The
drive-in movie theater scene was well established in the American filmgoer’s
landscape long before finding a new home within the horror genre. Often playing lower budgeted, trashier
exploitation fare rather than the typical big expensive movie houses would,
they carried with them a flavor including but not limited to the audiences they
attracted throughout the ‘50s and eventual ‘70s. The term ‘grindhouse’ more or less is
synonymous with the drive-in circuit and the whole arena produced many films
that couldn’t have existed without it, bringing us to the 1976 exploitation
trash/paean to the drive-in theater Drive-In Massacre.
An early entry in the annals of then-budding slasher movies, Drive-In Massacre served as a progenitor to the likes of more mainstream slasher fare ala Friday the 13th or Halloween. As a slasher it isn’t the most interesting storyline consisting of two cops trying to catch a killer preying on horny teenagers at a local California drive-in movie theater which used to be the site of a carnival. No, rather the film functions as a time capsule bringing modern moviegoers closer to the idea of a dingy dirty seedy drive-in theater in a physical sense than ever.
Simple
and direct in aim and approach, Drive-In Massacre makes no bones about
itself being an out and out piece of exploitation trash which only adds to the
nostalgic charm of the thing. Loaded
with sleazy characters including a peeping-tom, a boorish theater manager and
two dumb cops who can’t smell the killer right under their noses, this is the
kind of film you’re inclined to take a long hot shower in after it wraps
up. With drive-in theaters on the rise
again due to theater closures amid an ongoing pandemic, Drive-In Massacre enters
a weird headspace for modern viewers displaying a side of the movie business at
once bygone and suddenly alive again.
Visually
and from an editing standpoint, Drive-In Massacre is meat and potatoes
filmmaking and not just because of the use of vegetables during some of the
relatively gory for-their-time onscreen sword slayings. Heads get lopped off frequently with some
gruesome neck shots and to the film’s benefit you’re never really sure who the
killer is despite some lurid suspects appearing along the way. In the nighttime drive-in theater scene, it
could be anybody. The cheap synth
soundtrack by Lon John Productions isn’t particularly good but oddly fits
perfectly with this disheveled looking and sounding production.
No
Drive-In Massacre isn’t a particularly good proto-slasher drive-in trash
flick, but it does take you back to a time and place you’ve only heard or read
about but never thought you’d actually see.
A far better use of the drive-in arena for my money is the Ozploitation
flick Dead End Drive-In though that more or less fused The Road
Warrior with the drive-in scene. The
Severin blu-ray transfers the rough and ragged material to disc with plenty of
scratches and blemishes but again that only cements the film’s status as a
filthy slice of exploitation made at the height of the subgenre’s most prolific
period. Not recommended but definitely a
curiosity and snapshot of the seedy ‘70s drive-in experience and for some help
separate the myth and reality of what it was really like to be in.
--Andrew Kotwicki