VISUALLY STUNNING ODDITY By MEGAN TURNER May 15, 2002 -- PSHAW to those who would deride Matthew Barney's baroque, mystifying, aesthetically stunning creation as artsy indulgence. There's enough symbolism in "Cremaster 3" to provoke rapturous talk of "post-Oedipal myths" and "private cosmologies" from the art-house crowd, but the average moviegoer will simply be swept away by the visual cornucopia spilling out of Barney's fevered imagination. "Cremaster 3" is the final installment in an epic - a five-part cycle, filmed out of order - that has made the 35-year-old Barney an art-world legend. Completely dialogue-free, "3" continues with the themes of creation and destruction, ascent and descent (cremaster refers to the muscle that controls testicular contractions) which characterized the previous four films. Consisting mainly of a series of performance art pieces set at the Chrysler Building and the Guggenheim Museum, "3" opens with a "Lord of the Rings"-style sequence involving a giant snacking on whole sheep as he lumbers across the Scotish moors. The action switches to the art deco Chrysler, where we're treated to a balletic demolition derby between five Chrysler Imperials and a Chrysler New Yorker carrying the remains of a zombie. Barney appears looking like Indiana Jones as a character called the Entered Apprentice, a young mason commiting acts of sabotage in the building's elevator shafts, before a final confrontation with the Great Architect (played by the sculptor Richard Serra.) Aimee Mullins has dual roles as a gorgeous half-cheetah and as a woman who spends her days dissecting potatoes with her knife-edged heels. There are allusions to Celtic lore, gangsters and dental surgery, plenty of molten Vaseline. Barney has created a tour de force that is weird, wacky and wonderful. CREMASTER 3, A visual tour de force.Running time: 182 minutes. Not rated (nudity, disturbing images). At Film Forum, Houston Street, west of Sixth Avenue.