Up until the cop-out finale, Barry Shils’s first feature, scripted by Joseph Minion (After Hours, Vampire’s Kiss), is so genuinely weird and outlandish in its midnight-movie-like delirium that you may have trouble believing your eyes and ears. The ten-year-old Candide-like hero (Jordan Christopher Michael) runs off with $20 and his father’s Mustang and becomes obsessed with a card-collecting game called Motorola promoted by filling stations along the highway. Barreling through imaginary states and encountering a lot of screwy individualsincluding cameos by Jack Nance, Shelley Berman, Michael J. Pollard, Susan Tyrrell, Garrett Morris, Flea, Mary Woronov, Vince Edwards, Meat Loaf, and Dick Millerhe gets mauled and mutilated but never loses sight of the prize promised at the end of the game. This movie constantly threatens to break loose into something wild and wonderful like The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., but it never does; instead it eventually backpedals its way into total incoherence. (JR)