This week we look at a cult classic that's been lost to the ages, barely even showing up on the internet, where you can find a website about anything -- like, let's say, hats made out of meat.

John Doe of the great L.A. band X stars as Joe Mosely, a plant worker who bonds with the new guy, Dave, over their Harleys. Out for a beer that night, Dave is electrocuted by a video game in a nudie bar and dies. You hear about people in movies "meeting cute"; this is dying cute, but even a stupid death leaves behind a body, and Dave didn't have family. So Joe has him cremated, funnels the ashes into Dave's gas tank, and hits the road to spread them at Dave's favorite place in the world, a small Nevada town he can't remember the name of, with a casino called "Three queens, four kings, two jacks, something like that."

On the road Joe runs into Sam, played by Adam Horovitz (yes, that'd be the Beastie Boys' Ad-Rock, looking about 17), a weird kid with a fetish for Motel 9s. He ends up buying a motorcycle and chasing after Joe, eventually going from whiny tag-along to apprentice. (Come on, what's a buddy movie if they're not buddies?)

Two guys, two bikes, and the open road -- we're definitely in Easy Rider territory, updated, but barely, for the '90s. Joe's from the tail end of the Vietnam generation, Sam's an annoying twenty-year-old with attention deficit disorder. But the string of people they run into are leftovers from the previous generation -- burnouts, victims and casualties of the hippie days. Arlo Guthrie even shows up as an ex-biker who runs a diner, and Timothy Leary bails them out when Joe's bike breaks down. (There's also a can't-miss cameo by John Cusack in an eye patch, turning dine-and-dash into a political act.)

In Vegas, Joe falls for a dancer with the Bond-y name "Labia Mirage" who's stripping her way to the Yukon. Of course, Joe and Sam end up falling out and Sam takes off. By the time Joe's learned he needs Sam as much as the other way around, the trail is cold.

Here all the coincidences pile up. Joe just happens to run into Labia -- seriously, he calls her that to her face -- hitching a ride to a town called Jackpot, which just happens to have a casino called the Four Jacks, and which just happens to have a Motel 9, where Sam just happens to be staying. They end up gambling their bikes away, and Joe finds out that the job he's been calling in sick to has fired him. After dumping Dave out in the desert, they end up standing on the highway, debating whether to thumb back to Los Angeles and bad jobs and wasted lives, or to head to the wild frontier of the Yukon. (I won't give away the end.)

With all those cameos, the philosophizing, and the eye roll-worthy coincidences, this could easily be a train wreck, all bloated egos and fake avant-garde posturing (for your consideration: Mick Jagger in Performance). But Doe can actually act (he's since been in everything from Wuthering Heights to Roswell), and even though Ad-Rock is purposely annoying, their chemistry wears into a natural groove.

And the footage of the road is amazing: the old gas stations and dead towns that lined the two-lane highway that used to connect L.A. to Vegas, the Joshua trees, the towering rock, and the miles of desert scrub.

Oddly enough, this is sort of a ghost sequel to another Mondo Culto favorite, 1984's Repo Man. Director Abbe Wool co-wrote Sid and Nancy, which was directed by Alex Cox, who also directed Repo Man; and she's the stepbrother of Zander Schloss, who played Repo Man's Kevin the nerd. Roadside Prophets costar Jennifer Balgobin (that'd be Labia) was Otto's cheating girlfriend in Repo Man, and the movie was produced by Peter McCarthy, who eight years earlier co-produced ... Repo Man.

Ah, the small world of no-budget movies.

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