"Revs Up Fast And Furious Fun!" screams the back cover of the Dragstrip Girl video, echoing the recently released Jailbreakers, whose cover breathlessly claims, "They're Fast… And They're Furious!" Though it's not apparent from their packaging, both films originated in the early '90s as entries in Showtime and Dimension's "Rebel Highway" series, which paired iconoclastic filmmakers with titles from AIP's Eisenhower-era golden age. Of course, during its prolific prime, AIP was more concerned with exploitative, attention-grabbing advertising than with creating lasting art, so it's appropriate that Dimension would make such a shameless attempt to pass off both films as hastily assembled The Fast And The Furious knockoffs. Directed by Mary Lambert (My Stepson, My Lover), whose filmography proves that female directors can be just as creepy as their male counterparts, Dragstrip Girl offers an oddball, B-movie take on Rebel Without A Cause, the ultimate exercise in mid-'50s suburban teen romanticism. Brotherhood Of The Wolf star and martial artist Mark Dacascos handles the James Dean misunderstood-outsider role, while Natasha Gregson Wagner takes over the role of her mother Natalie Wood, playing the enraptured good girl who catches Dacascos' eye. Completing the film's makeshift family is his wheelchair-bound brother (Augusto César Sandino), who pines for Wagner and reads through her diary when not spying on prostitute Traci Lords. Perhaps the only director to have worked with both Jodie Foster and Terence Trent D'Arby, Lambert creates movies that straddle the line between tawdry exploitation and David Lynch-inspired experimentation. Dragstrip Girl exemplifies this strange split personality. References and allusions to Blue Velvet and Rebel Without A Cause abound, but awful dialogue, atrocious performances, and a pervasive air of all-encompassing sleaziness keep Dragstrip Girl rooted firmly in its B-movie origins. Like a lot of Lynch knockoffs, the film has dreamy, ethereal atmosphere to spare, but Lambert and screenwriter Jerome Gary fail to fill their evocative '50s dreamscape with sympathetic or interesting characters. From her punk-inspired direction of Pet Sematary 2 to the moody weirdness of Siesta, Lambert seems to specialize in films that are interesting and unexpected without being good, a description that squarely sums up Dragstrip Girl.