Moviegoes won’t see the mad-house girls of “Sucker Punch” until 2011, but director Zack Snyder has comely young inmates — including Abbie Cornish, right — in training already.

After the bloody hyper-reality of “300″ and the alternate-universe intensity of “Watchmen,” filmmkaer Snyder is ramping up for “Sucker Punch,” a surreal action film about a young woman who hopes to brak out of an pyschiatric unit with the help of the her four new wild-child friends, who may just be in her head.

The stars of the film are Emily Browning (“Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events”), Jamie Chung (“Dragonball Evolution”) Jena Malone (“Into the Wild”), Cornish (“Stop-Loss”) and, joltingly, Disney’s very own Vanessa Hudgens of “High School Musical” fame.

Cornish, who plays the leader-of-the-pack Sweetpea, said that Snyder (below, left) has the starlets working out like Spartan warriors.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I forget I’m an actor. We’re training so hard.” How hard? She said their five-day-a-week morning is “doing martial fighting, swords and choreography — just kicking butt with guns and everything imaginable. And then we do a training session in the afternoon. It’s like being a stunt person, really, not an actor at all. ”

Zack Cornish has been generating some Oscar buzz with her radiant turn as Fanny Brawne in Jane Campion’s “Bright Star,” which weaves a tale out of the 19th century romance between Brawne and doomed British poet John Keats. Don’t expect any corsets in “Sucker Punch,” though, which sounds like some high-octane mash-up of “Fight Club” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

“The film is a dream in a way, ” explains Cornish, which is set in the 1960s. “It operates on three levels. A reality, then a sub-reality where the psych ward world shifts into this strange high-roller’s brothel. Then there’s this dream world where it goes into these crazy action sequences that are totally removed from time and space.”

Cornish added that It’s still Sweatpea in the dream world, but “just all of a sudden she becomes a crazy killing machine and she’s decked out in a really cool outfit.”