Motorama

1991 road trip comedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Ten-year-old Gus decides to run away from home. He does it in style though, first stealing a Mustang and fashioning some leg extenders so that he can drive the thing. He starts out on an Odyssey across the country, stopping at participating Motorama gas stations to collect cards for a game in which he'll win a buttload of money by spelling out M-O-T-O-R-A-M-A. Unfortunately, he can't find the R. He does find a lot of eccentric characters, however.

Drew Barrymore is on a lot of the poster/dvd covers for this movie, and she's in the movie for literally about ten seconds and gets no lines.

This is one of the stranger coming-of-age movies you'll ever see, not surprising since it was penned by screenwriting genius Joseph Minion who wrote both After Hours and Vampire's Kiss. It's a surreal episodic little adventure that you're not sure is a comedy until you start laughing. There's a great cast. Jordan Christopher Michael plays the kid, this really unlikable little runt who steals, curses, and litters. He reminds me a little too much of Macaulay Culkin's character in the Home Alone movies though. John Diehl plays a dopey gas station employee named Phil who's got this interesting way of trying to impress God. The beautiful Jack Nance is hilarious in his small role as a hotel manager. Only Nance can deliver the line "I forgot to tell you. . .if you catch any squirrels, give them to me" like he does. Garrett Morris and Michael J. Pollard are funny, and both Meat Loaf and Flea are in this movie. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Meat Loaf, Flea, and Eraserhead have been in another movie together. Best of all is seeing Sandy Baron--one of my favorite Seinfeld characters, Jack Klompus--who plays a really creepy guy. All kinds of odd little details--currency that is very clearly not American, a road map that is very clearly not accurate, arm wrestling, multiple occurrences of auxiliary characters thinking the protagonist is a grown man or even an elderly man, and a trip through a Purgatory called Essex which features a Klan lynching and a priest being killed. The coolest scene might be where Gus meets another character, a much older character, who has also been playing the game. This movie has a similar rhythm to After Hours and might jerk around a little too much for its own good, but fans of existential coming-of-age road movies might want to check out this little gem.