sometimes i come across a movie that i've never heard of but for its title and subject i take a chance on. this afternoon i picked up for 2 whole bucks an obscure piece of celluloid with the title american drive-in. with a title like that you know i couldn't just pass it up.

so i watched it this evening as nicholas watched a spongebob squarepants disc [i've never watched spongebob before but the cartoon is hilarious]. i didn't expect much, and didn't get much from the movie. it takes place one night at a drive-in called city limits located at the east end of hell. for a plot, lets suppose a gang of greasers wait to attack a girl they fancy. this is supposed to be a comedy but there isn't a laugh to be had within the whole running time.

for all but 3 minutes the entire action takes place inside the drive-in. the denizens compose of an older gay couple, two old biddies in a 1950s-era car that could've come from the set of american graffitti, three hell-raising pre-teens, an out-of-work little person actor who is there to watch himself in the feature film which is titled hard rock zombies [this i understand is a real movie, produced and directed by the same no-name who is responsible for this feature], the young man who is the beau of the young woman the greasers want to bang, an intellectual couple who deconstruct the movie as we watch it, a prostitute who runs her services in an rv on the backside of the drive-in, and the list goes on and on. the director i think was trying for an ensemble cast with a cross-section of society. each frame is packed with people and cars. the soundtrack is horrible '80s synth pop.

for all that i got a kick out the movie. the projectionist is an old drunk who acts as the chorus to the film. at one point he looks at the camera and says, 'i don't know why people rent this junk' by which he means the film itself. the movie was released in 1985. the drive-in theater was pretty much like what is shown in the movie, but by the mid-80s if you wanted to watch idiotic exploitation fare you rented it and drive-in theaters hung on to dear life by trying to go legit by screening first-run stuff.

somehow the movie escaped my notice. and i was renting at that time every kind of bad film imaginable. i was also going to the drive-in a lot. the film must've been straight-to-video fodder whereby i passed it over for some other straight-to-video fodder. it's sorta hard to convey now, but the excitement in those early days of vhs and mom-and-pop video stores, of watching movies in yr own home, man, that was like the best high. if the movie you wanted was out you rented whatever was available. and you - me i mean - rented movies every night.

the stores themselves were small, sometimes dingy, that smelled of popcorn and often with a monitor overhead the cashier running god-knows-what kinda movie. no neon that i can remember but there were often those white light glass balls strung around movie posters. and the horror and porn sections were thick with every sort of movie one can imagine in those genres. i mention those because those were the genres that got a big boost from the age of video. no longer was there a stigma to going to a theater to see those movies. you could surreptitiously rent them and watch them in the privacy of yr own home.

which of course this movie was not about. the movie i watched tonight was not another mid-80s teen comedy. instead it was a vicious little flick that takes a mean turn at the end. the cast of no-names do a game performance. nothing above the level of suck, but even still i quite enjoyed this anti-gem. i could end and say you could do worse than this film, but that would give you the wrong impression. i could do worse than watch this film. that is the highest praise i can bestow. for the rest of you, seek it out and view at yr own peril.