Drive-In Massacre (1976)

For my first review on my drive-in blog, I thought it was appropriate to do a drive-in movie about the drive-in. I first saw Drive-In Massacre in the early eighties. I have a friend who had a 35mm projector set up in his living room. He worked in the business, so sometimes he was able to acquire prints of some obscure films. He got his hands on a print of this film and showed it one night.

The action begins at a California drive-in movie theater. A young couple sits in their car to discuss the future. (First hint that they are goners.) The young man leans from the car door to retrieve the speaker and faster than you can say Anne Boleyn, a sword comes down on his neck and decapitates him. His girlfriend freaks out and the assailant stabs her through the throat with his sword.

The next day, the police are baffled. (Are the police in bad slasher flicks ever not baffled?) Detectives Larry and Mike (We never learn their last names.) interview Austin Johnson (Newton Naushuas), the theater manager. Johnson is a class A prick(We know this because he has a shaved head and cusses a lot.) and refuses to cooperate with the police. It turns out that he's bitter because a carnival once stood on the site of the theater. Now he spends all his time in the projection booth and doesn't get to meet people. (Who in their right mind would want to meet this loathsome creature?)

The cops talk next to Germy, the clean up man who was once a geek in the carnival. Germy tells them about some perv in an old beat up Chevy Nova, who cruises around the lot peeping at couples doing the wild thing.

One would think that a brutal murder would cause all sensible folk to stay away from that place, but in Trash-O-Rama Land, no one is sensible. The drive-in is packed. That can only mean one thing. Another brutal murder. This time the couple is stabbed together with a sword after the girl tells the guy she's pregnant. (I wonder what those pro-life folks had to say about that.)

Germy writes down the perv's tag numbers and Detectives Laurel and Hardy pay him a visit. Even though he insists that he only goes to the drive-in to masturbate(Ewwww!) and not to murder innocent fornicating couples, Larry and Mike insist on searching his car where they find a bloody rag. After a very long drawn out foot chase, the perv is arrested, but has to be released when they find that it's only cat blood.(Why do they have to let him go? There are a slew of charges that could have been made.)

That night, our fine police officers decide to stake out the drive-in with one of them in drag. (I kid you not.) Even though those two brave detectives are keeping everyone safe, another girl and the perv are chopped up.

Our fearless law enforcers are back at the station licking their wounds, when they get a tip that a maniac is holding a teenage girl hostage in a warehouse. Gee, this has to be our killer. (Where the tip comes from and who left it remains a mystery.)

The action now moves to the warehouse where a maniac with a machete is indeed terrorizing a young girl. In a very long scene, he chases the poor girl around the warehouse until Larry and Mike arrive to shoot him dead. As it turns out, the girl is his daughter and he had escaped from the looney hatch just that morning.

Since neither the perv nor the machete wielding psycho could possibly have committed the murders, Mike and Larry decided to interrogate Austin Johnson. Austin does not take this well. He verbally abuses everyone and gets so pissed at Germy for helping the cops that he fires him. Of course Larry and Mike don't have a grain of evidence,(Where are those CSI folks when we need them?) so they have to release Austin Johnson.

The now unemployed Germy decides to see Johnson one more time before he goes. Another employee begs him not to go into the projection boot, but plucky little Germy isn't hearing it. Just as Larry and Mike arrive, we see shadows of a brutal murder on the screen. They break into the booth and find Johnson hacked to pieces on the floor. It has to be Germy, right? WRONG! Germy has also been brutally murdered.

The film ends with an audio announcement that there is a killer loose in the theater and for everyone to run for their lives. (Why didn't Hitchcock think of a cleaver gimmick like that?)

I have to say that this has got to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen, and I write about bad movies. The script is dreadful, the drive-in scenes are so dark that you can't even make out what's on the screen and the warehouse scene make one think someone put on the reel of a different movie. The worst part is the end. Nothing is resolved. We never find out who the killer is or why he/she was doing it. The producers probably thought they were creating some cleaver cutting edge gimmick, but it comes off as unfinished and stupid.

Drive-In Massacre is available on DVD from several different distributors. My copy is part of a collection called 50 Chilling Classics fro Mill Creek Entertainment. A word of warning: The version on this set has some of the more gory scenes watered down. I'm not sure if the original version is still available.

Watch the film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8dMi_GozUk