Reviewed by Alison Whittaker

Christopher Coppola appears to be the only Coppola family member who doesn't make entertaining pictures. This lazy movie is a grab bag of trendy ideas given lackluster direction and a definite lack of real inspiration.

The basic idea revolves around the Millennium as some kind of cosmic Armageddon. A Burbank antique dealer (Soupy Sales) pays truck drivers Bruce Palmer (Robert Carradine) and Pearl (Richard Hillman) way too much money to haul a mysterious crate to Florida by New Years' Eve. Along the way, they discover that the crate may contain the remains of Bruce's favorite quiz show host (Morton Downey, Jr.), or perhaps Satan himself. Bait shop owner Garrett Morris anxiously awaits the crate in Florida, hoping to drop it into the Devil's Triangle at midnight to avert the end of the world. Meanwhile, a mysterious millionaire in a black bus dispatches two hit men to intercept the truckers, to seize the crate's fantastic power for himself – or perhaps just to insure the end of the world.

Unfortunately, most of the movie concerns itself with meandering bits of business that wants to be character development but comes off as time wasting. Nothing is funny, even with Alice Ghostley as Bruce's nervous mom back home. The boys visit reptile farms and are waylaid by various sirens along the way, including a predatory man-hater played by Rosanna Arquette.

Robert Carradine and Richard Hillman want to be an amusing odd couple, the last two guys you'd think would be trying to save the world, but the script just doesn't give them what they need. There's too much filler with them conversing unseen over shots of the truck rolling through the same patch of desert. When things get more elaborate, as when the truckers watch a parade from the vantage point of a giant ornamental chair, there's nothing happening in the script to hold our attention.

The two hit men play out their own endless unfunny comedy routines, inspired no doubt by the world of Quentin Tarantino. One is gay and dotes on his pet dog while torturing his victims. He's always filmed in tight close-up, trying to look as grotesque as possible. He's hideously burned about 2/3 of the way through, but continues Zombie-like on his quest to catch Palmer and Pearl.

If Coppola has a theme running through his films, it's his penchant for weird dream sequences. Here the addle-brained Pearl character keeps seeing his dead girlfriend as a ghost come back to warn him about the mystery crate. It of course is the tired MacGuffin, the hellish box from Kiss Me Deadly that returned for the homage treatment in Repo Man and Pulp Fiction. In this incarnation, the Great Whatzit crate never builds the proper feeling of dread or mystery.

Piper Laurie, Clu Gulager, Grace Jones and Talia Shire make bit-part appearances. Jones plays a Siamese twin with a white male better half in a tepid Freaks takeoff in a traveling tent show.

Razor Digital's DVD of Palmer's Pickup is no beauty either. The okay transfer is letterboxed but not enhanced, and doesn't look that hot on a large monitor. The mix is reasonable but nothing to write home about. There's a lengthy stack of deleted scenes, which range from little snippets to longer chunks. None of them add much to the proceedings. All in all, Palmer's Pickup doesn't deserve much attention.