Structured, like American Graffiti, around a group of quirky strangers all listening to the same iconoclastic late-night DJ (Taj Mahal), Outside Ozona tells the overlapping story of motorists driving somewhere around the titular destination late one evening. Among the motorists are Robert Forster, playing a good-hearted trucker enamored of a placid Native-American woman, Kevin Pollak as an angry circus clown married to white-trash stripper Penelope Ann Miller, Sherilyn Fenn as an uppity society wife, and David Paymer as a right-wing serial killer. Ah, the serial killer, that eternal crutch of the lazy filmmaker searching for relevance and urgency. Bad direct-to-video films, and in particular bad direct-to-video ensemble comedy-dramas, tend to be heavily populated with serial killers of all varieties, and so is Outside Ozona, a bad film awash in cheap irony, paper-thin characters, and some of the most stilted dialogue this side of the works of Ed Wood. Almost everyone in Outside Ozona conforms to the bad-movie cliché that everyone is the exact opposite of what he or she superficially seems to be: Consequently, the corporate-looking, well-dressed man on the side of the road is, of course, a serial killer; the tipsy floozy is, of course, a loving and dedicated wife; and the clown is, of course, a brooding, angry loner. As can be expected of such a dire ensemble piece, the quality of the acting is all over the place, with some of the cast clearly too good for the material (Forster, Pollak, Paymer), but most not even able to do justice to the already-horrendous dialogue. (Miller and Fenn are particularly bad, and both sport unconvincing accents to boot.) Writer-director J.S. Cardone dedicated Outside Ozona to the late character actor J.T. Walsh, which is a nice gesture, but you have to question whether the immensely talented Walsh would even want his name posthumously attached to such a lazy piece of trash.