Punk/Metal Karaoke For Girls Only; Chippendale's Returns For...Whoever; Summer Movies Under the Stars

This Wednesday Don Hill's (511 Greenwich St., at Spring St., 219-2850) hosts "Bitch 5," run by Steve Blush of Rock Candy. Bitch follows Arlene's karaoke formula?a live band plays metal standards, backing those who think they can sing?but it showcases women exclusively, and women with class. Over at Arlene, there are businessmen who read about how cool Metal and Punk Karaoke was in The New York Times; at Bitch, there are artists and scenesters with some snot in their throat. They dress up nicely and have even been known to practice with the Bruce "Brucifer"Edwards house band before a show.

Since the Squeezebox party shut down, Wednesdays have been big at Don Hill's?Bitch runs every month and was packed to the gills last time. It starts at 11 p.m. and costs $10; get in now if you want to be what we call "OG."

...Over at Exit (610 W. 56th St., betw. 11th & 12th Aves., 582-8282), the home of Dumb Rappers Packing Heat (Jay-Z got busted putting his gun under the front seat of his car, people), Chippendale's has been tearing up Friday and Saturday nights. And although it's still technically in previews, marketing teams have been blanketing the Tri-State area and 400 women are coming down every evening, so it looks to be one of summer's bigger draws. Credit goes to?who else?NSYNC mastermind and possible Satan-worshipper Louis J. Pearlman.

Back in the early 90s, you may remember, Chippendale's had something of a heyday with a very profitable club on 1st & 61st. On any given Friday afternoon, tour buses would arrive from New Jersey chock-full of decked-out, giddy women, who would line up on the sidewalk and shriek at one another (no cell phones yet) in anticipation of the curvy bums they were about to see.

"What happened with that club is the community board shut it down," says Chippie's spokesman Kevin Denberg. "The neighborhood was just against a club on 1st Avenue. As it closed, there was a change of ownership, and [Lou] Pearlman was the purchaser of the Chippendale's brand name."

Pearlman got distracted, for a time, by other endeavors: "He bought it in 1993, about the same time he was developing the Backstreet Boys and then NSYNC, and you know the rest is history. He never got to Chippendale's until just about now," Denberg says.

But with NSYNC on their own financially and the whole teen thing kind of over (Entertainment Weekly got this perfectly right), Pearlman has had some time to consult the Devil and embark on his next investment strategy. He's selling Chippendale's to the young women of New York, Jersey and Connecticut as a hip night out that's worth $50.

And you know what? He's probably right, because human genetic stock just gets better and better. Today's Chippendale's dancers are barely human. They have that muscle that women worship?the one you should have at the bottom of your abdomen that cuts down on both sides in a diagonal line. They have about 17 abs each. And they can dance. Word from the Chippendale's camp is that they aren't even gay, although I hear different things from men who were around for our city's last round of costumed professional beefcake.

You know where all this is going, right? Pearlman can draft five dancers at any time for mUScles mUScles mUScles, the world's first stripping boy band. Cosponsored by Satan!

...While we're talking about Satan worshippers, another possible one (and there's actually hearsay and conjecture that supports this) is Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio. Friends of the emo band say he's one of those relatively normal guys who straight-up worships the Devil and doesn't make any bones about it. He certainly looks evil enough with the whites of his eyes turned up on his band's latest CD, From Here to Infirmary; Alkaline Trio plays Wetlands (161 Hudson St., at Laight St., 386-3600) this Monday with Dashboard Confessional.

For music, think the dark songs from NOFX's catalog, with everything fast and super-tight. For lyrics, think Weezer before they went puss on their latest record: Alkaline Trio has couplets like "Remember when I said I love you/Well forget it I take it back/I was just a stupid kid back then/I take back every word that I said." (Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo, on the other hand, has couplets like "In your arms/I was happy as a little boy could be," but he went to Harvard so it means more.)

Alkaline Trio is one of the few emo bands that can please people who don't like the genre; at their very worst they are a Blink-182 that appeals to 14-year-olds instead of 6-year-olds. The kids will be out on Monday, by the way, so if you don't want to deal with them, don't go. Alkaline Trio takes the stage on at 10:30 and tickets are $12.

...If you're already tired of paying for things this summer, try an outdoor movie festival?they're free, they show actual movies that you might have heard of and the mosquitoes aren't bad this year. (They've been driven off by West Nile spraying, to breed quietly into an insecticide-resistant subspecies.) Remember, you can get away with a lot more on a lawn (boozing, fornication, ham radio) than you can in a movie theater.

Two outdoor happenings that deserve your attention are the Bryant Park Summer Film Festival and Movies Under The Stars, both of which run through August. Bryant Park focuses on older flicks, with Viva Las Vegas (1964) screening this Monday at sunset. Naturally, that's over at Bryant Park (6th Ave. at 42nd St., 212-512-5700) and it'll attract a more refined crowd.

Movies Under The Stars takes a different tack, showing stuff you meant to see but missed last year. This Wednesday the 13th is O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), a fine film with a killer soundtrack that's giving local boy John Turturro some steady money. Next Wednesday is Shadow of the Vampire; both films start at 9 p.m. Movies Under The Stars takes place in Hoboken, but it isn't so bad: it's on the waterfront at Ernie Lackawana Plaza, right by the Hoboken PATH station, with a gorgeous view of lower Manhattan. Do not fear the PATH system. It runs just like the subway?it even has its own MetroCard, "QuickCard," and it costs $3 round trip. That means you can bring a bottle of wine and recreate, if only for a moment, the glory of the Three Dollar Theater.