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

Real-life not-twin sisters Audrey and Judy Landers play respective twin sisters Polly and Ruth Morrison in Deadly Trigger. It also features special guest star from Das Boot, Jan Fedder. Mind you, that’s how the actual movie actually credits him in its actual opening moments, which is one of your first signs that something about this double-vanity project is … off. Another tell is that a script credit is nowhere to be found.

Many more red flags unfurl; please be patient.

No sooner are happy, sexy sisters Polly and Ruth picnicking in a New York park and talking about moving to Germany to work in a bank and take pictures, respectively, and — bam — they’re in Germany and wearing sparkly dresses and singing in a local nightclub, allowing for music numbers that you just know the Landerses had written into their contract. One night, the girls are attacked in a parking garage, have their shirts ripped off and are raped, all at the behest of laughing thug Harry DeRomeo (aforementioned special guest from Das Boot, Jan Fedder) and his coke fingernail. Making this all the more is tragic is that Ruth, three months pregnant, miscarries and tries to kill herself by jumping out the hospital window. In the fall, Ruth is paralyzed, confined to a wheelchair and presumably testing the bonds of sisterly love by putting Polly on wiping duty.

Alternately known as Deadly Twins, the movie then becomes a rape-revenger — or at least once-and-only-once director/producer Joe Oaks’ approximation of the exploitation staple. Polly teams with a police detective to frame DeRomeo for stealing a cash payroll from a steel mill. Their plan does not make sense, but does DeRomeo flee, kidnap a kid at gunpoint and shout “It’s April Fools’ Day, guys. Off with your pants! Off!” at two cops? He does.

Does he chase an army man with a bulldozer? Yes.

Is said army man outwitted by said bulldozer and deposited into a lake? Most certainly.

Will you see DeRomeo duke it out with a guy while going through an automatic car wash? You will, but don’t get your hopes up — Oaks did not spend the extra two bucks for a spritz of tire sheen.

In fact, despite Deadly Twins being shot on video, Oaks somehow didn’t spring for recorded sound. This entire enterprise in VHS Eurotrash is not only dubbed, but dubbed very, very poorly, digging to a level of incompetence that is nearly indescribable.

But I’ll try: It’s as if Oaks had never seen a movie before, and only had heard about the concept in passing, yet decided to give it the ol’ community-college try. Then he either forgot to mic everybody or accidentally erased the soundtrack while playing with a RadioShack magnet kit too close to the camera. Thus, he was forced to re-create all the audio, but by then, everyone long had thrown away the script, so they went off memory, but everyone had received at least two concussions in the interim.

You have no idea how close that explanation is.

Lovely and talented, the Landers sisters were TV mainstays in the late 1970s and early ’80s — prime time to be a vital part of my pre- to pubescent dreams. I was partial to Judy (Hellhole) purely for curvaceous reasons, but Audrey (Bachelor Party 2: The Last Temptation) is the better actress, which may be why she gets the lion’s share of screen time. However, their infamous Playboy spread from 1983 exhibits more life than either sibling does here.

Where was Andy Sidaris when the Landers sisters — and the world — needed him? —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.