Don’t mess with Texas, as the state’s motto goes. Which is not to say Texas won’t mess with you.

So it goes for Clay McCarthy (Patrick Wayne, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger), driving from California to Tennessee in his souped-up van so he can do his stuntman work on a location shoot in Nashville. Tagging along are brother Dale (Mitch Vogel, The Reivers), because he wants to be a country music star, and sister Sugar (Lindsay Bloom, Sixpack Annie), because the primary antagonist needs someone to leer at and harass. Unfortunately, no sooner have the opening credits finished when a truck of redneck prison escapees forces the McCarthy siblings off the road and robs them of their wallets and wheels. Welcome to the Lone Star State, ya hear? Texas Detour might as well point them to Macon County.

Help — and eventual trouble — arrives in Beau Hunter (Anthony James, Soggy Bottom U.S.A.), a lanky, petulant rich kid who gives them a ride and a roof while they wait for the town’s apathetic sheriff (R.G. Armstrong, White Line Fever) to locate Clay’s van, provided he ever starts searching. Beau introduces the McCarthys to his sis (Priscilla Barnes, Mallrats), who goes gaga for Clay, and his dad (Cameron Mitchell, Gorilla at Large), who does not. Needless to say, the West Coasters learn about Southern-fried “justice” the hard way — none more so than the sweet Sugar, but judging from the weight writer/director Howard Avedis (Mortuary) gives various misdeeds, the theft of Clay’s van ranks higher than sexual assault.

Given that Texas Detour is an action movie from the era in which American culture fetishized vans, color us nonplussed. Story doesn’t propel Texas Detour forward, and yet Avedis keeps it moving in that direction, straight and steady. As immensely pleasurable as its leads are genial, the hicksploitation pic comes vacuum-packed with such drive-in-friendly confections as a motorcycle race, a car chase, Barnes’ bare chassis, a decent-enough Flo & Eddie soundtrack, a bar decorated with clown paintings this side of John Wayne Gacy and — what else? — Cameron Mitchell being all Cameron Mitchell, cigar ash on his shirt like so many flecks of Cheetos. —Rod Lott