Ed Pansullo is a lifelong actor who has appeared in five features by Alex Cox

Two men in a lengthy odyssey to exact revenge for past wrongdoings-not John Ford's anguished oater The Searchers, but Alex Cox's road movie redux. Meeting by chance, Mel (Del Zamora) and Fred (Ed Pansullo), two aging bit players, share a common fixation, movie minutiae, and a common childhood trauma-both had been abused by a screenwriter on the set of Buffalo Bill vs. Doc Holliday. Hearing that Fred Frobisher (Sy Richardson), the sadistic scribe, is planning to screen the film in Monument Valley, Mel and Fred, with Mel's doubting daughter, Delilah (Jaclyn Jonet), in tow, head for that most sacred of Western locations. This is Alex in wonderland, a road romp filled with film references, sly homages, buddy banter, and a love of the panoramic. Produced on a shoestring budget with no shoe attached, Searchers 2.0., which includes a cameo by Roger Corman, king of the microfeatures, still finds grace in the Southwestern landscape and the trailing dust of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Stagecoach. Much is at stake in this witty anti-Western: in a scene drawn precisely from Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Mel and Fred realize that their lives depend on how fast they can draw on past movies. Slap pleather.