What is this movie (sci-fi)?

Cafe Society
1

This might be a tough one, because my memory of this movie is pretty hazy and I was doing something else while it was on TV.

I watched this on TV in the early nineties. It looked really cheap (sets, acting, etc.) and had the feel of a 70s or maybe early 80s movie. The movie was in color.

Here’s what I can remember of the plot:

  1. Some scientists (or maybe the government?) have decided to send a bunch of teenagers into the future because they think the world is going to go haywire soon. They have a time-travel machine that they send the teenagers through. The set design was cheap and the lab looked like they went to an old junkyard (or maybe a Radio Shack) and grabbed electronic looking stuff. So, they send the kids to the future using the time-travel machine.

  2. In the future, though, everything goes wrong somehow (I can’t remember at all what happens), and one of the girls manages to come back to the time-travel lab at some point in time after they initially left. The lab is in disarray and she is attacked by someone who seems to be crazy. She escapes back into the time machine.

I’ll put the ending that I remember in a spoiler.

The girl winds up on the side of the road. A family in a futuristic car drives by and stops. They put the girl in the trunk, where (I think) she is consumed as fuel for the car.

Any ideas?

2

Are you certain it was a full-length movie?

The plotline reminds me of something from the Twilight Zone series. Though a quick search did not turn up an episode that matched this plot, there were several knock-off series that were similar.

3

Sounds like Idaho Transfer.

http://www.millionmonkeytheater.com/IdahoTransfer.html

4

Cool! Idaho Transfer it is!

Looks like the movie had an incoherent plot, so perhaps it’s not my memory that’s hazy.

5

The entire movie is on Youtube if you want to refresh your memory. Out of curiosity, I watched the last few minutes, and it’s even less coherent than that review made it sound.