drive-in [1976]

 

with a title like that you think i could resist watching this flick?  hells no.  this is an interesting movie & document of a brand of american youth culture in the mid 1970s.  almost nostalgic even.  at least for me cuz i was around 9 years old when this movie was released & was going to the drive-ins as much as i could get my parents to take me & my brothers.

the gist is this.  one saturday - i think it is a saturday - a few of the local young-uns in a small texas town go roller-skating then later that night go to the drive-in.  in between we have a pair of goofy, good-natured ne'er-do-wells who plan on robbing the drive-in when the manager transports the night's proceeds from the ticket booth to the snack bar.  we have a group of local tuff guys replete in their gang colors, an orange windbreaker with the words WIDOW MAKERS stenciled on the back.  their leader, enoch, is a real dickhead who is or was dating the local beauty named, you better believe it, glowie.  glowie is real tired of enoch's shittyness & has set her heart on orville who is sweet & shy but drives a bitchin' convertible ss camaro.  orville has a sidekick too, his 12-year-old precocious little brother named little bit.  yeah, lotsa cornpone humor! 

at any rate, this is a surprisingly well-made, well-acted flick.  i read that the texas film commission wanted to develop local talent for their own film industry & gave the filmmakers enough money to create this movie populated with mostly unknown actors & local characters.  the score is chock full of great ol' country artists like george jones, loretta lynn, merle haggard et al.  the landscape is different from my own NorCal but the experience of being at the drive-ins remained very similar to my own life at the drive-ins in the 1970s.  right down to the public telephone at the snack bar.  speaking of the snack bar the movie honors the age-old intermission with showing one of the classic intermission shorts of the drive-in theater, the one where the alien arrives at a drive-in snack bar, orders a shitload of snacks, then flies away on his flying saucer.  then the snack bar attendant breaks the fourth wall & says, 'they come from miles around to enjoy our intermission.'

let me not forget the parody movie playing at the Remember the Alamo drive-in theater too.  it is called Disaster '76 a series of vignettes of the disaster movies that were popular at the time.  a whole lotta fun to see.  what happens at the end?  let's just say all's well that ends well.  including glowie & orville.  much of the humor is awkwardly executed but a moment here & there it hits the funny bone.  like the parody movie within the movie.  all the actors are pretty damn good in their roles.  the director, rod amateau, made a b-movie par excellence.  fans of b-movies, & drive-in theaters, will get a kick out of this pic.  it is also a good movie for the end of summer when the weather is still hot, the air electric & is still lazy enough to spend a little over an hour & a half on a movie that is so much of its bygone era.  for in that era of popular american culture, as dylan reminds us, 'i was so much older then, i am younger than that now.'