If you’re looking for a drive-in movie set at a drive-in… Drive-In Massacre is the short, sharp schlock you’re looking for, a cult item shot in four days, without permits and with all the actors using pseudonyms because they were on a non-union production.
It’s a cult movie, which is a way of rationalising its low score on the IMDb – 3.7 out of 10 at the time of writing – but it’s better than its rating and has the sort of breezy, trashy quality you’d expect from a director with titles like Teenage Sex Therapy, Let’s Play Doctor and Teeny Buns on his CV. Stu Segall is the name.
The premise is simple. A mad killer is stalking a drive-in, running canoodling couples through with a sword or decapitating them completely before he disappears into the night.
Segall gets us up to speed with the opening “kill” sequence – after documentary-style shots of cars being marshalled into rows and columns at the drive-in, the focus shifts to Alan and his girl (as Janus Blythe is billed) on the front bench seat of a stick shift car. She’s all too ready for some action, but Alan is more interested in the movie than in getting his hands on the woman he will soon be making his wife. Or that’s the idea. In fact a rampant swordsman beats the altar to it and both Alan and “girl” are soon united only in death, and there’s blood and gore everywhere.
Enter the cops, detectives Mike Leary (John F Goff) and John Koch (Bruce Kimball) to question the manager of the drive-in, the loud, rude, endlessly bitching Austin Johnson (Robert E Pearson). Through Johnson we meet the drive-in’s resident halfwit and gopher Germy (Douglas Gudbye), a clueless individual referred to by Johnson as a “piece of puke”.
The shape of the movie is established. Segall’s screenplay switchbacks between couples at the drive-in – death is the main feature – followed by the cops questioning any characters they deem to be suspicious. Apart from Johnson (who they’d like to book if only because he’s so unpleasant) and Germy (dim, yes, but a killer?) most notably this includes Orville Ingleson (Norman Sheridan), a solitary loser who visits the drive-in every night so he can “beat my meat” to the sight of couples getting it on.
Whodunit? Not saying. But it’s revealed early on that there used to be a carnival on the site of the drive-in, and that both Germy and Austin Johnson used to work at it. They were both in a knife act. Too obvious a red herring?
Not much happens for a good central chunk of the movie, and yet it keeps going, the interest held by the hangdog faces of Goff and Kimball, who you’ve seen doing this thing before in other movies or TV shows of the era. They epitomise the sort of cop who is more interested in his morning donut than finding a killer, and yet Goff and Kimball also suggest, beneath the slack bellies and jowly expressions, that they’re good guys with a shred of integrity still firing away in there.
The casting is good all round though. Pearson, dressed like a white guy’s idea of a black pimp, plays the bumptious Austin Johnson to the max. Douglas Gudbye and Norman Sheridan are also effective as, respectively, the eager simpleton and the reluctant sleaze.
The non-sequitur ending comes right out of nowhere. It’s fascinating because it flicks the movie off up an avenue it opens up but then won’t explore, suggesting a deep-seated critique of the police and their trigger-happy ways was originally part of the movie’s big idea.
Drive-In Massacre looks just right – the drive-in is a dismal place, the cop shop is grimy and miserable, almost everything is beige or brown. It sounds right too, with a rock-influenced soundtrack possibly nodding to Dario Argento in its use of cheap scratchy synths and exposed piano strings being bashed about.
“Grimy and dirty ’70s exploitation nirvana!” is how the site theaterofguts.com described it and that’s a pithy way of putting it. Or as a happy customer who’d bought the DVD on Amazon put it, “Product as advertised.”
Drive-In Massacre – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
