Crash

''They bury the dead so quickly,'' says the mordant blond bombshell (Deborah Kara Unger) married to kinky car-accident survivor James Spader. They bury some movies quickly, too, especially when Ted Turner slags his company's product. Granted, this adaptation of J.G. Ballard's cult novel, Crash, shows director David Cronenberg (The Fly) at his most transgressive, tracing Spader's descent into a genuinely disturbing underground of auto-eroticists who get off on the forced melding of flesh and metal. But it also shows Cronenberg finally disappearing up the wind tunnel of his own obsessions. If there's a point about modern love, or the mechanization of life, or the need for auto-insurance reform, it's lost in a procession of sleek, explicit (less so by 10 minutes in the watered-down video-only R-rated version), ultimately dull imagery. The only entertainment value is in imagining Turner's apoplexy when he watched Spader having sex with Rosanna Arquette's leg wound. C-