MOVIE REVIEW : On the Road Once Again--With a Twist or Two

Throughout the 1980s, movie after movie suggested that the Great American Jackpot was just over the rainbow, that sex, success or revenge were our culture’s ultimate golden crock. That’s what “Motorama” (Laemmle’s Sunset 5) is about. It’s a tangy little road movie fable-fantasy about the decadence of that super-media American Dream.

The writer, Joseph Minion--who also scripted “After Hours” for Martin Scorsese and “Vampire’s Kiss” for Robert Bierman--is a specialist in paranoid comedy. And here, with director Barry Shils, he’s concocted another horrific jape: a nightmare about a society bad to the bone that’s done playfully, in pastel colors and dreamy vaudeville turns, with lots of offbeat star cameos and sendups of other movies.

The mood of “Motorama” suggests a weird cross between the ‘60s-’70s road movies (“Easy Rider,” “Two Lane Blacktop”), Beatle-era comedy and “The Wizard of Oz.” The hero, fittingly for this once-upon-a-time frame, is a child: a 10-year-old named Gus (Jordan Christopher Michael), who starts his cracked odyssey by breaking his piggy-bank, stealing a 1965 red Ford Mustang and heading down the highway--aided by a seat pillow and a pair of wood and metal leg extenders, so he can reach the gas pedals.

Though he’s fleeing squabbling, vicious offstage parents, Gus has only one major goal: He wants to collect enough gas-station bonus cards to win a $500-million contest called “Motorama,” a game that, hardly surprisingly, turns out to be unwinnable, fixed and run by smug Gucci-suited creeps in mile-high office buildings. Along the way, seemingly, Gus achieves a savage, desolate maturity, continually falling into the hands of swindlers, degenerates, nincompoops, bozos, bullies and swine--played by an all-star cult cameo crowd that includes Dick Miller, Meat Loaf, Mary Woronov, Sandy Baron, Susan Tyrrell and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The cost is severe. Gus loses an eye, his hair goes prematurely gray and he gets as calloused as everyone else, trashing the one character, a “born-again” kite-flying gas station attendant (John Diehl), who’s nice to him.

It’s part of the movie’s joke that no one ever questions why a 10-year-old is driving around in a red Ford Mustang. They’re too self-absorbed to notice--they think he’s just “a little fellow”--or they cop his vulnerability and scheme how to cheat or rob him. In a way, “Motorama” is the political inverse of the Super Kid fantasy in the John Hughes “Home Alone” movies, which teach us that a bourgeois suburban 10-year-old with a houseful of state-of-the-art gadgets or his daddy’s credit cards can triumph over crime and adversity--and that Crime and Adversity are just a couple of comedians.

Here, the world does the Super Kid in, although, clearly, it’s a fantasy realm: a fairy tale America where the states resemble Utah and Arizona, but have names such as North and South Lydon, Essex and Tristana (an obvious nudge toward Luis Bunuel). Even the gas station line in the Motorama contest gives the game way: It’s called Chimera--which is exactly what the mad ‘80s drive toward wealth at any cost was.

Shils, “Motorama’s” director, was the co-producer of Minion’s “Vampire’s Kiss,” that neglected little 1989 gem in which Nicolas Cage played “Nosferatu’s” Max Schreck as a deranged yuppie. Shils gives this low-budget fantasia a playful, bemused quality. Just as Gus plays at the games of life and riches, these filmmakers play at the games of filmmaking. They serve up evil and despair with a wink and another guest star--”Ben Casey’s” Vince Edwards, who shows up as a motel doctor.

Shils’ comic timing is sometimes broad or forced, the visual style pretty but overly tricky and the entire kid-in-a-car premise shoved at us too baldly, but there are things in “Motorama” (MPAA rated R for language and sensuality) that make you smile throughout. It’s an offbeat, brainy little riff about the bleak hell that lies under all those other fantasies of sunny, pedal-to-the-metal rock ‘n’ roll greed. It’s a game with no Grand Prize, just a punch-line.

‘Motorama’

Jordan Christopher: Michael Gus

John Diehl: Phil

Sandy Baron: Kidnaper Husband

Mary Woronov: Kidnaper Wife

A Planet Productions Corp. presentation of a Donald P. Borchers production, released by Two Moon releasing. Director Barry Shils. Producer Donald P. Borchers. Executive producers Lauren Graybow, Steven Bratter, Barbara Ligeti, Shils. Screenplay by Joseph Minion. Cinematographer Joseph Yacoe. Editor Peter Verity. Costumes Dana Allyson. Music Andy Summers. Production design Vincent Jefferds, Cathlyn Marshall. With Meat Loaf, Drew Barrymore, Dick Miller, Vince Edwards. Running time: 1 hour, 29 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (For language and a scene of sensuality).