THE BEACH BOYS “Still Cruisin’.” Capitol * 1/2: <i> Albums are rated on a scale of one (poor) to five (a classic) stars.</i>

Still cruisin’? Still coastin’ is more like it. In reverse. And it’s not just because seven of the 10 songs on the first “new” Beach Boys album in four years are recycled from film scores (and three of those are classics that have already each been on a zillion albums): Even the three all-new recordings, including Brian Wilson’s “In My Car,” only reaffirm the band’s longstanding status as purveyors of empty nostalgia and pallid escapist fantasy.

A couple of years ago, when they did a haunting remake of “California Dreamin’,” these silver-haired surfers seemed to momentarily remember that the magic of their catalogue came not just from singing about escape, but also about what was being escaped from.

Here it’s as if last year’s chart-topping success of the bubbly “Kokomo” (from “Cocktail” and included here) served not to inspire the band to seek new challenges,

but rather to play it safe with virtual rewrites (the title song, from “Lethal Weapon 2,” and the new “Island Girl”). Artistically speaking, surf’s down.