‘Outside Ozona’ Is a Road Movie That Wanders

Like Jonathan Demme’s “Handle With Care” (a.k.a. “Citizens Band”) or even the old cult fave “Vanishing Point,” J.S. Cardone’s “Outside Ozona” is that customized species of road movie in which the characters are spokes and their hub is the radio. Divergent travelers, united only by a lone voice on the airwaves--and, in this case, the serial killer who’s out there with them--it could only be an American movie: There’s nothing else to bond these road gypsies besides media and death.

Striving for a cross-section of Populist pie, Cardone isn’t short of ideas. His major theme, though, is the wheel of luck and how it spins. Why, for instance, is disc jockey Dix Mayal (blues legend Taj Mahal) still stuck behind the mike of a low-wattage country station in Outback, Okla.? Likewise his yes-man station manager, ex-sports star Floyd Bibbs (Meat Loaf)? Why did trucker Odell Parks (Robert Forster) lose his wife to a drunk driver? Why is out-of-gas Reba Twosalt (Kateri Walker) fortunate enough to have Odell come to her rescue? Why can’t circus clown Wit Roy (Kevin Pollak) keep a job? Why’s he in love with ex-stripper Earlene (Penelope Ann Miller)? And when is it--as the investigating Agent Deene (Lucy Webb) asks--that the highly successful, madly misogynistic Skokie Ripper will run out of luck?

Having structured his entire film on coincidence, Cardone sets us up not only to accept but expect the kind of cataclysmic convergence of characters toward which “Outside Ozona” ambles awkwardly. While the movie is woefully written (his American Indian characters, just for example, sound like Kevin Costner waxing mystic), the performers are generally good, particularly Forster, who took over the role upon the death of J.T. Walsh (to whom the film is dedicated) and cuts a gently macho figure throughout.

Power-shticking along a highway littered with the corpses of Ripper victims, “Ozona” (which suggests both Oz and the old song “Lost in the Ozone Again”) weaves its various stories together in a manner that might be called Altman-esque, if it had that kind of fluidity. We get the woeful Earlene and Wit, trying to rob a liquor store; Odell opening his heart to a brassy-but-good-hearted truck-stop waitress (Swoozie Kurtz); and the earthy Taj Mahal, growling through his on-air exchanges with the Gospel-besotted Ripper, coming off like a combination James Carville-Gore Vidal as he rips through the hypocrisy of fundamentalist-fueled hate.

The movie is anchored by a fairly infectious R&B; score put together by Taj Mahal and Bonnie Raitt collaborator Johnny Lee Schell. “Outside Ozona” may not be the most revealing CAT scan of American life or the psychology of its killers, but you can’t say it doesn’t have a sense of humor.

* MPAA rating: R for grisly violence and gore, sexuality/nudity and language. Times guidelines: A lot of the content is inappropriate for non-adult audiences.

‘Outside Ozona’

Taj Mahal: Dix Mayal

Robert Forster: Odell Parks

Penelope Ann Miller: Earlene Demers

Meat Loaf: Floyd Bibbs

Millennium Films presents in association with Nu Image, a Sandstorm Films production. Written and directed by J.S. Cardone. Produced by Carol Kottenbrook, Scott Einbinder. Director of photography Irek Hartowicz. Production designer Martina Buckley. Editor Amanda I. Kirpaul. Music by Taj Mahal. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes.

Westside Pavilion Cinemas, 10800 W. Pico Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 475-0202.