If the new frontier of adult film/video vision were likened to nouvelle cuisine, John Leslie's Fresh meat: A Ghost Story isn't so much a revolutionary exercise in the kitchen, as it is a bien cuit of Leslie themes wedded to the unlikeliest of trendy, designer sauces. Kind of like putting remoulade on a rump roast and discovering a whole new rhythm of culinary appreciation.

An able and willing gourmet-on-the-gallop, Leslie has long wined, dined, sipped and sucked at the finest cinematic restaurants in the world and taken home, time and again, the proverbial doggie bag. Petrified Forest and Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train, have, in the past, served as kindling for Leslie's cafeteria capers. Leslie's Mad Love is a title of a 1940's noir film while Jacob's Ladder seems to be the kishke for Dog Walker.

Fresh Meat: A Ghost Story is an extension of Leslie's own Laying The Ghost with its malapropos laugh track; Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers from which Leslie usurps its patchwork black & white/color/video/neo-film visual artisanship and, again, an absurdist laugh score; Mad Love for supernatural mood and a great house for spirits to swell; the ever-reliable Chameleons for the ol' girl-into-boy transmogrification trick; Ron Jeremy's hairy butcher-in-an-apron persona from John T. Bone's Depraved Fantasies 3 and Joey Silvera's patented shrapnel-style blank stare.

With semiotics thrown entirely out the window, this makes for one cockeyed viewing experience. The cross-gender opening sequence has Tom Byron fluffing his hair and applying lipstick, culminating with his verbal assailants (G.I.'s Steve Austin and Damien Michaels) jerking off, then compliantly killing themselves. Laugh track. At some point during Michaels-Austin's fusillade of abuse, Byron's masculine side takes root and he plants it squarely in Eva Flower's lovely, peek-a-boo leather-bedecked ass, practically making it bloom in spring. Laugh track. What part Byron and Flowers play in the subsequent trapeze act is anybody's guess, but they're always lurking about. Flowers has a nonsequitor-driven conversation with Silvera while he's pissing in a parking lot. Laugh track. Flowers, later transforms into Byron and gets a streaming wad in the kisser from Jeremy. Laugh track.

Silvera, wife Kristi Lynn and anal slave-on-a-leash, Annabelle Dayne, come to live in a house formerly occupied by a butcher reputed to have killed his wife then hung himself in a meat-locker.

The question of who's the butcher passes back and forth between Jeremy and Silvera like the "who's got the leads?" dialogue in Glengarry Glen Ross. Laugh track. We do know that Joey's character also likes to jerk off, by way of a bizarre scenario in which a stuttering delivery guy hands him a package of skin mags out-of-the-blue, and a threesome of Jen Teal-Felecia-Kevin Patrick fuck ferociously in front of him without so much a question or a comment. Laugh track.

John Dough may or may not be a bad guy in this can of mixed nuts, but we do know that he, Silvera and Jeremy get arrested by Jamie Gillis' "Inspector LaRue" for blowing their lines (Jeremy protests that he knows his) in a goofy taproom scene that has Dough and Silvera being fed dialogue from a reverse camera angle showing, the film crew much in the same way as the pants-falling-down-gag. No criminal charges filed, however, for Dough's earlier bent-over-the barstool doggie encounter with lovely brunette Kirsty Waay.

Kristy Lynn's early presence in the feature is a kickshaw of bra and panty preening, her copious ass like a wine barrel, begging, pleading and supplicating for the steward to tap its contents. She subsequently gets cork screwed in the butt (spoon position) by Dough's hit men, Mr. Marcos and Julian St. Jox; and gang banged (Marc Wallice doing the anal honors) in a convertible outside said taproom, all to a helicopter sound track.

With crickets chirping where there shouldn't be crickets and Joey winding up sticking his head in an oven (after fucking Annabelle in the as), asking, "what does it all mean?" Fresh Meat means nothing in the linear or philosophical sense, but strikes home as the epitomé of guilty pleasure. Fresh and exuberantly weird, it's an experience of anarchic sexual and cognitive value that will remain like the lingering sensation of a good, succulent prime rib well digested, long after the restaurant's closed. Buy it by the freezer-load.