: Jurnee Smollett, narrator-as-child in Louisiana-set "Eve's Bayou".